Peter Kirby has been following this developing around (see it's not just you reading these posts) and argues by analogy and by manuscript-logic that at least some of the reports about Mark in Alexandria are anachronistic. He points to a well-known case of false attribution—the so-called “Dorotheus of Tyre” dossier of prophetic/apostolic lists—where scholars eventually discovered that the “Synopsis” is not a single work, that its components circulated separately, and that attributions (Dorotheus, Epiphanius, Hippolytus, etc.) attach only to certain recensions, sometimes for polemical or political reasons.
Using that as a cautionary template, Peter Kirby treats the “Clement, fifth book of the Hypotyposes” tag in Anonymus I as potentially unreliable for the Mark-in-Boukolou material. He notes that Anonymus I contains (in his view) two interpolations about Mark: “buried in Alexandria, in the Boukolou, inside a martyrium,” with the Mark paragraph appearing in two different positions in different witnesses, which he takes as a sign of later insertion.
He then emphasizes that the only explicit Clementine reference in the piece is to the list of the Seventy (“according to what Clement relates in the fifth book…”), and he argues that this does not, by itself, imply that Clement said anything about Mark’s burial in Bucolis.
Kirby also distinguishes between two Latin “laterculus” forms: one that says only “Marcus Alexandriae” (which he regards as potentially non-anachronistic), and another that says “Mark is buried at Alexandria in the Bucolis,” which he regards as importing a post-Constantinian church-topography (because the Acts of Mark speak of a church at Boukalou by the sea).
Finally, he proposes that “Bucolia” as a named place is first extant in mid-4th-century Athanasius, and on that basis he suggests that a Clementine reference to “Bucolia” as Mark’s burial place would be anachronistic.
Let's critique what Peter Kirby says. Perhaps his strongest move is methodological: he is right to insist that lists like these often have messy transmission histories, that “one work” may actually be a bundle of loosely related dossiers, and that attributions can cling to only one recension or be retrofitted for ecclesiastical purposes. The Dorotheus analogy is an effective reminder that a patristic name in a rubric is not, by itself, proof of authorship.
But the analogy also risks doing too much work. Showing that some apostolic lists are forged or re-attributed does not establish that this Clement tag is false or that the Mark notice is necessarily secondary. To carry the claim, you need the kind of evidence that the Dorotheus case ultimately turned on: a stemmatic picture of recensions, distribution of variants, and demonstrable dependence among forms. Kirby gestures toward this by noting that the Mark paragraph appears in different locations across witnesses, but he does not actually demonstrate (in the excerpt you provided) why “two locations” must mean interpolation rather than ordinary reshuffling in list-transmission.
His anachronism argument is suggestive but not decisive. It depends on two things that remain underargued here. First, that Athanasius is indeed the first attestation of “Bucolia” in relevant senses. Second, that a toponym must be formally attested before it can be used locally (or in now-lost sources) and then preserved in later textual channels. Even if Athanasius were the earliest surviving attestation, it would still be possible that a local Alexandrian designation circulated earlier and only becomes visible to us in the 4th century. That’s not a refutation of Kirby’s point—just a warning that “first extant attestation” is weaker than “origin date.”
More importantly, Kirby sometimes slides between categories: “Boukolou/Baucalis” as a quarter associated with a church or martyrion, “Bucolia” as a broader toponym, and “Bucoloi” as a term that can also evoke non-urban Egyptian contexts. In list traditions, that kind of phonetic/orthographic drift is exactly what can produce apparent anachronisms that are really the artifact of later spelling or localization. The excerpt itself shows that the traditions are already unstable enough to yield “Marcus Alexandriae” in one witness and “in Bucolis” in another, which is precisely where you have to separate “topographic memory” from “toponym in its later fixed form.”
Finally, the speculation about Arius and episcopal suppression is the least secure part of the argument in the excerpt. It’s a long inferential chain from Athanasius’s “in Bucolia is Heraclius” to “Bucolia acquired its formal identity because Constantine allowed a church to be built there,” to “associated with Arius,” to “therefore Arius was a bishop but suppressed.”
That kind of reconstruction might be interesting as a hypothesis, but as presented here it reads like a leap beyond what the cited line can bear.
