The Old Latin as Witness to Proto-Mark

The Old Latin tradition of Mark, especially when read together with Codex Bezae, preserves traces of an earlier, deliberately two-level “Proto-Mark” whose structure matches Clement of Alexandria’s description of Mark’s gospel as a Roman catechesis later expanded in Alexandria. On this view, about 22 Markan episodes form a crafted three-tier composition: an initial Roman catechetical core (twelve episodes mostly paralleling Luke), a narrative supplement drawn from Peter’s “memories” (five episodes lining up with Matthew), and a sayings supplement reserved for leaders (five further Matthean parallels). These units are said to carry not just a surface story about Jesus but a hidden historical script about the first Christian generation—Hellenist dissidence, Paul’s conversion, the shift from Peter to James, the reversal of election toward Gentiles, even competing models of canon closure—encoded in “difficult” details: odd geographical pairings like “Jerusalem and Idumea,” surprising toponyms like “Gerasenes,” “Dalmanutha,” or “Bethany,” nicknames like “Lebbaeus,” and tiny grammatical features such as a resurrection participle at Mark 6:45. In this reconstruction, those anomalies are not noise but signals, functioning much like what Origen once described when he said that “Divine wisdom has created within the narrative impossibilities and inconsistencies, so that rupture in the story stops the reader following the apparent meaning.”

Over the second century, as the gospels were reshaped for public, liturgical reading and folded into a new Christian “canon,” that second level was progressively effaced. Local Greek revisions and the emerging mainstream text smoothed awkward place-names, supplied or altered personal names, and removed cryptic markers, while the Old Latin, translated from a Greek form close to Bezae’s, sometimes preserves the older, more puzzling readings and sometimes shares the later simplifications. Amphoux’s claim is that where Old Latin and Bezae converge on the “hard” variants—Gerasenes, Tabitha, Tyre alone, the strange itinerary “through Sidon,” Bethany for Bethsaida, the resurrection participle—they are giving us the best window onto Proto-Mark’s hidden architecture, a scholarly catechesis written around 120 and only later repurposed as straightforward narrative. The Old Latin thus becomes not just an early translation but a key witness to a Mark intentionally composed with a “second sense” that later ecclesial usage largely forgot.