Clement's Variant Gospel of Mark As Witnessed by Quis Dives Salvetur [Part One]

If you follow this blog you know I don't see things the way the other people in this field see things. I was always an outsider looking into Christianity. I was never baptized. I didn't even know what a 'Jesus Christ' was until I was like thirty five (lol). But the point is that I come at everything with a fresh set of eyes. I am not for the truth or Christianity, I am not against the truth of Christianity.

I am not even sure that anyone today knows what the truth of Christianity is. That's why I joined the atheist blogroll in the first place. They promoted themselves as a group of bloggers who blog from the atheist or agnostic perspective.

Well, I thought to myself, I am convinced that I don't know nor does anyone know what the truth of Christianity is. I guess that makes me 'agnostic.' Little did I know that on this continent 'agnostic' is supposed to mean 'atheist light.'

It was like a day later that I started noticing I was getting harassed by all these people who make it their life's work 'to disprove the evils associated with atheism.'

In any event the point is that I don't think my ignorance is a bad thing. It certainly separates me from all the 'experts' who think that they can just slot people like Clement of Alexandria into convenient pre-fabricated terminology.

The reason I am spending so much time on Clement is that I think that he defies easy categorization this because he is not being truthful about his own beliefs. There is something inherently ambiguous about his self-identity. If you discount the Letter to Theodore he never so much as once makes a positive reference to his native Alexandrian episcopate.

This is all the more unusual when we see Clement described as a leader or 'governor' of the Christians of the city. Can you imagine the mayor of New York openly cheering on the Boston Red Sox? But this is exactly what scholars like to pretend was going on with Clement.

The Marcionites had a canon with a Letter to the Alexandrians and Clement is understood to hold up his hand and say 'I don't want anything to do with this.' If some people thought the Apostle took an interest in Alexandria how could the story of St. Mark coming to Alexandria be far behind?

An apostolic narrative doesn't have to be true to be heavily promoted. It's like arguing that a music company has to believe in the talent of its artists to promote them to radio stations.

Now I happen to believe that an important apostle named Mark did indeed visit Alexandria a little over a year after the Passion but that's not the point.

It is in my mind impossible to believe that Clement didn't subscribe to some 'native myth' connecting Alexandria to the inner circle of Jesus. The fact that Clement doesn't openly acknowledge WHAT THAT MYTH WAS (outside of To Theodore) is immaterial. Christianity could not have survived in Alexandria without some sort of fable - a parallel to the Acts of the Apostles which effectively allowed the religion to spread to the Greece and Asia Minor.

If the story of St. Mark didn't already exist it would have been made up in the late second century.

In any event, the fact that Clement does indeed develop a homily on Mark 10:17 - 31 (Quis Dives Salvetur) referencing only the Gospel of Mark in my mind speaks in favor of the importance of Mark in the city already in the late second century. As I have noted before the way Clement employs Mark implies that the text already had a special significance to the Alexandrian community. If this is so why aren't the Alexandrian Church Fathers themselves more explicit about their attachment to the apostle in the way, let's say, that the Roman Church was explicit about its attachment to Peter?

I have already answered this question in previous posts and don't want those arguments to distract anyone from what I trying to accomplish with this present discussion.

The point is that when we look at that Quis Dives Salvetur there is something inherently suspect about the way most scholars approach the material. They say on that it is a homily on Mark 10:17 - 31 but at the same time they notice that 'something is wrong' with his quotations from the gospel. As such this has to be explained in some way that doesn't contradict our inherited assumptions about the universality of our existing New Testament canon.

So it is that Barnard writes "by comparing the quotations with the Revised Version it is possible to see how far Clement differs from the text now usually adopted. It is necessary, however, to bear in mind that appears to have often quoted loosely from memory (of course!!!) and also that his quotations may to some extent have been altered by the transcribers, though these changes would tend rather to the suppression than to the insertion of unusual reading.

The evidence which even this short homily affords of the unique position of the four gospels at the beginning of the third century will strike every reader." [p. 11, 12]

All I have to say of course is 'Mr. Barnard please don't include me in this list! I do not see how Clement's specific choice of Mark's version of the 'Young Rich Man' speaks to the "unique position of the four gospels at the beginning of the third century." While the text that follows is described as a 'homily on Mark 10:17 - 31 this is technically incorrect as we shall see. It is instead a homily of a section of text paralleled in our canonical gospel of Mark chapter 10 which appears in a form which more closely resembles the earliest copies of the Diatessaron.

Indeed as I will demonstrate over the course of this next week, Clement's EXPLICIT point is that that section of text (identified in our gospel as Mark 10:17 - 31) brings up a problem which is only resolved with the introduction of a figure identified as 'Zacchaeus' (Luke 19:1 - 10) or 'Matthew.' There are no known canonical gospel variants where 'Matthew' is substituted for 'Zacchaeus.'

The point of course is that it defies logic to suggest that Clement is thinking in terms of our any of our canonical gospels when none of our canonical gospels begins with what appears in Mark 10:17 - 31 and then proceeds after a small interval to arrive at the equivalent of Luke 19:1 - 10 as its 'conclusion.'

No text that is save for texts of the Diatessaron circulating in the East as early as the third and fourth centuries.

The question we have to ask ourselves here is why would Clement go out of his way to first raise the question of how the rich man can be saved, then proceed to cite a large portion from the Alexandrian 'Gospel of Mark' in order to argue that the solution to the original question is 'in that text' and then go on to say THAT CITATION leads to the solution of how the rich man is saved 'by the time Zacchaeus appears.'

I know we have all learned to read the gospels in an absurd 'Protestant' manner but Clement wasn't a Protestant. As I will demonstrate all this week, the only LOGICAL solution to the puzzle of his argument in this homily is that text that Clement identified as 'the Gospel of Mark' of the Alexandrian tradition contained extra material and ultimately resembled the Diatessaron.

Not only has the path been cleared for this understanding by Scott Brown's translation of Clement's Letter to Theodore (as we have shown all this last week) but countless other lines of proof including the parallel manner in which the last known portion of Secret/Mystic Mark appears in to Theodore parallels the Diatessaron's introduction of the Zacchaeus narrative.

Here is the end of Clement's witness of his 'authorized' copy of the Gospel of Mark (not 'Secret' Mark but where mystic is just an adjective like we find ascribed the true text in Quis Dives Salvetur viz Jesus 'teaches all things to His own with divine and mystic wisdom' i.e. the gospel):

And he comes into Jericho, and the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them ...

The Diatessaron 'inserts' the story of Zacchaeus in the exact same place:

And when Jesus entered and passed through Jericho, there was a man named Zacchaeus, rich, and chief of the publicans. And he desired to see Jesus who he was; and he was not able for the pressure of the crowd, because Zacchaeus was little of stature. Arabic, And he hastened, and went before Jesus, and went up into an unripe fig tree to see Jesus: for he was to pass thus. And when Jesus came to that place, he saw him, and said unto him, Make haste, and come down, Zacchaeus: to-day I must be in thy house. And he hastened, and came down, and received him joyfully. And when they all saw, they murmured, and said, He hath gone in and lodged with a man that is a sinner. So Zacchaeus stood, and said unto Jesus, My Lord, now half of my possessions I give to the poor, and what I have unjustly taken from every man I give him fourfold. Jesus said unto him, To-day is salva- tion come to this house, because this man also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man came to seek and save the thing that was lost. And when Jesus went out of Jericho, he and his disciples[Diatesaron 31:15 - 25]

If Scott Brown's translation is correct Clement is just citing the generally accepted Alexandrian reading of Mark. If To Theodore is authentic, then we would expect to find Zacchaeus rather than Mark 10:46b follow what is cited at the end of the text. Clement does not cite this because the presence of Zacchaeus has nothing to do with his original argument.

Trust me friends, when I introduce the Clement and Origen showing how different the Alexadnrian gospel(s) where here, it will blow people's minds. We are now going beyond the question of whether to Theodore is authentic to - everything we have been told about the New Testament is a lie.

Toodles, should be fun ...