The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark

[권순토마]

The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark
F.F. Bruce
Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis
in the University of Manchester
The Ethel M. Wood Lecture
delivered before the University of London
on 11 February 1974
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I. Secret Writings
All the world loves a mystery, and there is something about the announcement of a ‘secret’
Gospel which attracts instant attention.
In Judaism of the closing centuries B.C. and early centuries A.D. there was a number of
apocalyptic writings, bearing the names of authors long since deceased―Enoch, Noah, the
Hebrew patriarchs, Ezra and so forth. If it was asked why there was such a time-lag between their
alleged date of composition and their publication, the answer was that the works were ‘sealed’,
kept secret by heavenly direction, until the time to which they pointed forward had arrived; then
their contents might be divulged. A New Testament example of this is the sealed scroll in the
Apocalypse, containing a record of the divine purpose for the world, which could not be put into
effect until someone appeared with the requisite authority to break the seals and expose the
contents.
In Judaism, again, by contrast with those works which were suitable for public reading in
synagogue (the canonical books of the Hebrew Bible) there were others which were ‘hidden’,
withdrawn from public circulation, and reserved for the eyes of those with sufficient maturity to
profit by them. According to one rabbinical tradition, the canonical book of Ezekiel was at one
time in danger of being ‘hidden’ in this sense of being withdrawn from public currency because
of theological difficulties raised by some of its contents (TB Shabbat 13 b).
The Greek adjective apokryphos, which was used for such ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ books, is the
word from which our adjective ,apocryphal’ is derived. We, however, have come to use this
adjective of those Old Testament books which, while they were not included in the Hebrew
Bible, came to be recognized as canonical or deutero-canonical over wide areas of the Christian
church. This usage goes back to Jerome, who used the Latin
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adjective apocryphus to denote those books which were suitable for reading in church to
inculcate ethical lessons but were not to be used for the establishment of doctrine (Prologues to
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
Samuel and to the Solomonic books). But there was never anything ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ about
most of those books.
In Gnosticism, however, the idea of secret writings, containing truth for the spiritual élite,
enjoyed a fresh and vigorous lease of life. In addition to his public teaching, preserved in the
church’s gospel tradition, whether oral or written, it was maintained that Jesus had imparted
private teaching to his disciples which was not to be blazed abroad to the world at large but
communicated to a minority of favoured souls who had proved themselves worthy to receive it. If
New Testament writers like Paul and John refuse to countenance the idea that there is any
Christian teaching which may not be imparted to Christians as a whole, this simply proves that
already in the first century the idea of an esoteric teaching for the spiritual élite was gaining
currency.
If, as Luke says, Jesus spent the interval of forty days between his resurrection and ascension
telling his disciples ‘the things concerning the kingdom of God’ (Acts 1: 3), what were those
things? The New Testament writings do not go into much detail about them, but the second
century was very willing to make good the deficiencies of the first. The gnostic compilation
Pistis Sophia, for example (known only from a fourth-century Coptic manuscript), purports to
record teaching given by Jesus to his disciples over a period of twelve years between his
resurrection and final ascension. The Secret Book (Apocyyphon) of John tells how the exalted
Christ appeared to John some time after his ascension, in the role of the gnostic Redeemer, and
promised to be with John and his fellow-disciples always (cf. Matt. 28: 20). The same literary
device could be used quite early in anti-gnostic circles, as is seen possibly in the Didache (‘The
Teaching of the Lord through the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles’) and certainly in the Epistle
of the Apostles, a second-century treatise extant in Coptic and Ethiopic versions.
The gnostic library from near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, discovered about 1945, includes
among its forty-nine treatises (contained in thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices) several
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whose titles proclaim their ‘secret’ character. Such are the Secret Book (Apocyyphon) of John
(already mentioned), the Secret Book (Apocyyphon) of James and (best known of all) the
compilation called in its colophon the Gospel according to Thomas, which begins: ‘These are
the secret words which Jesus the Living One spoke and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down’.
Despite the designation of the following contents as ‘secret words’, there is nothing particularly
secret about the 114 real or alleged sayings of Jesus which this work comprises; perhaps it was
their interpretation that was secret. When the first popular English edition of the Gospel of
Thomas was published―the excellent edition by R. M. Grant and D. N. Freedman―its public
appeal was no doubt enhanced by its title: The Secret Sayings of Jesus (Collins, 1960).
Irenaeus speaks of his gnostic opponents as adducing ‘an indescribable multitude of apocryphal
and spurious scriptures’ (Heresies i. 20.1), and elsewhere says that ‘those who separate Jesus
from the Christ, holding that the Christ remained impassible, while Jesus suffered, prefer the
Gospel according to Mark’ (Heresies iii. 11.7)―from which Irenaeus’s editor W. W. Harvey
inferred that another Gospel assigned to Mark, in addition to the well-known one, was current in
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
Alexandria, although he was disposed to identify this other Gospel with the Gospel of the
Egyptians (to which reference will be made later).
It is in the context of this wealth of esoteric gospel-literature that we have to eval‎uate the ‘secret’
Gospel of Mark to which our attention has been drawn in recent years by Professor Morton
Smith, of the Department of History in Columbia University, New York City.
II The Clementine Letter and the Expanded Gospel
In 1958 Professor Smith was engaged in cataloguing the contents of the library of the ancient
monastery of Mar Saba, in the wilderness of Judaea, some twelve miles south of Jerusalem, when
he came upon a copy of Isaac Voss’s edition of six Letters of Ignatius, printed and published at
Amsterdam in 1646. On the end-papers of this volume was a copy, in what seemed to be a mideighteenth
century hand, of a Greek letter, purporting to be the work of Clement the stromateus,
meaning most probably
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‘the author of the Styomateis’―i.e. Clement of Alexandria (who flourished between A.D.
180 and 200). The letter launched an attack on the followers of the heretic Carpocrates and
embodied an account (unfortunately broken off short at the end) of an expanded text of part
of the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark.
Professor Smith reported his discovery to the Society of Biblical Literature at its ninetysixth
meeting in December 1960. He indicated that he was disposed to accept the ascription
of the letter to Clement of Alexandria, but he submitted the text to the judgment of a few
other scholars, specially competent in the Greek patristic field, some of whom agreed with
him while others preferred a different origin. A. D. Nock was moved by ‘instinct’ to
disagree with the ascription, although he wished to date the letter not later than the fourth
century; J. Munck argued that the letter showed dependence on Eusebius and therefore
could not be earlier than the fourth century. But the majority of the scholars consulted
accepted the ascription to Clement; these included H. Chadwick, R. M. Grant and G. W. H.
Lampe. We too may safely accept it as a working hypothesis.
The text of the letter was not published until the summer of 1973; it appeared, together with
a translation and an exhaustive treatment of its literary, historical and religious
implications, in Professor Smith’s book Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of
Mark (Harvard University Press). At the same time he published a shorter and more
popular―not to say sensational―volume entitled The Secret Gospel (Harper and Row,
New York).
To eval‎uate Professor Smith’s conclusions would take us far beyond the limits of an hour’s
lecture. Suffice it here to present an English translation of the document, based on
Professor Smith’s editio princeps of the Greek text, and discuss some of the issues which it
raises.
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
The letter runs as follows:
From the Letters of the most holy Clement, author of the Stromateis.
To Theodore:
You have done well in muzzling the unmentionable doctrines of the Carpocratians. It is
they who were prophetically called ‘wandering
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stars’ [Jude 13], who stray from the narrow way of the commandments into the
fathomless abyss of fleshly sins committed in the body. They have been inflated with
the knowledge, as they say, of ‘the deep things of Satan’ [Rev. 2: 24]. They cast
themselves unawares into the gloom of the darkness of falsehood [cf. Jude 13].
Boasting that they are free, they have become the slaves of lusts that bring men into
bondage. These people must be totally opposed in every way. Even if they were to say
something true, not even so would the lover of truth agree with them; everything that is
true is not necessarily truth. Nor should one prefer the apparent truth which is according
to human opinions to the real truth which is according to faith. But of the matters under
dispute concerning the divinely-inspired Gospel according to Mark, some are utterly
false and some, even if they contain certain things that are true, are not so truly
delivered; for the things that are true are corrupted by those that are fictitious, so that,
as it is said, ‘the salt has lost its savour’ [Matt. 5: 13 ║ Luke 14: 34].
Mark, then, during Peter’s stay in Rome, recorded the acts of the Lord, not however
reporting them all, for he did not indicate the mystical ones, but selected those which he
thought most useful for the increase of the faith of those undergoing instruction.
When Peter had borne his witness (i.e. suffered martyrdom), Mark arrived in
Alexandria, taking his own and Peter’s memoirs. From these he copied into his first
book the things appropriate for those who were making progress in knowledge but
compiled a more spiritual Gospel for the use of those who were attaining perfection.
Yet not even so did he divulge the unutterable things themselves, nor did he write down
the Lord’s hierophantic teaching. But adding to the previously written acts others also,
he presented, over and above these, certain oracles whose interpretation he knew would
provide the hearers with mystical guidance into the inner shrine of the seven-timeshidden
truth. Thus, then, he made advance preparation-not grudgingly or incautiously,
as I think―and on his death he left his composition to the church in Alexandria, where
even until now it is very well guarded, being read only to those who are being initiated
into the great mysteries.
But abominable demons are always devising destruction for the human race, and so
Carpocrates, having been instructed by them, used deceitful devices so as to enslave a
certain elder of the church in Alexandria and procured from him a copy of the mystical
Gospel, which he proceeded to interpret in accordance with his own blasphemous and
carnal opinion. Moreover, he polluted it further by
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F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
mixing shameless falsehoods with the holy and undefiled sayings, and from this
mixture the dogma of the Carpocratians has been drawn out. To these people, then, as I
have said already, one must never yield, nor must one make any concession to them
when they pretend that their tissue of falsehoods is the mystical Gospel of Mark, but
rather deny it with an oath. It is not necessary to speak all the truth to everyone; that is
why the wisdom of God proclaims through Solomon: ‘Answer a fool according to his
folly’ [Prov. 26: 5]―meaning that from those who are spiritually blind the light of the
truth must be concealed. Scripture also says, ‘From him who has not will be taken
away’ [Mark 4: 25] and ‘Let the fool walk in darkness’ [Eccles. 2: 14]. But we are sons
of light, having been illuminated by ‘the dayspring from on high’ of the Spirit of the
Lord [cf. Luke 1: 78], ‘and where the Spirit of the Lord is’, Scripture says, ‘there is
liberty’ [2 Cor. 3: 17]; for ‘to the pure all things are pure’ [Tit. 1: 15]. To you, then, I
will not hesitate to give an answer to your questions, exposing their falsehoods by the
very words of the Gospel.
Thus far Clement’s preamble (to some points in which we must come back); from now on
he gives an account of the expanded text of Mark 10: 32ff. in the second edition of the
Gospel to which he has referred:
Immediately after the section which begins And they were on the road, going up to
Jerusalem and continues to after three days he will rise [Mark 10: 32-4], there follows,
as the text goes: ‘And they come to Bethany, and there was a woman there whose
brother had died. She came and prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him: “Son of
David, pity me”. The disciples rebuked her, and Jesus in anger set out with her for the
garden where the tomb was. Immediately a loud voice was heard from the tomb, and
Jesus approached and rolled the stone away from the entrance to the tomb. And going
in immediately where the young man was he stretched out his hand and raised him up,
taking him by the hand. The young man looked on him and loved him, and began to
beseech him that he might be with him. They came out of the tomb and went into the
young man’s house, for he was rich. After six days Jesus laid a charge upon him, and
when evening came the young man comes to him, with a linen robe thrown over his
naked body; and he stayed with him that night, for Jesus was teaching him the mystery
of the kingdom of God. When he departed thence, he returned to the other side of the
Jordan’.
After this there follows And James and John come forward to him
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and all that section [Mark 10: 35-45]. But as for ‘naked to naked’ and the other things
about which you wrote, they are not to be found.
After the words And he comes to Jericho [Mark 10: 46a] it adds only: ‘And there was
the sister of the young man whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome; and Jesus
did not receive them’. But as for the many other things which you wrote, they are
falsehoods both in appearance and in reality. Now the true interpretation, which is in
accordance with the true philosophy...
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
―and there the writing breaks off. Probably the scribe who copied the text on to the endpapers
of the Ignatius volume found that his exemplar failed him at that point, so he could
copy no more.
III Clement and the Gospel Text
That, then, is the text: what are we to make of it?
No letters by Clement of Alexandria have been preserved, but two or three citations from
letters ascribed to him appear in the compilation of biblical and patristic maxims called
Sacra Parallela, traditionally attributed to John of Damascus (c. 675-c. 749)―who himself,
coincidentally, spent some time at Mar Saba. (Even if the Sacra Parallela be not his, some
letters ascribed to Clement were apparently known to the real author, whoever he was.)
Towards the end of the newly-published document the letterwriter quotes the opening
words of Mark 10: 46 in the form ‘And he comes to Jericho’. This is the Western reading,
in place of the majority text ‘And they come to Jericho’; the use of the Western text could
be a pointer to Clement as the author.
The letter-writer commences his account of the expanded text by saying that it comes
immediately after the section which begins, ‘And they were on the road, going up to
Jerusalem...’ (Mark 10: 32). Immediately before that section comes the incident of the rich
man who asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10: 17-31). This incident
provides the subject-matter for Clement’s homily, Who is the Rich Man who is to be saved
?―a homily which includes a quotation in extenso of these fifteen verses of Mark. This
quotation contains no esoteric or other expansion, but presents some
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textual peculiarities, on which the redoubtable J. W. Burgon animadverted in a famous
passage in The Revision Revised (London, 1883), pp. 326ff.:
I request that the clock of history be put back seventeen hundred years. This is A.D.
183, if you please; and―(indulge me in the supposition!)―you and I are walking in
Alexandria. We have reached the house of one Clemens,―a learned Athenian, who
has long been a resident here. Let us step into his library,-he is from home. What a
queer place! See, he has been reading his Bible, which is open at S. Mark x. Is it not a
well-used copy? It must be at least 50 or 60 years old. Well, but suppose only 30 or
40. It was executed therefore within fifty years of the death of S. John the
Evangelist. Come, let us transcribe two of the columns... as faithfully as we possibly
can, and be off... We are back in England again, and the clock has been put right.
Now let us sit down and examine our curiosity at leisure ... It proves on inspection to
be a transcript of the 15 verses (ver. 17 to ver. 31) which relate to the coming of the
rich young Ruler to our LORD.
We make a surprising discovery... It is impossible to produce a fouler exhibition of
S. Mark x. 17-31 than is contained in a document full two centuries older than
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
either B or Aleph,―itself the property of one of the most famous of the ante-
Nicene Fathers... The foulness of a Text which must have been penned within 70 or
80 years of the death of the last of the Evangelists, is a matter of fact,―which must
be loyally accepted, and made the best of.
Dean Burgon was concerned to make the point that the most ancient manuscripts of the
New Testament are not necessarily the purest. The text of Mark 10: 17-31 as quoted by
Clement in this treatise is rather heavily contaminated by the texts of the Matthaean and
Lukan parallels. But it is not at all certain that, if we could visit Clement’s study and look
at his scroll or (more probably) codex of the Gospel of Mark open at this place, we should
find the text which is reproduced in his treatise. He may have quoted it in part from
memory, and when we depend on memory for a text which appears in all three Synoptic
Gospels we are apt to produce a very mixed text, as Clement does here. (Dean Burgon
himself gives evidence of such reliance on his memory when he speaks of ‘the rich young
Ruler’; it is Matthew, not Mark, who says that he was young.) Clement gives evidence
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of memory quoting later in the same treatise when he comments on the words of verse 21,
‘sell what things you have’ (hosa echeis), which he has quoted above in their Markan
form, quoting them the second time in the more familiar form of Matt. 19: 21, ‘sell your
property’ (ta hyparchonta). If one Alexandrian writer was able to produce such a
contaminated Gospel text, we need not be surprised if the author of the additional
pericope quoted by our letter-writer amplifies his Markan phrases occasionally by means
of their Matthaean parallels.
IV The Expanded Text
The pericope inserted between verses 34 and 35 of Mark 10 is Markan in diction, for the
simple reason that it is largely a pastiche of phrases from Mark (‘contaminated’ by
Matthaean parallels), coupled with some Johannine material. The story of Jesus’ raising
of the young man of Bethany from the tomb at his sister’s entreaty is superficially similar
to the incident of the raising of Lazarus in John 11: 17-44; but our present story, far from
presenting the features of an independent Markan counterpart to the Johannine incident, is
thoroughly confused: in view of the loud voice which was heard from the tomb as Jesus
approached, it is doubtful if the young man was really dead. In this story Jesus himself
rolls away the stone from the entrance to the tomb, whereas in John 11: 39 he commands
the bystanders to remove the stone which covered the tomb of Lazarus.
The young man’s sister makes her plea to Jesus after the example of the Syrophoenician
woman who fell at Jesus’ feet (Mark 7: 25), saying ‘Pity me, son of David’ (Matt. 15:
22), and like her she incurs the disciples’ disapproval (Matt. 15: 23). (We may compare
the similar plea of blind Bartimaeus in Mark 10: 47f., and his refusal to be silenced by the
rebukes of those around.) Jesus’ anger is matched by his reaction to the leper’s plea in the
Western text of Mark 1: 41, and by his indignation at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11: 33,
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
38) ‘The garden where the tomb was’ is a detail borrowed from John’s account of the
burial of Jesus (John 19: 41).
Jesus’ action in taking the young man by the hand and raising him up comes not from the
account of the raising of Lazarus but from the raising of Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5: 41)
or, even more
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closely, from the healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark 1: 31). The statement
that ‘the young man looked on him and loved him’ reverses that of Mark 10: 21, where
Jesus looked on the rich man and loved him. The young man who is here raised from
the tomb was also rich. When he began to beseech Jesus that he might be with him, he
followed the example of the cured Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5: 18). The time-note
‘after six days’ was the interval between the Caesarea Philippi incident and the
transfiguration (Mark 9: 2). The linen robe thrown over the young man’s naked body
reminds us of the young man similarly attired at the scene of Jesus’ arrest (Mark 14: 5
1). The statement that ‘he stayed with him that night’ may recall John 1: 39, ‘they
stayed with him that day’.
The reference to the young man’s sister and mother in the amplified form of Mark 10:
46 is probably meant to integrate the incident of the young man with its general context.
Curiously, however, the young man is now identified as the one ‘whom Jesus loved’;
we have reverted to the situation of Mark 10: 21―although, since the verb ‘loved’ is in
the imperfect tense here (ēgapa), in contrast to the earlier aorist (ēgapēsen), we may
detect the influence of the Johannine references to ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’
(John 13: 23, etc.). It is not clear what Salome is doing in this company, but she figures
as a somewhat self-assertive disciple of Jesus in a number of gnostic texts; we may
recall, too (if she is to be identified with the mother of the sons of Zebedee, as a
comparison of Mark 15: 40 with Matt. 27: 56 might indicate), that she figures in the
Matthaean counterpart to the incident of Mark 10: 35-45, for in Matt. 20: 20f. it is the
mother of James and John who takes the initiative in asking for them the places of
highest honour in the coming kingdom. Jesus’ declining to grant this request may lie
behind the statement at the end of our writer’s quotation that he ‘did not receive’ the
three women who met him at Jericho.
The fact that the expansion is such an obvious pastiche, with its internal contradiction
and confusion, indicates that it is a thoroughly artificial composition, quite out of
keeping with Mark’s quality as a story-teller. Morton Smith indeed argues that it is no
mere pastiche or cento, but I find his arguments unconvincing. That the letter-writer
was disposed to acknow-
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ledge it as part of a fuller edition of Mark’s Gospel, written by the evangelist himself, is
quite in line with evidence which we have of Clement’s credulity in face of apocryphal
material. He treats the work entitled the Preaching of Peter as a genuine composition of
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
the apostle Peter (Strom. ii. 15.68; vi. 5.39ff., etc.) and he similarly accepted the
authenticity of the Apocalypse of Peter (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. vi. 14.1). And we shall
see how readily he acknowledged as dominical sayings ascribed to Jesus in the Gospel
of the Hebrews and the Gospel of the Egyptians, explaining them in terms of his own
philosophy.
V Mark and Alexandria
The information that Mark came from Rome to Alexandria is otherwise known to us
from Eusebius. Johannes Munck concluded for this reason that our letter could not be
earlier than Eusebius. But Eusebius did not originate the story of Mark’s coming to
Alexandria; he received it from others. After telling of Mark’s association with Peter in
Rome, he goes on: ‘They say that this man [Mark] was the first to be sent to Egypt to
preach the gospel, which he had also written down, and that he was the first to establish
churches in Alexandria itself’ (Hist. Eccl. ii. 16.1). Then he says that the success of
Mark’s preaching may be gauged by the quality of the Therapeutae described by Philo
(De vita contemplativa, 2ff.), whom he takes―quite wrongly and indeed
anachronistically―to have been a Christian community. Later he says that in Nero’s
eighth year (A.D. 61/62) one Annianus succeeded Mark in the ministry of the
Alexandrian church (Hist. Eccl. ii. 24).
We can but guess the source from which Eusebius derived this information―or
misinformation―but some awareness of the situation at Alexandria keeps him from
using the term episkopos of its leading minister in earlier days.
At any rate the story of Mark’s founding the church of Alexandria is of most
questionable authenticity. If it has any historical basis, that may be found in the coming
of a codex of the Gospel of Mark to Alexandria, soon after its publication in Rome (cf.
C. H. Roberts, ‘The Christian Book and the Greek Papyri,’ JTS 50 [1949], pp. 155ff.; L.
W. Barnard, ‘St. Mark and Alexandria,’ HTR 57 [1964], pp. 145ff.). Even more
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questionable is the whole succession―list of Alexandrian church leaders from Mark and
his alleged successor Annianus on to the last decade or two of the second century. The
first bishop of Alexandria of whom we can speak with confidence is Demetrius (c. 190-
233), first the friend and then the enemy of Origen. It is difficult to refute the argument
of Walter Bauer in Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (E.T. Philadelphia,
1971), pp. 44ff., that Alexandrian Christianity in its earliest generations was
predominantly gnostic or gnosticizing, and that not until the last quarter of the second
century did the ‘orthodox’ interpretation of the gospel begin to gain the upper hand. In
this later development the catechetical school founded by Pantaenus, Clement’s teacher,
played an important part. It is not without significance that Pantaenus was a Sicilian by
birth, while Clement probably came from Athens. But even the orthodoxy of the
catechetical school was suspect in the eyes of later theologians; its leaders indulged too
daringly in speculation.
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
The picture of Mark as the founder of Alexandrian Christianity represents an attempt to
provide the church of that city with an orthodox pedigree, one moreover which linked it
closely with the Roman church, the pillar and ground of orthodoxy, and incidentally
gave it quasi-apostolic status. For if Mark’s association with Peter gave apostolic
authority to the gospel which he penned, equally it gave apostolic lineage to the church
which he founded.
In the New Testament, however, Alexandria figures as the home of the associate of
another apostle―Apollos, the friend and colleague of Paul, who (according to the
Western text of Acts 18: 25) had been instructed in Christianity in his native city. Could
he not have provided the church of Alexandria with apostolic prestige? Evidently
not―perhaps because it is made so plain in Acts 18: 24-26 that Apollos’s orginal
understanding of Christianity was defective, so that he had to be taken in hand by
Priscilla and Aquila (foundation-members, perhaps, of the Roman church) and taught
the way of God more accurately. (Not all Alexandrian Christians were Gnostics or
gnosticizers, of course; the Letter to the Hebrews and the Letter of Barnabas may both
have been written by Alexandrian Christians, and neither of them bears a gnostic
stamp.)
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Our letter, however, does not say that Mark planted the church of Alexandria, but that
he came to Alexandria after Peter’s martyrdom (not several years before it, as Eusebius
implies) and continued there the literary activity which he had begun in Rome. This is
an earlier form of the story of his connexion with Alexandria than Eusebius reports, but
it provided a basis for the later account, which Eusebius may have derived from the
Chronicle of Sextus Julius Africanus, who visited Alexandria when Demetrius was
bishop and Heraclas, Origen’s successor, was head of the catechetical school, and
probably learned it from them.
The kind of Gospel literature that was current in Egypt in the generation before Clement
is exemplified by the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of the Egyptians, which
Bauer supposes were used respectively by the Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians
of Alexandria. Clement was acquainted with both of these documents. From the Gospel
of the Hebrews he quotes the logion, ‘He who seeks shall not desist until he finds; when
he has found he will marvel; when he has marvelled he will attain the kingdom; when
he has attained the kingdom he will rest’ (Strom. ii. 9.45; v. 14.96). Another form of
this Greek logion appears in the Oxyrhynchus Sayings (P. Oxy. 654.2) and, in a Coptic
version, in the Gospel of Thomas (logion 2). Clement characteristically interprets the
saying of the true (Christian) philosopher.
From the Gospel of the Egyptians Clement quotes an alleged saying of Jesus, ‘I came to
destroy the works of the female’, and illustrates it by a conversation between Jesus and
Salome. In reply to Salome’s question, ‘How long will death prevail?’ he said, ‘As long
as you women give birth to children’. ‘Then’, said she, ‘I have done well in bearing
none’. ‘Eat every herb’, said he, ‘except that which has a bitter fruit’. When she pressed
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
her original question again, he replied more fully: ‘When you tread underfoot the
garment of shame, when the two become one and the male with the female neither male
nor female’ (Strom. iii. 6.45; 9.63ff.; 13.91ff.). This expresses a Valentinian theme, that
death entered into human life with the separation of the female from the male―death
being included, along with conception and birth and the other phases of the biological
cycle, among
[p.16]
‘the works of the female’―and that the state of perfection and immortality would be
attained when the female was reabsorbed with the male into the complete human being.
This view was unacceptable to Clement but, as he did not wish to give up Jesus’
reported words to Salome as unauthentic, he replaced their proper gnostic sense with an
ethical allegorization, in which the ‘female’ whose works are to be destroyed is
concupiscence and ‘neither male nor female’ means neither anger nor concupiscence.
When the author of the letter says that Mark, after publishing his first book, ‘compiled a
more spiritual Gospel’, it is impossible not to be reminded of Clement’s statement that,
after the first three Evangelists had published their works, ‘John last of all, conscious
that the “bodily” facts had been set forth in those Gospels, urged by his disciples and
divinely moved by the Spirit, composed a “spiritual” Gospel’ (ap. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. vi.
14.7). By the ‘bodily’ facts in the Synoptic record Clement appears to mean the outward
historical details, whereas John’s Gospel is ‘spiritual’ in the sense that he brings out
their allegorical significance. Presumably Mark’s ‘more spiritual Gospel’ was one
which brought out the allegorical significance of his first edition, but we are not told
what the allegorical significance of the extract we are given from the amplified edition
might be. If the letter-writer is Clement, he may well have given it a moralizing
interpretation such as he gives to the conversation with Salome in the Gospel of the
Egyptians, and he might be just as far astray from the true sense.
In fact we might ask what there is of a ‘secret’ or ‘hierophantic’ character about the
pericope quoted by the letter-writer from the amplified Gospel of Mark―unless, as with
the Gospel of Thomas, it was the interpretation and not the written text that was
regarded as esoteric. And this brings us to what the letter says about Carpocrates and his
followers.
VI The Carpocratians and the ‘Secret’ Gospel
Carpocrates was an Alexandrian Platonist of the earlier part of the second century; he
flourished two generations before Clement. According to Irenaeus (Heresies i. 25. 1f.),
he taught that the world was created by angel-archons, not by the supreme
[p.17]
God, and (like the Ebionites) held that Jesus was a man, the son of Joseph by natural
generation, on whom the divine power descended. The same power might be received
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
by the souls of all who, like Jesus, set the archons at naught and conquered the passions
which exposed men to their penalties. He also appears to have taught metempsychosis
for all who were enslaved to the archons; only by defying and overcoming them, as
Jesus did, could men be released from the necessity of successive reincarnations.
Pythagorean influence may be indicated here, and it is perhaps relevant that, according
to Irenaeus (Heresies i. 25.6), the Carpocratians venerated images of Pythagoras, Plato
and Aristotle along with images of Jesus.
The followers of Carpocrates are charged by Irenaeus (Heresies i. 25.3ff.) and Clement
(Strom. iii. 2.5-11) with ethical neutralism and specifically with the practice of sexual
promiscuity at their love-feasts―with the same kind of conduct, in fact, as was alleged
in a number of pagan circles against Christians in general (cf. the ‘Oedipodean
intercourse’ of which the churches of the Rhone valley were accused, according to their
letter preserved in Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. v. 1.14). While we should not swallow
uncritically what is said of the Carpocratians by their orthodox opponents, it is to be
observed (i) that such charges are not levelled against all gnostic groups
indiscriminately and (ii) that a philosophical defence of promiscuity by Epiphanes, the
son of Carpocrates by a Cephallenian woman, is quoted by Clement (Strom. iii. 2.6).
Cardinal Jean Dani6lou, who regards Carpocrates himself as an exponent of what he
identifies as Jewish Gnosticism, holds that Epiphanes hellenized his father’s system,
‘just as Valentinus did Samaritan Gnosticism and Justin the orthodox gnosis of the same
period’ (The Theology of Jewish Christianity, E.T. [London, 1964], pp. 84f.).
Whereas Tertullian could say, ‘we have all things in common, except our wives’
(Apology 39.11), probably implying that private property was a sign of sinful
covetousness, Epiphanes and the Carpocratians appear to have gone farther and said,
‘we have all things in common, including our wives’. Epiphanes justified this policy by
an appeal to the principles of divine righteousness or equity as embodied not in the law
of Moses but
[p.18]
in the law of nature. He pointed to the example of the animal creation, and thus incurred the
rebuke of Jude: ‘by those things that they know by instinct, as irrational animals do, they are
destroyed’ (Jude 10). It was evidently predecessors of the Carpocratians, if not the Carpocratians
themselves, whom Jude denounced so unsparingly for following the precedent of the disobedient
angels and the men of Sodom. Indeed, Clement himself, in his account of the Carpocratians,
expresses the opinion that ‘it was of these and similar heresies that Jude spoke prophetically in his
epistle’ (Strom. iii. 2.11). He further links them with the Nicolaitans of Rev. 2: 6, 14f., and the
author of our letter links them with those who explore ‘the deep things of Satan’―i.e. the
adherents of ‘that Jezebel of a woman denounced in the letter to the church of Thyatira, whose
tenets were practically identical with those of the Nicolaitans (Rev. 2: 20ff.).
For our present purpose it is particularly interesting that, on the testimony of Irenaeus, the
Carpocratians emphasized the statements of Mark 4: 11, 34, that Jesus explained the mystery of
the kingdom of God privately to his disciples, while speaking to the general public in parables;
they claimed also that the disciples were authorized to deliver this private teaching ‘to those who
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
were worthy and who assented to it’ (Heresies i. 25.5). They themselves, in other words, were
the custodians of Jesus’ private teaching―of the ‘messianic secret’, so to speak. But whereas the
historical ‘mystery of the kingdom’ or ‘messianic secret’ was concerned with the nature of the
kingdom, of the God whose kingdom it was and of the messianic ministry by which it was being
inaugurated, it was reinterpreted―or rather misinterpreted―among the Carpocratians and in
other gnostic schools in terms of mystical initiation. The letter-writer himself uses the language of
mystical initiation with regard to the mature Christian (as Clement does with regard to his ‘true
Gnostic’), but with him (as with Clement) this is but a figure of speech.
It was evidently the Carpocratians’ claim to be the recipients and transmitters of Jesus’ esoteric
doctrine that moved Theodore to write to Clement (if we accept the attribution of the letter). They
appealed to an edition of Mark’s Gospel which,
[p.19]
they maintained, vindicated their assertion that Jesus taught conventional morality in public but
communicated a more uninhibited ethic to select souls in private. Theodore evidently asked
Clement about this ‘secret’ Gospel of Mark. Clement knows about it, but denies that it supports
Carpocratian doctrine: Carpocrates procured a copy, he says, by underhand means, and his
followers have perverted its interpretation, putting a libertine construction, for example, on the
incident of the young man ‘with a linen robe thrown over his naked body’, as though the
impartation of the mystery of the kingdom of God involved complete physical contiguity. When
Clement says that the phrase ‘naked to naked’, about which Theodore had asked, is not found in
the text of the ‘secret’ Gospel, we should probably infer that this phrase summed up the
Carpocratians’ interpretation of the incident, which they probably invoked in defence of their
own ‘sacramental’ practice.
That there was an extreme libertine tradition in early Christianity as well as an extreme ascetic
tradition is plain to readers of the New Testament, especially of the Pauline letters. Paul himself,
like Jesus before him, taught a way of holiness which did not belong to either of these extreme
traditions. As for the libertine tradition, Professor Smith finds it so firmly embedded in early
Christianity that he concludes it must have gone back to Jesus’ esoteric teaching, as the more
ascetic tradition went back to his public teaching. But such evidence as we have points to a
Gentile origin for the libertine tradition. We cannot be sure about the Nicolaitans of the
Apocalypse, whether or not they were called after Nicolaus the proselyte of Antioch (Acts 6: 5),
as Irenaeus believed (Heresies i. 26.3); perhaps they and kindred groups simply wished to relax
the terms of the apostolic decree of Acts 15: 28f. But Paul’s Corinthian correspondence gives us a
clear enough line: the libertines in the Corinthian church were the ‘spiritual’ men who had come
to regard all bodily activities as morally indifferent, and devised a theological defence of their
continued indulgence in the besetting sin of Corinth, even after their conversion to Christianity.
They probably maintained that they were carrying to its logical conclusion Paul’s gospel of
freedom from the law. It was men of this outlook who regarded the cohabitation of one
[p.20]
of their number with his father’s wife as a fine assertion of Christian liberty (1 Cor. 5:
1ff.). Epiphanes, who had learned from his father Platonism with a dash of
F.F. Bruce, The ‘Secret’ Gospel of Mark. The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the
University of London on 11 February 1974. London: The Athlone Press, 1974. Pbk.
pp.20.
Pythagoreanism, devised a more sophisticated philosophical defence for this kind of
conduct.
As for the ‘secret’ Gospel of Mark, it may well have come into being within the
Carpocratian fellowship, or a similar school of thought. That Clement thought it went
back to Mark himself is neither here nor there, in view of his uncritical acceptance of
other apocrypha. The raising of the young man of Bethany is too evidently based―and
clumsily based at that―on the Johannine story of the raising of Lazarus for us to regard it
as in any sense an independent Markan counterpart to the Johannine story (not to speak of
our regarding it as a source of the Johannine story). Since this conclusion is so completely
at variance with Professor Smith’s carefully argued case, one must do him the justice of
giving his case the detailed consideration which it deserves. But for the present I have
given my initial assessment of the document which he has discovered and published.
© 1974 Continuum (http://www.continuumbooks.com). Reproduced by permission.
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