To Theodore: Perfectly at Home in 2nd c. Alexandria

Jeffery is right to take Brown to task about claiming that the "greater mysteries" could not have referred to liturgy or sacraments.  But this strengthens the argument for Secret Mark; it was used to teach about Christian liturgy and sacraments, in particular the summit of the liturgy and the greatest of the sacraments: the Eucharist.  Jeffery even says this explicitly on p. 2 of his response to Brown:

That is why, in ancient times, becoming a Christian meant going through a whole series of initiation rites, which included not only exorcisms and prayers, confessions and professions, anointing, immersion, and first eucharist, but also the reading and preaching of selected pericopes from the Bible in which human beings come to a true knowledge of who Christ is--just the sort of reading that the first Secret Gospel excerpt appears to be.  Thus even if it were correct that the Mar Saba letter says nothing about water immersion, anointing, or eucharist, it would not be correct to conlcude that it says nothing about liturgy.

I agree entirely: the mysteries mentioned in To Theodore are related to the mysteries of the Christian liturgy.

We can also dismiss Jeffery's absurd questions when it comes to how the secret gospel was "most carefully guarded" (p. 16 of his response to Brown).  While Brown's translation of certain phrases in To Theodore may or may not be improvements over Smith's translation, Jeffery gets nowhere by mocking Brown's explanation that the Secret Gospel was simply withheld from those who weren't ready to read it (surely the most sensible explanation).  Jeffery asks derisively "How might that have worked?  Did you need a letter from Clement to see it?  Or a letter to Clement?  Was Theodore applying?"  The rather simple answers to these rather childish questions are: 1) straightforwardly 2) no, but it might have helped 3) no, and 4) no.  Jeffery goes on to claim "The upshot of all this uncertainty is that we can't form a mental picture of what the historical situation might have been like."  I fail to see how this is true.  We can easily imagine a situation in which there were few copies of this text, and they were in general held by the elders of the various churches in and around Alexandria, and shared only with those whom the elders could trust with a certain amount of secrecy regarding the teaching they contained.

Jeffery also portrays Brown's argument on secrecy unfairly, calling it a "laid-back suburban view", in contrast to the strong wording of To Theodore (p. 17).  This is inaccurate and unfair.  While Brown might go too far in denying that Clement was advising a certain amount of secrecy concerning the author of the Secret Gospel, the harsh words Clement uses to describe the Carpocratians don't imply any particular lengths that Theodore needs to go to in order to protect the identity of the author of Secret Mark.  Clement advises Theodore to do one simple thing: deny the Markan authorship of the Secret Gospel.  Stating this fact, as Brown does, is neither "laid-back" nor "suburban".  Jeffery complains "try to locate this text anywhere specific in early Christian history, and it disappears."  But as we've shown above, it's easily located, in Alexandria in the time of Clement, in the context of the education of catechumens (or the recently-baptized) into the mystical meaning of the Christian scriptures and liturgy.


And now we're finally ready to make a positive claim about Secret Mark in our next post.