Is it at Least POSSIBLE that 'Titus Flavius Clemens' was NOT the Alexandrian Author of the Stromateis' Real Name?

I started writing a post on the Alexandrian text of the Gospel of Mark mentioned in Quis Dives Salvatur and - as often happens at this blog - I discovered a 'hidden trapdoor' in the room. The manuscript evidence for Clement OUTSIDE of Quis Dives Salvatur is very limited. There is only ONE surviving witness for each of the surviving works of 'Clement' - two manuscripts ALLEGEDLY from the same source (Arethus Archbishop of Caesarea) but this is not proven.

Manuscript P is explicit about its origins. It is also called the Arethas Codex and starts with the Paedagogus and is followed by Protepticus. While it is impossible to see to whom Paedagogus was originally attributed,'Clementos Stromateos' does appear in the title of the Protepticus.

Yet I have been racking my brain all day about the situation with the other manuscript, manuscript L, which is ostensibly 'eight books of the Stromateis' but the title page is again missing from the beginning of the work. This is no explicit ascription of the text to Clement and then we have the curious situation where book eight is made up of three works of no certain provenance. The start of the critical edition of the work appears here.

What has been puzzling me all day is the fact the way the Excerpta have been thrown into the mix. The way scholars look at the text is that Clement decided himself to preserve a bunch of fragments of a gnostic named 'Theodotus' who was a Valentinian. Yet Clement's name nowhere appears at the beginning of the text. We just see the title Epitomes from Theodotus and from what is Called the Eastern Teaching from the Time of Valentinus splashed across the page and then a section entitled Prophetic Extracts which follows.

Not only is there no explicit mention of 'Clement' as the author of the material which survives, the manuscripts which preserve Quis Dives Salvatur preserve no title nor any idea of who the author is. The original manuscript is just tacked on to the end of Origen's Nineteen Homilies on Jeremiah and is simply identified as 'A Homily.'

Now I know that everyone out there is going to point to Eusebius and all the fourth century Fathers 'knowing' that a guy named 'Titus Flavius Clemens' was the author of this material. However there are three arguments which refute this testimony.

(1) the first and most powerful being that Origen NEVER mentions 'Clement' by name which is strange given that he is supposed to be his successor and wrote an amazing number of works.

(2) the fact that the same fourth century Fathers who believe 'Titus Flavius Clemens' is the name of our Alexandrian writer ALSO BELIEVE that 'Titus Flavius Clemens' is the name of some if not all of the material attributed to the Clementine writings. If they were wrong about one they could be wrong about the other.

(3) the fact that when 'Clement' - i.e. Titus Flavius Clement OF ALEXANDRIA - cites Titus Flavius Clement of Rome he never identifies him as his namesake or his ancestor (in order to explain the similarity in names many scholars have had to claim that the one was related to the other; Clement never references any relation to his namesake).

(4) the fact that Eusebius claims that the Hypotyposeis were written by the same author as the other text and we have plainly showed this to be impossible. If he could mistake some of the writings written by someone not named 'Titus Flavius Clemens' as being written by Titus Flavius Clement he could have been misinformed about the rest of the material too. Photius and his student Arethas did not include the Hypotyposeis in their bundles of material attributed to 'Clement'

So in the end what we have are two manuscripts with their first pages missing making it impossible to know if Clement was identified as the author in both MSS. When scholars use the title of the Protetepticus to prove the author of the Paedagogus why doesn't the same argument apply to the Stromateis itself - i.e. that the Excerpta Ex Theodoto can be used as a tradition regarding the name of the author of the Stromateis?

I mean does it make sense that 'Clement' would have gathered up all these fragments of someone else and put them in a work and that this work would have been assigned to what became 'book eight' without any explanation on the part of the editor? It seems to make much better sense that someone collected a bunch of 'other works' of the author of the Stromateis than adding a collection of ANOTHER authors work to the end of the Stromateis.

Indeed scholars have been struggling with how to make sense of the contents of 'book eight' of the Stromateis and many have come up with even wilder theories than mine here. Bousset for instance supposed that both the Excerpta and Eclogae might have been written by Pantanaeus. I can cite almost as many theories as there are scholars who have studied the problem.

In my mind the evidence can only suggest one other REASONABLE possibility outside of the accepted idea that Clement was the author of ALL of the material and that is that there was an ancient tradition that Theodotus was the name of the author of the Stromateis.

Why should anyone care about my silly little theory? Well it seems to be weakly reflected in two ancient reports from Rome. The first is found in the Liber Pontificalis where the bishop of Alexandria at the time of Victor is identified as 'Theophilus.' There is no known bishop of Alexandria with this name from the period but as many have noted the idea must have been developed from Eusebius report which speaks of events at this time and refers to Theophilus of Caesarea speaking of the shared practices of his church and those of Alexandria:

Endeavour also to send abroad copies of our epistle among all the churches, so that those who easily deceive their own Souls may not be able to lay the blame on us. We would have you know, too, that in Alexandria also they observe the festival on the same day as ourselves. For the Paschal letters are sent from us to them, and from them to us: so that we observe the holy day in unison and together.

Could it be that a confusion arose as to the existence of two bishops associated with the tradition at Alexandria being confused with one another - i.e. 'Theophilus' and 'Theodotus'?

The other is what Hippolytus says about a Theodotus who was excommunicated in the same age. While Theodotus is said to have originally have come from outside of Alexandria, the same is thought of Clement of Alexandria. As I will show in my next post, it is not at all crazy to begin to suspect that Theodotus might well have been the original name of 'Titus Flavius Clemens' of Alexandria. The Roman Church was in the habit of slapping on the 'Titus Flavius Clemens' onto writings from the original center of Christianity. This might have been a convenient identity to confuse people - i.e. a 'contemporary Clement' from Egypt.

Even now people get confused as to which 'Clement' wrote the Pseudo-Clementines. Could this have been intentional?