Clement of Alexandria’s purported ‘Letter to Theodore’ was discovered in the Mar Saba monastery in 1958 by Columbia university professor Morton Smith. Once Smith published his Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark and the Secret Gospel, discoverer and discoverer became almost inexorably intertwined. Because Smith brought up ‘secret baptism’ rites and homosexuality the entire focus of all research into the manuscript were focused on these possibilities. While Scott Brown had successfully brought up challenges to Morton Smith’s interpretation of the text and the manuscript itself, a general lack of imagination among subsequent generations of scholars has led to debate basically limited to the question of whether the document is a forgery and if it is a forgery whether it is an ancient or modern one.
In this paper I will make the case that the so-called ‘secret gospel’ referenced in the Letter to Theodore is the much-discussed gospel of the Marcionite community. Clement’s reluctance to speak about the text is owing to the fact It lays bear the Marcionite character of the Alexandrian community in the late second century – a fact illustrated by Apelles, the leading Marcionite in the period being Alexandrian as well as Origen’s patron Ambrose. What Clement calls Mark’s ‘secret gospel’ is a gospel written by and for the confirmation of Paul’s leadership role within the Christian community. The closest Clement comes to saying anything about this matter is his repeated assertion that “We must know, then, that if Paul is young in respect to time (ὁ Παῦλος τοῖς χρόνοις νεάζει) —having flourished immediately after (εὐθέως μετὰ) the Lord’s ascension—yet his writings depend on the Old Testament, breathing and speaking of them.”
It is difficult to square the idea of an immediate conversion of Paul with the details provided to us by the Acts of the Apostles. Indeed, I shall argue that there are critical details found here which can help confirm the secret gospel’s identity as a Marcionite text. Firstly τοῖς χρόνοις νεάζει confirms that he was the unnamed youth ( ) of the gospel. That he flourished (ἀκμάσας) straight after (εὐθέως μετὰ) the Lord’s ascension (τοῦ κυρίου ἀνάληψιν). While Acts acknowledges Paul as a youth at the time of the martyrdom of Stephen, the rest of Clement’s understanding that he ‘blossomed’ as a Christian breathing new life into the Old Testament writings immediately after the resurrection cannot be reconciled. Instead we must look to the statement from the Marcionite community known Eznik of Kolb whereby Paul becomes a Christian immediately after the ascension.
The Armenian bishop formulates the core Marcionite understanding after the crucifixion as follows:
And when he (the Jewish god) had raised him on a cross, they say, he descended into the Harsh and emptied it. And having raised the souls from the middle of it he led them into the third heaven, to his Father. And the Lord of creatures having become angry, in his anger he rent his robe and the curtain of of his temple. And he darkened his sun and he clothed his world in umber. And in his affliction he dwelt in mourning. Then when Jesus descended a second time in the form of his divinity to the Lord of creatures, he brought a lawsuit against him on account of his death.
And when the Lord of the world saw that divinity of Jesus, he discovered that another God apart from himself existed. And Jesus said to him, 'I am in litigation with you, and let no one judge between us, but the laws that you wrote’ … And when the Lord of creatures saw that he had gained victory over him - neither did he know what to say in reply because by his own Law he was condemned; nor did he find an answer to give because he came forth condemnation in exchange for his death - so having fallen down in supplication, he was praying to him "Whereas I sinned and slaughtered you ignorantly because I did not know that you were a god, but rather I considered you a man, let there be given to you in exchange, for revenge, all of those who wish to believe in you to take wheresoever you wish."
So Jesus having released him, he carried off Paul from the astonished ones, and he revealed to him their prices, and he sent him forth to preach that we have been bought for a price, and everyone who believes in Jesus has been sold by that Just One to the Good One. This is the beginning of the sect of the Marcion ...
Clearly then the Marcionite sect understands Christianity to have begun from Paul being made the first living Christian convert (the dead souls from the first 29 generations from Adam to Moses’s giving of the Law go before him) from Judaism immediately after the ascension.
Of course, we are left with the problem – unresolved in the material from Eznik – as to why Jesus singled out Paul ‘the youth’ to become the first Christian. Nevertheless another Alexandrian Christian – Origen – helps resolves these difficulties for us. The first thing Origen reveals to us in the Homilies on Luke is that the Marcionites understood Paul to be the one who ‘sits on the right’ of Jesus. The immediate context is clearly the question raised by James and John in the gospel. If the Marcionites read the gospel as if Paul was the one ‘prepared’ by Jesus to sit at his right, Origen also hints that he is the rich figure from Mark 10:17 – 31 when he writes in the same work:
Madness is evident in the thought of Marcionites and Manichees, who say that the Law is alien to Christ. For, Mark says that "Jesus looked upon him and loved him." He would not have loved one who spoke of observing the Law of an alien god. But, we should ask why he loved the man who would not follow him to life. It is possible that he who observed the Law—and that from his youth—was worthy of love under the Old Covenant. But, by his contempt for perfection, he did not allow his love for the Old Law to become perfect. Hence, having grasped all that was incomplete in the Law, Paul hastened on to perfection.
While there is not an explicit connection between the rich man who rejected Jesus in the pericope before the so-called ‘Secret Mark’ story, there is an implicit one. Paul completes the turning away of the rich man. Indeed, it is puzzling why Paul is mentioned at all in the same breath with the figure in Mark 10:17 – 31 unless, as I will suggest here, they are one and the same person.
Paul as the Unnamed Youth in the Gospel of Mark
In the same way as scholarship has been bogged down in its approach to the Secret Gospel mentioned in Clement’s Letter to Theodore because of what Morton Smith said or wrote, a similar situation exists with respect to the Marcionite gospel and the various things the Church Fathers say about it. Irenaeus started the association of the text with the Gospel of Luke. As the story trickles down to us from Tertullian, Marcion had before him all four gospels but chose to only ‘falsify’ Luke. When the notoriously unreliable Epiphanius piles on with a specific list of falsifications of Luke from Marcion’s gospel, the ‘identity’ of the Marcionite gospel is clear – whatever the Church Fathers say about the Marcionite gospel is the Marcionite gospel.
Yet there are many implicit things about the Marcionite gospel that are never explicitly stated by the Church Fathers which we know must have been true. We know the Marcionites believed that Paul in some way authored the written text of the gospel. To be sure, the orthodox put forward that Luke wrote the unwritten gospel of Paul but we know the Marcionites rejected this understanding. Paul brings the written gospel before the pillars of the Church at Jerusalem and ultimately accuses them of falsifying the text. When Paul says, ‘my gospel’ he means ‘my written gospel.’ Again, while no Church Father ever explicitly attributes this understanding to the Marcionites, this was the Marcionite understanding. We can have absolutely no doubt about it.
We can even go beyond this implicit truth to another, more significant ones for the Marcionites – the gospel necessarily and explicitly confirmed the authority of Paul. When Jesus appears before the synagogue at Bethsaida/Capernaum and speaks with an unknown or unrecognized authority, this was understood by the Marcionites to be the same authority ‘above the Law’ that would later crystalize in the teaching of Paul. The idea that there was an authority above the Law then was understood by the Marcionites to be found in the pages of the gospel. The systematic exposition of the ‘antitheses’ between the authority of Jesus and the Law and which are now only found in our canonical gospel in the pages of Matthew were originally also found in the pages of the Marcionite written gospel. The Marcionites understood the gospel to have been written by Paul, and that its narrative to be the account of progressive revelation of that authority in the world at that time but the understanding and acceptance of that doctrine by a particular historical individual.
While it is clear that the Marcionites understood this individual who was first to receive this ‘revelation’ would later be known as ‘Paul’ – as we have just showed immediately after the ascension – the suddenness of this discipleship necessarily suggests that Paul was in the gospel. It will be argued here, based on the evidence from Alexandria just mentioned that Paul was the rich man from Mark 10:17 – 31. Already Clement in his Can the Rich Man Be Saved suggests the rich man is a youth. This helps further consolidate the rich man with the rich youth of Secret Mark in the very next scene. In the same way that Jesus loves him in Mark 10:17 – 31, in the missing scene from Secret Mark the youth loves Jesus. But as the narrative progress from the rich man to the rich youth scene of Secret Mark to the material that follows – the So-Called ‘Question of James and John’ – there is an important further suggestion that the youth who refuses to follow Jesus not only dies, is resurrected and appears naked in the Secret Mark narrative to initiated into the mysteries of the divine kingdom but is ultimately the robed youth who appears ‘at the right’ of the tomb in the original ending of the gospel.
If we start with the opening words of the gospel- assuming there is no reference to John the Baptist - 'Jesus' is the angel who comes to:
Prepare (Ἑτοιμάσατε) the way for the Lord; make His paths straight! (Mark 1:3)
By Mark 10:17 – 31 we are told what the preparation is as Jesus addresses the rich man:
If you would be perfect, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven: and come, follow Me.
Of course the disciples would have seen the man who Jesus loved walk away unable to free himself from the Law. Secretly and unknown to the disciples of course we learn that:
Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb, they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do, and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.
Immediately after, James and John ask their question (not knowing what just happened), and Jesus tells them:
You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared. (τὸ δὲ καθίσαι ἐκ δεξιῶν μου ἢ ἐξ εὐωνύμων οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμὸν δοῦναι, ἀλλ’ οἷς ἡτοίμασται)
The disciples are left wondering – who is this individual? After the crucifixion, we the audience see the answer laid out before our eyes.
Knowing the contents of Secret Mark, we approach a very similar ending where someone – i.e. Jesus – has moved the stone covering the entrance to the tomb and the women enter see
a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side (εἶδον νεανίσκον καθήμενον ἐν τοῖς δεξιοῖς περιβεβλημένον στολὴν λευκήν), and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’” Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.
At once we understand who the ‘prepared one’ is that will sit at the right. It is the rich man who refuses to give up the Law in Mark 10:17 – 31, who dies, is resurrected and ‘prepared’ for the mysteries of the kingdom of God in the following scene. Indeed the repeated reference to the ‘sitting at the right’ in Mark chapter 14 only confirms for us that the final scene with the robed youth is the coronation of the one who would sit as Pope over the entire Church.
Now at last the unexplained ‘nakedness’ of the youth in Secret Mark is finally explained – explained in a way that completed eluded Morton Smith. In the words of Paul himself,
we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.
In other words, this is our first indication that Paul knows very well the contents of the gospel – that is the secret gospel – because of course he was the man who was taught the very mystery of the kingdom of God and later imparted them to the Church.