"These things are written in the Gospel according to Mark, and in all the other accepted gospels the passage as a whole shows the same general sense, though perhaps here and there a little of the wording changes."

Peter Kirby notes that what jumps out at him in all of this is how banal the “controversy” actually is if you just start where Clement himself tells you to start: with Mark.

Clement doesn’t bury the lede. In Quis Dives Salvetur he prefaces the rich man pericope with the line, “These things are written in the Gospel according to Mark, and in all the other accepted gospels the passage as a whole shows the same general sense, though perhaps here and there a little of the wording changes.” That’s not a casual throw-away. He front-loads Mark’s version as the anchor text and explicitly demotes Matthew and Luke to “same sense, slightly different wording.” For a triple-tradition passage, that is a quiet but very clear statement of priority.

And it’s not just the one sentence. In Quis Dives Salvetur he proceeds to unload a long block of Mark 10:17–31 before he does what he always does: spin it out into an exhortation, an ethic, a pastoral line about rich people and salvation. The pattern is: question comes in on a narrow point, Clement quotes Mark at length, then only after the Markan block is on the table does he start “answering.” The quotation establishes the interpretive horizon; the actual exegesis happens inside that Markan frame.

The textual detail that makes his choice of Mark almost over-determined is the variant in Mark 10:24. In many manuscripts the verse reads not just “how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God,” but “how hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God.” That wording does exactly what Clement needs it to do: it separates the fact of having wealth from the disposition of trusting in it. His whole homily depends on that distinction. The rich don’t have to become poor; they have to be detached. They can keep the property so long as it’s effectively already surrendered in their hearts, available for almsgiving. If you want a neat Alexandrian motto here, it’s something like: not renunciation of wealth, but renunciation of dependence on wealth.

So of course he leads with Mark. Matthew and Luke don’t give him the same leverage. The “hard saying” becomes pastorally usable once you have “for those who trust in riches” built into the text. Modern commentators even flag this as the “easier” reading from the standpoint of ordinary moral sensibilities. For an Alexandrian church trying to catechize well-off believers, that “easier” reading isn’t a bug, it’s the point.

At the micro-level there are the little philological cruxes you can feel Clement operating around. Take εἷς που. It can function as an indefinite “someone, somewhere,” but also carries a sense of rarity—“one in a million” territory. Read that alongside “with persecutions” and you get a picture of how exceptional it is to manage possessions under trial without being mastered by them. That matches exactly the ethical tightrope Clement wants: not “everyone should own nothing,” but “almost no one can handle owning a lot without becoming its slave.” The much-discussed conjecture εἴργου (“in restraint”) would push the hundredfold “now” into a kind of constrained, hedged blessing, but to get there you have to posit coordinated corruption in multiple places. Text-critically it’s much cheaper to keep εἰς ποῦ / που as transmitted and let the ethic ride on the rarity of the case instead of on a hypothetical participle.

Pull back from the textual weeds and the broader Alexandrian profile becomes clearer. Clement is perfectly comfortable with works “called” this or that, with titles that are more like later labels than authorial signatures. The incipit “beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ” easily functions as a proto-title; “according to Mark” is the sort of thing you’d add once you have more than one “gospel of Jesus Christ” in circulation and you need to distinguish copies and recensions. Modern scholarship already admits that the “according to X” labels look like second-century attributions, not original front covers. In that kind of environment, it’s not weird at all that the Alexandrian dossier treats Mark as a kind of redactor-translator of apostolic material (Peter’s preaching, perhaps others’), or that a work with one hand and style (Hebrews) can ride under Paul’s name because the content is taken as Pauline.

Once you see that, the whole Secret Mark food fight looks different. Whether you think To Theodore is authentic Clement or Morton Smith’s “Clement fan-fic,” the tactic ascribed to “Clement” there is the same one we can watch him use in Quis Dives Salvetur. Someone asks a relatively narrow question—about Matthew’s camel and needle, or about some scandalous Carpocratian use of Mark 10:35ff.—and Clement’s reflex is not to answer it in a tight, scholastic way. His reflex is to answer by quotation. He drags in a big chunk of Mark, sometimes not even the text the question was originally about, and by sheer volume of Markan narrative he resets the frame in which the question is supposed to be thought.

In Quis Dives, the presenting issue is Matthew 19:24, but Clement opts to recite Mark 10:17–31 instead, in a form already slightly contaminated by Matthew/Luke and tailored to his pastoral needs. In To Theodore, the presenting issue is gossip about “naked with naked” in connection with Mark, and what we get is again a long Markan excursus, plus a tour of Carpocratian abuse, mysticism, and secrecy. The strategy is the same: lead with Mark, let the Markan block do most of the heavy lifting, and only then circle back toward the original concern. If you bracket the authenticity debate, the letter still witnesses to a recognizably Alexandrian habit: controversies are answered Mark-first, exposition second.

Now put that beside the larger question of gospel relationships. Modern textbooks still talk about “the Synoptic Problem” like it’s some rarefied puzzle, but in any other cultural field we’d just call it what it looks like: copying. When one film studio rushes out Antz after hearing about A Bug’s Life, or you get Deep Impact and Armageddon in the same summer, nobody pretends they’ve unearthed four independent oral traditions about asteroids that just happened to converge on the same beats. The entire entertainment industry runs on this kind of imitation–variation ecology, from the Monkees as a manufactured echo of the Beatles, through TV networks cloning hospital dramas and workplace comedies, to game studios shamelessly reskinning whatever genre is hot this year.

The public doesn’t punish the imitators; it rewards them. Once a “genre” exists, people want more of the same. That’s how you can have both Beatles and Monkees in the rear-view mirror bundled together in boomer nostalgia as if they were co-equal, when at the time everyone knew who was the original and who was the copy. The fact that Matthew, Luke and John can all live together peacefully on a modern pulpit says more about the distance of time and the power of canon-nostalgia than about their origins. Tight agreement at the level of narrative beats and wording is not a primitive feature; it’s what you expect after someone has already done the work of normalizing and harmonizing.

So when Clement says, in passing, that Mark has the story and the “other accepted gospels” show the same sense with minor verbal shuffling, he’s accidentally telling you the order of operations. From his Alexandrian vantage point, Mark is the baseline, the text you cite at length to set the stage. The others are known, accepted, useful—but they are, by his own description, variations on the theme that preserve “the same unity of meaning.” That’s not how you talk if you think all four fell from heaven independently. That’s how you talk if you live in a world where the Monkees and the Beatles are already on the same radio station.

You don’t have to romanticize some pristine ur-Mark to see the force of this. The Mark we have is probably not the “first edition,” but it’s still the best surviving window into whatever earlier, more ambiguous story sat behind all the later polished products. It’s fluid enough that both Cerinthian and anti-messianic readings are still possible; ambiguous enough that you can spin it Marcionite, proto-orthodox, or something in between. That very ambiguity is what makes it so productive. Out of Mark—or something very close to it—you can see how Matthew, Luke-Acts, John, and the whole menagerie of “heretical” gospels could unspool as developments and rewrites.

From that angle, Clement’s Mark-first habit and his reliance on a variant like “for those who trust in riches” aren’t just local curiosities. They are a snapshot of an Alexandrian culture where Mark is the dossier you go to when a passage “causes trouble” and needs to be fixed, expanded, or quarantined. Whether To Theodore is genuine Clement or not, the letter fits that same profile: extended Markan quotation as a device to take control of the narrative. And once you admit how normal imitation, plagiarism, and “mockbuster” production is in every other cultural domain, it becomes very hard to keep pretending that the close agreement of Matthew, Mark and Luke is anything other than a sign that we’re already looking at the late, curated layer of the tradition, where the copies have been gathered up, re-copied, and stamped “holy.”