To Theodore: A Forgery After All?

Andrew Criddle, in comments to a previous post, notes that one great difficulty with To Theodore is the admonition of Clement to Theodore to lie under oath about the authorship of the Secret Gospel.

Indeed, this is the most difficult wording of To Theodore to explain.  For, in Strom. 7.51, of course, Clement rather explicitly explains how the Christian "gnostic" is to behave with respect to oaths, and he makes it clear that no deception is permissible.  "He will neither lie nor commit perjury so as to wrong the Deity....The Gnostic swears truly..."  Indeed, the Gnostic is not to swear at all, or to lie, even on pain of death: "And so he swears not even when asked for his oath; nor does he ever deny, so as to speak falsehood, though he should die by tortures."

It is, however, somewhat incongruous to read 7.52 immediately after, and it seems like Clement is trying to admit that there may be exceptions, or even to have it both ways.  7.51 says "Nor yet will he lie or commit any transgression, for the sake of the neighbour whom he has learned to love, though he be not on terms of intimacy."  Yet Clement immediately follows this up with "But for the benefit of his neighbours alone, he will do things which would not have been done by him primarily, if he did not do them on their account," in 7.52.

We shouldn't eliminate the possibility that Clement sometimes talked out of both sides of his mouth, or tried to whitewash his teachings.

Nevertheless, lying under oath also seems like a pretty severe violation of Clement's teachings, so I admit it is unusual, and can't be easily explained away, given the texts that we have.

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.

Clement and the Noble Lie

Did Clement of Alexandria advocate a policy of deceit when it was necessary to further the cause of faith? I'll be arguing that he did.

Secret Mark and the Baptism of the Dead

This post is more of a speculative argument.

Peter Jeffery has argued that Secret Mark can't be authentic, because it appears to be about baptism (symbolized by the raising of the dead man).  But it doesn't seem to reflect any actual baptismal practices in place during Clement of Alexandria's time, therefore it can't be authentic.  Thus, any claims about the use of Secret Mark in early Christian baptismal ritual (in Alexandria or elsewhere) can't be true.

I've tried to argue against this in many ways, but here I'm just going to address one specific facet of Jeffery's claim, namely: the relationship of the resurrection of the man in Secret Mark to baptism in general.

Evidence from Epiphanius

Epiphanius, in his Panarion, lists numerous "falsificatons" that Marcion supposedly made to the gospel of Luke.  It's hard to tell when he's talking about a different version of a pericope, or the absence of it altogether.  We can sometimes get this information from Tertullian and other authors, but sometimes it can't be completely determined.

At any rate, two of these textually divergent passages are mentioned right after one another in Panarion: the blind man of Jericho, and the third prediction of the passion (Panarion 42.11.6.51-52).  Epiphanius doesn't tell us how Marcion's story of the blind man differed from Luke's, and Tertullian doesn't help us much.  The third prediction seems to have been missing from Marcion's gospel entirely--Epiphanius states it was "falsified in its entirety" and Tertullian doesn't discuss it at all.  Furthermore, in Scholion 52 of that same book (Panarion 42) Epiphanius explains in more detail that Marcion "concealed the lines".  This could mean they were missing altogether, though it could also mean that something else was in their place.