What if St. Mark Wasn't the Gnostikos of the Alexandrian Community

I just received another short email from my friend Dimitri in Corinth who asks 'what if the Coptic tradition has nothing to do with the gnostics.' Well, the straightforward answer is that the Copts do no claim to be 'gnostic.' To them the very term is heretical and thus something that they want to keep away from at all costs.

The real question of course is what did the ancient Alexandrian Christians believe. For this we have to go to Clement of Alexandria and see that he explicitly identifies the tradition as being (a) 'according to Mark' and (b) quite specifically 'gnostic.'

Now someone could of course argue that the modern Copts have nothing to do with Clement. The reality is that Severus of Al'Ashmunein has very little to say about Clement and all the references - like those associated with Origen - all derive from a source which was palpably hostile to the two men.

Severus first writes a puzzling account of Demetrius the Patriarch where he seems to blend the Catholic understanding of him ruling over Alexandria for forty three years with a native account of him being banished by the Emperor Severus sometime during his reign (193 - 211 CE):

Demetrius remained patriarch forty-three years. In his time there was a disturbance at Alexandria, and the emperor Severus banished him to a place called the quarter of the Museum; and there he died on the 12th. day of Barmahat, which, I believe, was the day of the manifestation of his virginity.

Now the curious thing of course is that the date of the beginning of Demetrius' career as bishop is well established - viz. 189 CE. This means that Severus of Al'Ashmunein's two accounts contradicted one another.

Severus of Al'Ashmunein immediately goes on to write of Origen and Demetrius' mutual hostility saying:

Now in the reign of the emperor Severus many became martyrs for the love of God. Among them was the father of a man named Origen, who learned the sciences of the heathen, and abandoned the books of God, and began to speak blasphemously of them. So when the Father Demetrius heard of this man, and saw that some of the people had gone astray after his lies, he removed him from the church.

Severus of Al'Ashmunein references the persecutions that were ongoing in Septimius Severus' rule:

In these days also the martyrs Plutarch and Serenus were burnt alive, and Heraclides and Heron were beheaded. Likewise another Serenus, and the woman Heraïs, and Basilides; and Potamiaena, with her mother Marcella, who suffered many torments and severe agonies; also Anatolius, who was the father of the princes, and Eusebius, and Macarius, uncle of Claudius, and Justus, and Theodore the Eastern; all these martyrs were kinsmen. There was also another virgin named Thecla. Now Basilides was a soldier, and he came forward of his own free will; and when they questioned him, he replied : «I am a Christian because I saw three days ago in a dream a woman who appeared to me, and placed upon my head a crown from Jesus Christ». Thus Basilides obtained the crown of martyrdom; and so likewise a great number were martyred; for Potamiaena was seen by them in dreams, and encouraged them to have faith in the Lord Christ, so that they receved the crown of martyrdom.

And then goes on to introduce Clement seemingly as a figure who came to Alexandria after the quarrels of Demetrius and Origen had already been established:

Now there had come to Alexandria, in the room of Pantaenus, a new governor, whose name was Clement; and he remained governor until those days. And this Clement composed out of his own head books, in which he overthrew the received chronology. Then a Jewish scribe, named Judas, who had read in the book of the Visions of Daniel, in the tenth year of the reign of Severus, explained the years and dates mystically up to the epoch of Antichrist, on a system of his own, and declared that the time was at hand, on account of the deeds of Severus, the hostile prince.

The last reference to Clement in Severus is with his familiar position at the side of Alexander of Jerusalem after fleeing Alexandria later in life and remained until the day he died. Severus writes:

Among the holy men of this time was Serapion also, who was patriarch of Antioch; and when he died Asclepiades, the confessor, was appointed, and his degree was exalted. And Alexander wrote to the people of Antioch with regard to Asclepiades, saying thus : «Alexander, the servant of God, and believer in Jesus Christ, addresses the holy church in Antioch, in the Lord, with joy, by the hand of the chaste priest Clement.

The point of course of all of this is that there is a discernible pattern in Severus' sources which go beyond what modern religious historians like to acknowledge.

Clement clearly was a 'governor' in Alexandria before and while Demetrius was 'bishop.' I have always suspected this but Severus makes it explicit. The implications of these statements make it highly likely to me that Demetrius was an 'overseer' of the church but the term 'bishop' was probably foreign to the Alexandrian faith just as we have seen many other aspects of the Roman religion (i.e. 'swearing oaths' at baptism' etc.)

I think BOTH Clement and Origen continued to have authority over the Christian community in Egypt albeit secretly. They were ultimately expelled by Demetrius when he saw that even the bishops he appointed continued to have allegiance to the old line of Patriarchs from the Church of St. Mark in the Boucolia.

It is difficult to know what to make of the statements in Severus. As I noted he seems to take two reports that don't quite agree with one another. Our standard history of Alexandria assumes that Demetrius continued from 189 to 242 CE. Severus makes it seem as if there were several 'expulsions' which Demetrius ordered but these might again represent a number of separate reports of the same expulsion in 231. Alternatively we can view Origen's many travels since 215 as having a sinister backdrop that went under reported in the subsequent Church Fathers.

The bottom line is that I think the reference to Clement being a 'governor' is very important. I will try and track down the Arabic term here because it is important. The supposition again is that when Clement uses the term 'gnostic' to describe the Alexandrian tradition he is not reinforcing our thoroughly insipid modern sense of 'gnosticism' (i.e. where a bunch of libertines sit around smoking pot and have 'revelations' or insights) but the original Platonic meaning of the term which Morton Smith accurately coined as meaning:

the ideal king, the only man capable of knowing God, who would therefore act as the mediator between God and man; he would be, in effect, the Nous [the divine intellect] of his subjects, in whom he would restore their lost contact with the heavenly world from which he came.

Or as the more enlightened of my readership will begin to see - the 'gnostic' is one and the same with the Alexandrian Patriarch or, if you will that Mark as the first in the line of these Patriarchs was the first gnostic (cf. Irenaeus AH i.14f)

The problem of course is that the term 'gnostic' no longer means what we moderns who investigate 'gnostic traditions' WANT the term to denote. As such we walk away from the profound revelation that the Alexandrian tradition can be PROVED to be gnostic merely because we don't like what we discover about our beloved terminology when it comes face to face with reality.