Chapter Six

The previous chapter ended with a modest but unavoidable conclusion. The handwriting of the Letter to Theodore cannot be explained by imagining Morton Smith sitting in Mar Saba in 1958 and inventing, on the spot, an entire scribal system: distinctive ligatures, rare letter forms, and rules of usage so obscure that even later specialists failed to recognize them. Whatever else one thinks about the letter, the paleographical evidence pushes it back well before Smith’s discovery. The hoax hypothesis survives only by multiplying improbabilities.

This does not mean that the Letter to Theodore can now be carried in triumph straight back to Clement of Alexandria. No responsible argument can pretend that the chain of transmission is complete. The manuscript is lost. The photographs are imperfect. The library history is fragmentary. The letter comes to us through a seventeenth-century copy, not through an ancient codex. These limits must be acknowledged.

But limits are not licenses for fantasy. Too much of the debate has been governed by the assumption that, if the letter cannot be proven Clementine to everyone’s satisfaction, then any alternative is permissible: pulp fiction novels, Oscar Wilde, theosophy, secret codes, private jokes, and endless theories in which Smith becomes not a scholar who made a discovery but a novelist, playwright, magician, paleographer, and criminal conspirator all at once. That is not skepticism. It is a refusal to think historically.

The question that remains is therefore not whether the modern hoax theories can be made more entertaining. They cannot. The question is what becomes possible once they are set aside. If the Letter to Theodore is not a twentieth-century forgery, then what is it? Could it be, in some meaningful sense, a real letter of Clement? Could Clementine teaching have circulated in epistolary form, been excerpted, rearranged, preserved, or repurposed, so that a later copy might look to modern eyes like a pastiche of Clement’s known writings?

That question is the subject of this chapter.

Nathan Porter’s paper on Ps.-Basil’s Epistle 366 is relevant because it breaks the automatic assumption that a letter containing material familiar from Clement’s Stromateis must be a later patchwork made out of Clement. Porter begins with a passage in Stromateis 3.7.59.3 where Clement explicitly quotes Valentinus’s Letter to Agathopous, then observes that the same material appears, with wider parallels, in Ps.-Basil’s letter On Continence. Earlier scholars had assumed that Ps.-Basil was excerpting Clement, but Porter argues the reverse: the letter is independent of Clement and may even be Clement’s source, because the shared material is more coherent in the letter than in the Stromateis, because Clement’s known citation practice often involves partial, rearranged, and unattributed borrowing, and because the letter preserves theological and grammatical features that look prior rather than derivative. The relevance to Secret Mark is obvious. If a letter preserved under another name can contain material parallel to Clement and yet still represent a real earlier source used by Clement, then the presence of Clementine language in the Letter to Theodore cannot by itself prove forgery or pastiche. Porter’s method shows that literary direction must be argued, not assumed. A rediscovered letter of Clement may naturally reuse, concentrate, or parallel material known from Clement’s accepted writings, especially if it addresses a specific theological controversy. Thus the Letter to Theodore should not be dismissed because it sounds like Clement; on the contrary, its dense Clementine texture may be exactly what one should expect from a genuine Clementine epistolary intervention into a dispute over Markan tradition.

Porter’s argument, however, can be turned in precisely the opposite direction. His own conclusion is that Ps.-Basil’s Epistle 366 may preserve a letter of Valentinus known to Clement. But the larger methodological point is more important than that particular identification. Porter has shown that a text preserved as a letter, and containing material parallel to Clement, need not be derivative from Clement in the crude sense. It may preserve an earlier source, a shared dossier, or a more coherent form of material that later appears in the Stromateis in excerpted and recontextualized form. This matters for the Letter to Theodore because the argument against authenticity often assumes the very thing Porter has called into question: that when a letter contains recognizably Clementine material, the letter must be secondary, artificial, and suspicious.

The existence of programmatic summaries throughout the Stromateis does not remove the problem. The famous passage at the end of Book 7, where the author describes the Stromateis as a deliberately unordered woodland of doctrines, is often treated as the master key to the whole work. But it can just as easily be read, at least in part, as an apology for the condition in which Clement’s materials were transmitted. The passage explains disorder by turning it into method. It makes discontinuity intentional. It sacralizes literary unevenness. This does not require the conclusion that the passage is post-Clementine. But neither should it be used as a magic wand to dissolve every difficulty in the transmission of Clement’s writings. The Stromateis are undeniably Clementine in substance, language, and intellectual world; nevertheless, the work as it survives may still preserve Clementine material in a form affected by excerpting, rearrangement, supplementation, and editorial framing. Clement himself worked in precisely this way. He excerpted, rearranged, paraphrased, embedded, and recontextualized older material. It would be strange to assume that later readers and transmitters of Clement never did the same thing with Clement.

This is where Mark Buckley’s objection to Porter becomes important. Buckley accepts that Porter has made serious arguments for the letter’s priority to Stromateis 3.7.59, or at least for its independence from Clement. But he questions Porter’s attempt to identify the letter as Valentinian. Porter’s argument for Valentinian provenance depends on reading the theology of Epistle 366 through a broad assemblage of Valentinian sources. Buckley objects that this resembles the older habit of applying a generalized “Gnostic” template to any text that contains speculative language about divinity, the body, or spiritual transformation. The most vulnerable example is Porter’s interpretation of χάρις in the letter as a Valentinian Aeon, possibly God’s protological consort. Porter himself admits that this is not Clement’s meaning in the Stromateis, but explains the difference as Clement’s misunderstanding of Valentinus. Buckley’s response is that such a move is unnecessary if the relevant theology can be shown to be perfectly congruent with Clement’s own teaching about ἐγκράτεια, spiritual transformation, and the body.

Buckley’s point may be summarized this way: if Porter has made a good case that the letter is not simply excerpted from Clement, and if the language of the letter is thoroughly Clementine, then the main obstacle to its being Clementine is theological. The question becomes whether the letter’s notion of spiritual body, divine power, and ἐγκράτεια is alien to Clement or deeply at home in him. Buckley argues the latter. For Clement, the soul is sent from heaven and belongs to a divine chain of being. The rational soul is breathed by God from above; the human mind is the image of the image of God; man is a heavenly plant made for the contemplation of God. Human salvation is therefore not merely moral improvement but restoration to a higher divine kinship.

Within that framework, ἐγκράτεια is not a minor virtue. It is one of Clement’s key themes. Clement even claims in the Paedagogus to have written a treatise On Continence, the same title attached to Ps.-Basil’s Epistle 366. In the Stromateis, ἐγκράτεια belongs to the interlocking chain of virtues. The virtues follow one another, and salvation belongs to the one in whom this sequence is present. Clement can define ἐγκράτεια as an ignoring of the body in accordance with confession toward God, and he can say that it does not merely teach σωφροσύνη but grants it, since it is a divine power and grace. That language is already close to the language of Epistle 366. The letter’s claim that continence is δύναμις and χάρις need not be dragged into the Valentinian badlands. It can be read naturally within Clement’s own moral and mystical theology.

Buckley’s treatment of the phrase “God is ἐγκράτεια” is especially important. Porter reads this as an idiosyncratic claim contradicted by Clement’s statement in Stromateis 2.18.81 that God is not properly called continent, since God is never subject to passion and therefore has no passion to overcome. But Buckley argues that this is not a rebuttal. It is a Clementine qualification. Clement frequently makes strong claims and then qualifies them according to context. Ἐγκράτεια can name the human process of self-mastery, the discipline by which desire is restrained; but it can also name the achieved state in which desire no longer arises. The former belongs to the struggle of the ordinary Christian. The latter approximates the condition of the perfected gnostic, who by grace comes to mirror the divine impassibility as far as possible. Thus Clement can say, in one context, that God is not “continent” in the human sense of overcoming passions, while in another context he could say that God is ἐγκράτεια in the higher sense: the perfect absence of need, desire, and disorder.

This distinction is thoroughly Clementine. Clement regularly follows Plato’s formula of assimilation to God “as far as possible.” The gnostic becomes godlike, angelic, passionless, luminous, and even “a god walking about in flesh,” yet Clement also insists that no created perfection is identical with the perfection of God. The same word may therefore apply at different levels of the hierarchy without collapsing creature and Creator. Divine ἐγκράτεια and human ἐγκράτεια are not identical, but they are related by participation, imitation, and grace. Buckley therefore sees no contradiction between Epistle 366 and Clement. The phrase “it seems to me that God is ἐγκράτεια” is not a Valentinian intrusion. It is a bold Clementine thesis that would naturally receive qualification elsewhere.

Nor is Clement’s use of Valentinus an obstacle. Clement can quote Valentinus neutrally, critically, or positively, depending on the needs of his argument. As Buckley notes, Valentinus belongs for Clement to the same broad class as Plato and other pagan or heterodox witnesses: a writer who may possess an intimation of the truth without being granted a full imprimatur. Clement quotes such figures when their words are useful. Therefore, Clement’s quotation of Valentinus in Stromateis 3 does not require that the surrounding theological framework be Valentinian. Clement may be appropriating, correcting, or recontextualizing a useful fragment within his own doctrine of ἐγκράτεια.

The deeper issue concerns the body. Porter argues that the Jesus of Epistle 366, whose continence is so complete that his food is not corrupted in him, is not presented as an imitable figure. Buckley turns this around. In Clement, Jesus is always the source and perfect manifestation of the divine life toward which the gnostic progresses. The gnostic does not imitate Christ by mechanically reproducing every miraculous property of his body. Rather, Christ displays the final state toward which the gnostic is being transformed. Clement’s gnostic advances toward impassibility, angelic likeness, and bodily lightness. Fasting empties the soul of matter and makes it, together with the body, pure and light for divine words. The gnostic touches the earth only on tiptoe, raises the soul aloft, despises the chain of the flesh, becomes equal to the angels, and is described as already almost disembodied, already holy above the earth.

This makes Epistle 366 look less strange. The letter says that Jesus became light upon earth and sea, that neither earth nor sea held him down, and that just as he walked upon the sea, so he did not weigh down the earth. Porter treats this as evidence for a Valentinian theology of spiritual body. Buckley argues that it is thoroughly Clementine. Clement repeatedly correlates spiritual progress with bodily lightness, angelic transformation, and release from the weight of materiality. The “levitating” Jesus of Epistle 366 is not an alien Valentinian intrusion but an intensified Christological version of a Clementine conceit: the divine life makes the body light.

The objection from later Christological tradition does not overturn this. Buckley notes that there is indeed a later tradition, ultimately associated with pseudo-Dionysian themes and found, for example, in Severus of Antioch, which uses Christ’s walking on water to express the indivisible union of the human and divine in the incarnate Word. Severus asks how one could divide the act of walking upon the water: running upon the sea is foreign to human nature, but using bodily feet is not proper to the divine nature; therefore the action belongs to the incarnate Word, in whom divine and human character exist together indivisibly. This is a powerful fifth- or sixth-century Christological use of the motif. But Buckley argues that it is not decisive against a Clementine reading of Epistle 366. The later tradition focuses on the paradox of water bearing bodily feet, whereas Epistle 366 emphasizes the lightness of Jesus’ body on both land and sea. The inclusion of land is crucial. It links the passage not merely to the miracle of walking on water, but to Clement’s repeated image of the perfected gnostic touching the earth only lightly, almost on tiptoe. The issue is not simply that water becomes solid beneath Christ’s feet, as in some later Christological interpretations. The issue is that the perfected body has become κουφός, light, because it is animated by divine ἐγκράτεια.

This distinction matters. In pseudo-Dionysian and later anti-Chalcedonian or neo-Chalcedonian contexts, the walking on water becomes a way of discussing the indivisible operation of Christ’s two realities. In Epistle 366, as Buckley observes, the emphasis lies elsewhere: Christ’s body is so light, so governed by divine power, that neither land nor sea weighs him down. That is not an obvious anachronism. It is a conceit already prepared by Clement’s anthropology, asceticism, and doctrine of the gnostic’s angelic transformation. The fact that later writers developed related imagery for later Christological controversies does not prove that Epistle 366 was composed in that later period. Clement’s ideas were precisely the sort of ideas later writers could take up and redeploy.

The same applies to digestion. Clement says elsewhere that the Savior ate not because his body required nourishment, but so that those around him would not form a false opinion of him. His body was held together by a holy power. He was entirely impassible, inaccessible to movements of pleasure or pain. This is remarkably close to the claim attributed to Valentinus that Jesus ate and drank in his own way, not expelling his food, because the food was not corrupted in him. In Clement’s own terms, Jesus’ body is sustained by holy δύναμις, not by ordinary bodily necessity. The “divine inability” to process food is not foreign to Clement’s Christology. It matches his distinction between the Savior’s visible participation in human life and the hidden divine power sustaining that life.

Buckley further observes that Clement’s anthropology already allows for a hierarchy of bodies. The soul itself may be described as a body; angels have bodies, though unlike earthly bodies; heavenly and intellectual bodies differ from earthly ones by glory, form, and subtlety. The angelic body does not function like the ordinary human organism. It does not require lips, throat, windpipe, breath, and air in order to communicate. If the gnostic is being transformed toward angelic likeness, and if Jesus stands above even the angelic hierarchy, then the body of Jesus in Epistle 366 need not be Valentinian. It may be Clementine in exactly the same sense that Clement’s perfected gnostic is already angelic, already luminous, already God-bearing and God-borne.

Buckley adds a further linguistic point that weighs against a later date. Epistle 366 says that ἐγκράτεια “causes us to be mixed with God” — καὶ Θεῷ μίσγεσθαι ποιεῖ. The verb μίσγω, especially in the infinitive μίσγεσθαι, is an archaic Ionic form, common in Homer and Herodotus but largely obsolete in later Greek. The ordinary forms are μίγνυμι or μίγω, with later variants such as σμίγνυμι and σμίγω. Buckley notes that μίσγεσθαι appears in Clement’s own voice at Stromateis 1.16.74, where Clement, drawing on Herodotus, speaks of the Egyptians prohibiting intercourse with women in temples. Clement de-Ionicizes much of the Herodotean context but retains the archaic μίσγεσθαι. If later patristic writers do not independently use this form in their own voice, it becomes less likely that a later author would extract this rare and sexually colored archaism from Clement and use it to describe union with God. It is more plausible that the word belongs to Clement’s own archaizing literary habit.

The word also fits Clement’s thought. Clement is cautious about the language of mixture when speaking technically about union with God, preferring terms of likeness, participation, conjunction, and assimilation. But in paraenetic and mystical contexts he is capable of using bolder language. In the Paedagogus, he can speak of the blood of the grape, the Logos, being mixed with water; of the spirit being blended with man; of the eucharist as a divine mixture; and of the human being as mystically compounded by the Father’s will through the Spirit and the Logos. Buckley’s point is not that Clement always speaks this way, but that he can speak this way when the rhetorical and theological setting permits it. The transformation of μίσγεσθαι from its ordinary sexual sense into a spiritual sense would be very Clementine: a transvaluation of inherited language, just as Clement transforms philosophical ἐγκράτεια into a divine power and pagan imagery into Christian pedagogy.

Buckley’s note on Epicharmus strengthens the same cumulative case. Epistle 366 closes with the line, “as it is said, the mind sees and the mind hears” — νοῦς ὁρᾷ καὶ νοῦς ἀκούει. The same saying appears in Stromateis 2.5.24, where Clement explicitly attributes it to Epicharmus: “Let Epicharmus speak: ‘The mind sees and the mind hears; all besides is deaf and blind.’” On a scissors-and-paste theory of Epistle 366, this creates a problem. Why would a fourth- or fifth-century forger, supposedly trying to produce a letter of Basil, make the text so conspicuously Clementine by ending with a pagan comic poet whom Clement cites repeatedly but Basil, in his extant works, apparently does not use in this way? The quasi-scriptural use of a pagan maxim to cap a theological argument is not Basilian. It is intensely Clementine.

This is more than a matter of ornament. Buckley observes that Clement has a particular rationale for using pagan texts when their authors have “got it right.” First, all human beings possess some divine effluence or intimation of the truth. Second, the Greeks derived their best insights from the older “barbarian philosophy,” above all the Hebrew tradition. Clement repeatedly argues that Greek philosophers and poets preserve fragments of truth, sometimes through plagiarism from older sources. Epicharmus occupies a privileged place in this scheme. Clement cites him many times and presents him as a Pythagorean, which for Clement is a mark of unusually acute pre-Christian insight. Plato himself, in the Theaetetus, treats Epicharmus as a chief figure of comedy alongside Homer in tragedy. In Clement’s world, therefore, Epicharmus is not a random quotation. He is a gold-standard pagan witness to a truth that Christianity possesses fully.

The appearance of Epicharmus in Epistle 366 thus supports Buckley’s broader point: the letter looks less like a late forgery dressed up as Basil and more like Clement recycling his characteristic material. A late forger wishing to pass as Basil would have had no obvious reason to close with a Clementine pagan citation. But Clement did have such a reason. For Clement, the maxim “mind sees and mind hears” fits precisely the argument that the true perception of divine things belongs not to the bodily senses but to the purified intellect. The saying also prepares the final claim of the letter that each word is νοῦς, mind or meaning, and that the reader will understand upon reading. That is not random decoration. It is Clement’s theory of hidden meaning compressed into epistolary form.

The same applies to Buckley’s discussion of κατασπάω. Epistle 366 says that the angels, having become ἀκρατεῖς, were dragged down from heaven because of desire. The parallel in Stromateis 3.7.59 says that some angels, becoming ἀκρατεῖς and seized by desire, fell from heaven. The introduction of κατασπάω in the letter is significant because Clement uses the verb rarely and in a distinctive way. Buckley argues that in Clement the word is associated not with generic falling, but with catastrophic moral collapse: the dragging down of a soul that had been in the process of ascent but is diverted by desire, pleasure, false teaching, or weakness of will.

This matters because Clement’s moral universe depends on ascent and the possibility of failed ascent. The believer is called toward angelic likeness, but the angels themselves are the warning that ascent can be interrupted by desire. Clement differs here from Philo, for whom the actual angels do not fall in this way. Clement treats the fall of the angels as real and morally exemplary. They abandoned contemplation of divine beauty for fading beauty and fell from heaven to earth. The same pattern threatens human beings. The gnostic aims at angelification, but the soul can still be dragged downward by pleasure, fear, false teaching, or desire. In this context, Buckley argues, κατασπάω is exactly the right Clementine word.

Buckley’s analysis of Clement’s use of κατασπάω deepens the case. In Stromateis 1.8.41, Clement uses the image of those who “drag down the masts and weave nothing,” apparently drawing on a text involving Penelope’s futile weaving and the shipwreck imagery beloved by Clement. The word evokes both wasted labor and moral shipwreck: the soul that should ascend is instead pulled down. In the Paedagogus, κατασπάω appears in a discussion of sexual immorality and abortion, again in a chapter connected to ἐγκράτεια and again in a context of catastrophic moral failure. In Stromateis 7.7.46, the word appears in a discussion of the gnostic’s ascent, the fall of angels, and the danger that what faith elevates may be dragged downward. These are not random occurrences. They form a Clementine pattern.

Therefore the use of κατασπάω in Epistle 366 is not merely compatible with Clement. It is strikingly appropriate to Clement. The fallen angels of the letter are not simply “falling”; they are being dragged down by desire from a state of heavenly orientation. This is Clement’s own moral psychology. Desire breaks ἐγκράτεια, interrupts ascent, and turns angelic possibility into ruin. On the assumption of a late forgery, the question becomes increasingly awkward: why did the forger make the letter so ultra-Clementine, down to the use of a rare verb in precisely the kind of context in which Clement uses it?

The final phrase of Epistle 366 — “each word is νοῦς” — also makes better sense in a Clementine framework. The wording may look strange if isolated, but Buckley suggests that it reflects the conception of a text as a living body whose literal words are outward members and whose inner meaning is mind. Philo speaks this way when he compares Scripture to a living creature, with literal ordinances as its body and the invisible mind laid up in the wording as its soul. Clement can similarly distinguish between the λέξις and the νοῦς of scriptural or theological discourse. The final sentence of Epistle 366 therefore does not read like a bizarre aphorism. It reads like a Clementine instruction in how to read: the words are few, but each word contains mind; the surface is slight, but the meaning is alive.

The analogy with the later Christian use of Zechariah’s lampstand helps clarify the process. A biblical text can sit available for centuries before a new theological situation causes it to be rediscovered, re-presented, and repurposed. Zechariah’s lampstand was first read in relation to Christ and the Spirit, then later transferred in Marian exegesis to the Virgin as the lampstand bearing the immaterial light made flesh. No forgery is required. A text becomes newly relevant because a new controversy or doctrinal need makes its latent possibilities visible. Buckley uses this analogy to explain how Epistle 366 could be a “falsification” rather than a forgery in the strict sense: an existing text, or an existing Clementine or Valentinian-Clementine dossier, was repurposed under Basil’s name because its contents suddenly became useful in later Christological controversy.

The corpus of Basil’s letters makes this possibility historically credible. Buckley points to Lieve Van Hoof’s discussion of the letters exchanged between Basil and Libanius. The collection includes letters that are not newly invented forgeries but “falsifications”: existing letters reassigned to new correspondents. One letter is actually the first paragraph of a letter by Libanius to the emperor Julian, altered so that Libanius’s praise of Julian becomes praise of Basil. Other letters in the Basil-Libanius dossier are adapted from letters of Gregory of Nyssa. In other words, late antique transmission could shamelessly reassign letters from one famous figure to another, even among relatively recent and well-known authors. If that could happen with Libanius, Julian, Basil, and Gregory, then it is hardly impossible that an older Clementine piece, perhaps preserved in a library or dossier, could later be repurposed under Basil’s name when its contents became newly relevant.

This same model is relevant to the Letter to Theodore. The question is not whether a later manuscript setting, title, or transmission history might involve repurposing. Ancient texts were constantly repurposed. The question is whether the underlying material coheres with Clement’s language, method, and theology. In the case of the Letter to Theodore, the Clementine texture is not a liability. It is the primary evidence for its proper setting. The letter addresses a specific controversy over Markan tradition. It distinguishes true Alexandrian transmission from Carpocratian abuse. It invokes secrecy, advanced instruction, guarded tradition, and the danger of premature disclosure. These are not random tags pasted together by a forger. They form a recognizable Clementine response to a concrete ecclesiastical problem.

Ishodad provides an important parallel. He refers to “that great letter” of Clement against those who reject marriage, and the passage he cites is recognizably related to Stromateis 3.51–53. The easy solution is to say that Ishodad simply confused the Stromateis with a letter. But this assumes that Clement’s writings circulated only in the forms familiar from modern editions. Patristic material was excerpted, rearranged, translated, adapted, and redeployed. A passage now found in Stromateis 3 could have circulated in Syriac tradition as part of a Clementine letter against the rejecters of marriage. That letter need not be an independent treatise written from scratch by Clement. It could be a genuine Clementine composition, an excerpted Clementine dossier, or a later epistolary arrangement of Clementine material. What matters is that Ishodad’s testimony shows Clementine material functioning as a targeted letter for a specific theological controversy.

The same possibility must be allowed for the Letter to Theodore. The objection that it contains too much Clementine material proves less than it appears to prove. On one reading, this is evidence of forgery: the author pasted together phrases and ideas from Clement’s accepted writings in order to imitate him. But Porter’s work, especially when corrected by Buckley’s theological critique, shows that this assumption is insecure. A letter-form text may preserve material parallel to Clement not because it is a derivative patchwork, but because Clementine material circulated in multiple forms and could be concentrated for specific polemical uses.

The real issue is literary function. In Ishodad, Clementine anti-Encratite material is deployed to defend apostolic marriage, Peter’s household, and Mark’s filial relation to Peter. In the Letter to Theodore, Clementine material is deployed to defend the integrity of Alexandrian Mark against Carpocratian corruption. Both are plausible uses of Clement. Both concern the regulation of apostolic tradition. Both place Mark within an Alexandrian or Petrine chain of authority. Both answer heretical misuse by appealing to a more controlled and authoritative memory of the apostolic past.

The argument can therefore be stated simply. Porter has shown that a letter containing material parallel to Stromateis 3 may be prior to Clement’s present literary arrangement, or may at least preserve a more coherent form of the material. Buckley has shown that Porter’s attempt to make the theology of Epistle 366 distinctively Valentinian is unnecessary, since its central ideas about ἐγκράτεια, spiritual body, bodily lightness, divine power, Christ’s impassibility, “mixing” with God, the fall of angels, the mind’s true perception, and the hidden νοῦς of words are deeply congruent with Clement’s own thought and language. Buckley further shows that supposed anachronisms, such as the walking-on-water motif, need not be anachronisms at all; they may be Clementine ideas later redeployed by fifth- and sixth-century writers for new Christological purposes. Ishodad shows that Clementine material parallel to Stromateis 3 could circulate as a “great letter” against a defined theological error. The Letter to Theodore fits this same pattern. It is a letter-form deployment of Clementine tradition against a heretical abuse of apostolic material. To call it a pastiche because it contains Clementine material is to mistake the normal operation of Clementine transmission for evidence of fraud.

The better conclusion is that Clement’s accepted writings do not exhaust the forms in which Clementine teaching circulated. They are one witness to a larger literary and theological activity. Ishodad preserves another. Ps.-Basil’s Epistle 366, whatever its final attributional form, may preserve another. The Letter to Theodore may preserve another still.