Understanding How Morton Smith Repurposed Clement's Writings to Make the Letter to Theodore

The core idea is that the supposedly “incomplete” ending of the Letter to Theodore is only a problem if you misread how Clement actually writes and how Greek discourse particles work. The phrase that bothers people—“Ἡ μὲν οὖν ἀληθὴς καὶ κατὰ τὴν ἀληθῆ φιλοσοφίαν ἐξήγησις” (“So then, the true interpretation, in accord with true philosophy…”)—looks, on normal Clementine usage, like a wrap-up formula, not the start of some lost, juicy exegesis. In the Stromateis, ἡ μὲν οὖν regularly appears as a hinge that closes a unit and pivots to the next topic. Strom. 2.2.5.1 is the key control case: after expounding Proverbs, Clement ends the section with “ἡ μὲν οὖν βάρβαρος φιλοσοφία, ἣν μεθέπομεν ἡμεῖς, τελεία τῷ ὄντι καὶ ἀληθής” (“Accordingly, the barbarian philosophy which we follow is in reality perfect and true”), and only then turns to a completely new scriptural passage. There is no sense that something is missing; ἡ μὲν οὖν there is a full-stop, not a dangling half-sentence.

Once that intra-Clementine pattern is recognized, the reconstruction game often played around Letter to Theodore falls apart. The idea that Morton Smith sat down with Stromateis, “cobbled together” a Clement-like ἡ μὲν οὖν closure from scattered bits, and then used it to suggest an omitted continuation is over-engineered and, statistically, implausible. If he had done the kind of close, comprehensive work on the Stromateis that this argument assumes, he would have seen that ἡ μὲν οὖν very naturally ends discussions, including in precisely the passage he cited. Instead, his own 1973 remark that his Clementine chapter was essentially frozen in 1961 and that he had “turned from Clement to study the Gospel fragment” suggests the opposite: he stopped working the Clement corpus at just the point when a denser familiarity with these tics might have cooled his fragment-hypothesis.

The same re-reading defuses the charge that the letter must be a fragment because it gives “no exegesis” of Secret Mark. Clement is explicit elsewhere that letters are not the proper vehicle for divulging divine mysteries, and patristic tradition about viva voce, esoteric exegesis in heretical circles shows why he might practice what he preaches. In the Theodore letter, the public problem is not how to read the text symbolically but how many “nakeds” are in the scene and what that implies. The Carpocratian slogan is “many naked ones with the naked,” and Clement’s move is to counter this with a narrative in which there is only one naked youth with Jesus. That is “exegesis without exegesis”: he corrects the claim by retelling the scene, without ever unpacking the sacramental or mystical sense. On that reading, “the true interpretation according to true philosophy” in the final line points back to the corrected picture he has just sketched, not forward to a lost mystical lecture.

The nudity theme itself is not some alien Carpocratian perversity. Later Christian tradition can speak of martyrs “stripping off the whole mortal and corruptible nature, and being naked to the naked, and pure to the purest Word,” γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ καθαροί τε τῷ καθαρωτάτῳ προσωμιληκότες Λόγῳ, as Nicetas the Paphlagonian has it, when describing apostles who “become a spectacle to angels and men” and pass through torments into union with Christ. That idiom shows how naturally “naked with the naked” lives inside a wider Christian discourse of Adamic restoration and martyrial purity. The distance between Clement and the Carpocratians is therefore more about reputation and polemical framing than about whether such language can ever be used reverently.

If one stops demanding a polished Ignatian-style farewell and stops insisting that a mention of “true exegesis” must introduce, rather than summarize, the argument, the letter’s ending ceases to be suspicious. Read against Clement’s own stylistic habits and his reluctance to write out mysteries, “Ἡ μὲν οὖν ἀληθὴς…” functions as a perfectly Clementine closure to a deliberately limited, exegesis-lite reassurance: there is a secret Gospel of Mark, it is used for initiation, the Carpocratians are misusing a corrupted form of it, and their claim about “many naked ones with the naked” is simply wrong. No missing page is required to make that work.