What follows are the basic, checkable facts about the “abbreviated List of the Apostles” (the one that includes the line “Mark the apostle / Mark at Alexandria”) and why three German scholars—Lipsius, Zahn, and Harnack—are constantly invoked when modern writers try to connect that list with Clement of Alexandria’s lost Hypotyposeis, especially Book Five.
The starting point is that there exists a short, itinerary-style catalogue of apostolic missions and burials (e.g., “Peter and Paul at Rome… Andrew at Patras… Mark at Alexandria… Thaddaeus and Judas in Britio of the Edessenes…”) which later transmission associates with Clement. In the late nineteenth-century German discussion, this catalogue is treated not as an “apostolic romance,” but as a bare summary—precisely the kind of thing that could be excerpted, recopied, and reattached to different authorial names.
Richard Adelbert Lipsius is important because he explicitly treats the “Clementine” label as a feature of transmission rather than a guarantee of Clement’s authorship. His basic methodological point, made in his Ergänzungsheft to the Apokryphen Apostelgeschichten, is that Clement’s citation in Stromateis (1.20.100) does not prove Clement used the Egyptian church-order work commonly called the “Apostolic Church Order,” because the relevant line also occurs in the newly recovered Didache.
From there Lipsius argues that the apostle-catalogue prefixed to that church-order tradition—the “Apostelverzeichnis” and the little narrative of an apostolic meeting before dispersal—derives from an independent source and only later becomes the template by which editors distribute canons among apostles.
The key factual implication is straightforward: in Lipsius’s model, later scribes and compilers really did connect such lists with “Clement,” but that connection is itself a historical phenomenon of pseudo-Clementine church-order literature, not a proof that the list is Clement’s own composition.
The second pillar is Theodor Zahn. In the same Lipsius material, Zahn is singled out as the scholar who insists that at least part of this apostolic-list material represents a genuine fragment of Clement’s Hypotyposeis. Lipsius names Zahn’s argument directly: Zahn (in Forschungen III) wants to recognize here “a real fragment from the Hypotyposeis (Fragment 10).”
Lipsius rejects Zahn’s way of reading the Eusebian evidence, specifically calling it “simply not true” that Eusebius explicitly testifies Clement named Sosthenes as one of the Seventy in Book Five.
But the fact that matters for the “abbreviated list” question is that Zahn’s position exists in a precise, defined form: Zahn is the one arguing that the Clementine ascription is not merely a later flourish; it preserves genuine Clementine material from Book Five.
The third name—Adolf von Harnack—enters because he explicitly built on Zahn’s discussion when working with newly recovered fragments of the Hypotyposeis. In the tradition represented by your English quotation, Harnack is presented as having noticed that Zahn’s Forschungen contained a “quotation relating to the tombs of the Apostles,” claimed to be derived from the Hypotyposeis, and then focusing on one peculiarly diagnostic place-name: “Britio Edessenorum.” Harnack’s published suggestion (as reported there) is that “Britio” could be misread by an early medieval scribe as an abbreviation pointing toward “Britannio/Britanniae,” helping explain later Western confusions about a “Lucius” and “Britain.” The historical claim attached to that observation is that “Britio” fits the concrete Edessene context (the Birtha/citadel associated with Abgar IX) and is therefore better explained as early, local, and technical—rather than as a medieval invention. That is the factual basis for why later writers say Harnack saw the list as genuinely anchored in the Clementine period: if the list carries “Britio Edessenorum” as a living Edessene toponym, it plausibly belongs in the late second-/early third-century informational world that Clement’s Hypotyposeis could have drawn upon.
How does “Mark the apostle” fit into this?
The crucial distinction is between two different “Mark problems” that are often blurred. One stream of evidence is lists of the Twelve where later manuscripts actually insert “Mark” into the numbered apostolic sequence; Lipsius documents that phenomenon in an Athos witness (Vatopedi 635), explicitly saying the list is in shorter form and includes “insertion of Marcus between Matthew and James of Alphaeus.”
That is not the same thing as the abbreviated itinerary list. The abbreviated list’s “Mark” line is typically of the “Mark at Alexandria” type, functioning as a coordinate within a geography-of-apostles catalogue. The shared point is that both kinds of lists are transmitted under “Clementine” headings in later collections; the dispute among the Germans is whether that Clementine label is merely traditional packaging (Lipsius), or whether a real Clementine core survives behind the packaging (Zahn, and—via Zahn—Harnack’s willingness to treat at least parts of the tradition as early).
So the sober, public conclusion, based on what these three scholars actually contribute, is this.
Lipsius provides the framework: apostolic lists and church-order texts are repeatedly transmitted under Clement’s name, but that fact shows a history of pseudo-Clementine attribution and editorial reuse, not automatic authenticity.
Zahn provides the counter-claim: within that transmitted material there is, at least in his judgement, a genuine fragment from Clement’s Hypotyposeis (Book Five), and the abbreviated apostolic catalogue is to be read as a witness to that lost Clementine content.
Harnack’s contribution, as it is invoked in the “Britio” argument, is the historical plausibility test: a technical Edessene place-name (“Britio”) sitting inside the catalogue behaves like early information that later scribes could misunderstand; that favors an early origin for the list’s toponymy and makes it at least plausible that the list belongs to the Clementine-era dossier of apostolic lore rather than being a purely medieval construction.
Those are the facts that can be said without turning the issue into a loyalty test. The remaining question—whether the abbreviated “Mark the apostle / Mark at Alexandria” notice itself stood in Clement’s Book Five or is a later condensation attached to Clement’s name—remains exactly where the Germans left it: Zahn presses “yes,” Lipsius presses “no” (or at least “not proven”), and Harnack is cited as treating the “Britio” toponym as a strong reason to take the Clementine-period connection seriously.
