Andrew Criddle has responded to my research on Mark the Apostle and to Tony Burke’s entry on the “List of the Apostles” with the following remark: “The claim about Mark in the list …” (see his comment here: https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=200223#p200223). He also points to an “interesting discussion” by Tony Burke here: https://www.apocryphicity.ca/2023/05/29/apostolic-lists-as-sources-for-and-transmitters-of-apocryphal-traditions-about-the-apostles/.
But this is largely a distraction. It’s remarkable how “hoax theorists” in the Letter to Theodore debate repeatedly miss what these data imply for their own reconstructions. Criddle has started multiple threads at Early Writings arguing that there is no evidence for Mark’s Alexandrian visit prior to Eusebius. The reason is obvious: even a slight shift in the evidentiary picture—however small—counts, in their framing, as a marginal gain for “forgery” hypotheses regarding Theodore. In any case, I am glad that this exchange has drawn more attention to Burke’s work, since that was the original purpose of my post. Burke himself expressed interest in what I noticed about the implications of his earlier posting of Zahn’s material on Clement’s Hypotyposeis.
The central question remains: if the “List of the Apostles” really derives from Book Five of Clement’s Hypotyposeis, who else could its author be but Clement of Alexandria? Criddle would have us believe that the list must be at least as late as the development of specifically Alexandrian Mark-traditions, but the evidence I am pointing to runs in the opposite direction. The Codex Marcianus does not report merely that the notice about the Seventy came from Book Five; it presents the whole “List of the Apostles” as deriving from Book Five of the Hypotyposeis, not just the section on the Seventy. As always, everything turns on where one draws the line between “reality” and later corruption or abbreviation of that reality.
So the real bottom line is this: was Book Five of Clement’s Hypotyposeis responsible for both the list of the apostles and the list of the Seventy? Codex Marcianus, as I read it, testifies that Book Five stood behind the entire list. Two additional considerations reinforce that identification by implication: first, the reported Book Five material that calls Mark an apostle without proceeding to list the other apostles; and second, the absence of Mark from the Seventy in traditions that explicitly claim to be drawing on Book Five.
Finally, there is the Egyptian angle. The Coptic tradition—Egypt’s native Christian tradition—preserves in its liturgy repeated references to “Mark the Apostle,” even though “Mark the Evangelist” dominates normative Christian usage elsewhere. That matters here because it makes it harder to dismiss “Mark the Apostle” as an arbitrary late flourish. And that, of course, is precisely why Criddle avoids engaging the specific question whether Book Five of the Hypotyposeis contained a reference to “Mark the Apostle”: if Clement did so, that is one more datum—however small—that complicates the usual claims about what “Clement could not have said,” and therefore (for some) one less rhetorical foothold for dismissing the Letter to Theodore as “implausible.” Morton Smith, at any rate, did not know that Clement identified Mark as an apostle or perhaps - but not necessarily - more importantly, that he referenced a truncated version of the Letter to Theodore's story of the death of St Mark at the martyrium in Boucolia, in the Hypotyposeis.
This seems to be a rather "big deal," big enough that Andrew avoids the question entirely in his comments.
