For anyone who has read my previous posts it should be plain that I think the approach of the Marcionophiles (the scholarly circle that "studies" - more like "fixates" - on two supposed "textual critical studies" of the Marcionite New Testament canon in Tertullian and Epiphanius) is superficial. Most of the writings of the early Church Fathers represent little more than a giant game of "broken telephone" (formerly known as "Chinese whispers").
I think Irenaeus actually did complete the anti-Marcionite work which he references in Adversus Haereses Book Three - viz:
"curtailing the Gospel according to Luke and the Epistles of Paul, they assert that these are alone authentic, which they have themselves thus shortened. In another work, however, I shall, God granting [me strength], refute them out of these which they still retain."
I think this work survives in an altered form in Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem (in the manner that Tertullian copied, translated and reshaped Irenaeus's Valentinian material from Adversus Haereses 1.1 - 12 in Adversus Valentinianos. Epiphanius employed Irenaeus lost work in his "detailed" study of Marcion's gospel and letters of Paul in the Panarion.
In other words, what has come down to us via two sources is an argument that Marcion falsified Luke when in reality the actual gospel of Marcion resembled Mark as witnessed in the account of the Philosophumena. Luke is an expansion of Mark. The Marcionite gospel could - at least theoretically - be regarded as both an expansion of Mark and a contraction of Luke.
The point here is that I think we should abandon "trusting" the Church Fathers to show us what the actual Marcionite gospel looked like, these same men who wanted to keep Marcion away from the "innocent lambs" of their flock. I think Clement of Alexandria provides us with the truth. His homily on Mark 10:17 - 31 begins with the statement that his present work is aimed at rescuing those who lose hope hearing the rich man, camel and eye of the needle parable, those Clement identifies as:
having withdrawn further from the way that leads there, no longer troubling themselves either which (τίνας) from among the rich the Master and Teacher is speaking about, or how what is impossible for human beings becomes possible.
In one sense the discussion develops as if Clement is addressing a generic class of people. Here τίνας is an interrogative/indefinite accusative plural: “which (ones), which people.” So the question implied is:
“Which rich people is the Lord talking about?”
Now in 4.4 Clement cites the opening words of the Mark 10 scene:
ἐκπορευομένου αὐτοῦ εἰς ὁδὸν προσελθών τις ἐγονυπέτει λέγων…
“as he was going out into the road, someone came up and knelt before him, saying…”
That τις is the “rich man / rich youth” of the story. The title of the work however is in the singular: Τίς ὁ πλούσιος ὁ σωσόμενος; “Who is the rich man who will be saved?” By the time he reaches §§38–39 he has already re-read the pericope through 1 Corinthians 13, so that the whole scene becomes a practical commentary on Paul’s “more excellent way.” Now he draws the line out to its furthest consequences.
Clement introduces the Corinthian material not as an edifying excursus, but as a salvific path disclosed by Paul himself: “But you, learn the ‘surpassingly excellent way’ (τὴν καθ’ ὑπερβολὴν ὁδόν), which Paul reveals unto salvation” (38.1). The phrase is of course lifted from 1 Cor 12.31, but Clement recontextualises it as a kind of esoteric itinerary, a mystic ὁδός that leads beyond prophecy, tongues and healings into the definitive triad of faith, hope and love. In his hands Paul is not merely an ethical preacher but a mystagogue: he “reveals” (δείκνυσι) the hidden way by which the soul is perfected. Love is not simply the greatest of the three virtues; it is the only one which survives eschatological vision and fulfilment, the only power that is “brought together into perfection and grows even more in those who have been handed over to perfection” (38.3). The whole homily has been circling around τέλειος and τελείωσις; here Clement quietly identifies Paul as the one who knows how the Gospel’s demand for perfection is actually realised.
It is at this point, having threaded the rich man’s story through Paul’s “more excellent way,” that Clement turns to the question of the man’s identity. After insisting that even a person “born in sins” and guilty of “many forbidden things” can, through love and pure repentance, fight back against his misdeeds (38.4–5), he adds the notoriously cryptic warning: “Let not even this be left to bring you despair or hopelessness—even if you come to know who the rich man is” (εἰ καὶ τὸν πλούσιον μάθοις ὅστις ἐστίν).
The Greek is as pointed as it is brief. Clement does not say, “even if you understand the parable,” or “even if you grasp the meaning of the rich man.” The verb is μανθάνω, “to learn, to come to know,” in the aorist optative μάθοις, and it is followed not by an abstract but by a relative clause that presses on the man’s personal identity: ὅστις ἐστίν, “who he is, exactly.” The construction is precisely what one would expect if Clement envisaged some of his readers being initiated into a further piece of information: not merely what the rich man stands for, but who he in fact was. The very need to reassure them – “let not even this drive you into despair or ἀπογνώσις” – presupposes that the answer, once disclosed, might well be disturbing.
Read in this light, the clause εἰ καὶ τὸν πλούσιον μάθοις ὅστις ἐστίν does more than dangle a rhetorical possibility. It tacitly acknowledges the existence of a tradition in which the “rich man” of Mark 10 bore a determinate, real-world identity. Clement does not name him; but he writes as someone who knows that such an identification circulates, and that some of his hearers may one day “come to know” it. That is why he must add: even if you reach that level of insight, do not conclude that the figure in question is irretrievably lost. The entire sequence from 38.1 to 39.6 is designed as a theological prophylactic against precisely that conclusion.
The ensuing paragraph confirms the point. Clement immediately generalises from the hypothetical rich man to “the one who has no inheritance in the heavens,” and asks “in what manner one, by rightly using the things that are, might escape both the arrogant burden of wealth and its difficulty regarding life, and be able to partake of the eternal good things” (39.1). He then imagines someone who has fallen into “such sins or transgressions after the seal and the redemption”—that is, after baptism—whether through ignorance, weakness, or involuntary circumstance, and insists that it must not be thought that such a person is “wholly rejected by God, as if he were utterly condemned.” Instead, the prodigal is invited to true μετάνοια, to “uproot entirely from the soul those sins for which one has condemned himself unto death” (39.2–3). God alone forgives sins; God alone refuses to “reckon transgressions”; and God is by nature μακρόθυμος, waiting for those who turn back (39.5–6). Only now does the homily’s rhetoric fully make sense. Clement is not offering a generic reassurance that rich men as a class may be saved. He is hedging the revelation that this particular rich man – whose identity some of his readers may eventually learn – has, or can have, a story of repentance after grave post-baptismal sin.
Who, then, would fit such a profile? In principle one might think of Peter, whose denial of Jesus became a paradigm of fallen apostleship healed by tears. But Peter’s fall and rehabilitation are already inscribed in the canonical narratives. There is nothing esoteric in the assertion that Peter sinned grievously yet was restored; no Alexandrian gnostic needed to be cautioned not to despair “even if you come to know who Peter is.” The canonical Peter is public property, not hidden knowledge. Clement’s language makes far more sense if the identity in question belongs to the realm of whispered tradition, a “someone” whose connection to the Gospel’s rich youth is not inscribed on the evangelic roll.
The figure who best fits Clement’s hints is the very apostle through whom he has just interpreted the passage. Paul is, for Clement, the man who “flourished straight after the ascension,” a young Jew whose mind outstripped his years, a perfect keeper of the Law who nevertheless had to abandon his former life in order to press on toward perfection. In Quis Dives the rich youth has already kept the commandments “from earliest age,” possesses a precociously ripened φρόνημα, yet fails, at least initially, to take the final step into τέλειος. In Paedagogus Clement glosses Paul’s confession in Phil 3 by saying that he “considers himself perfect in having left his former life and taken hold of the better—not that he is perfect in knowledge, but that he presses toward what he expects of the perfect.” The overlap is too close to be accidental. The young, law-observant τις of Mark 10 is the narrative foil for the apostle who later discovers and walks Paul’s “more excellent way.” If, in Alexandrian circles, that connection crystallised into the claim that the rich man was Paul in his unperfected state, then Clement’s final proviso falls into place. Even if you, dear hearer, should one day learn who the rich man really was, do not let that knowledge cast you into despair. For the whole point of Paul’s gospel is that even the one who first turned away from perfection can, by love and repentance, be restored.
Is it Peter? Is it Paul? Clement will not say. But when his closing warning is read against his own Pauline dossier, the balance of probabilities tips toward the latter. The rich man whose identity might shock the gnostic into despair, yet whose story Clement wraps in a dense theology of love, perfection and post-baptismal repentance, looks very much like the Marcionite Paul: once the wealthy youth who went away grieving, later the apostle who finally walked the surpassingly excellent way he himself revealed.