| Clement locus | Gospel scene / saying used | Canonical Gospel reference | Synoptic parallels | Eusebian Canon placement | What this shows |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paed. 1.5.16.1–2 | Disciples ask who is greatest; Jesus places a child in the midst; humility defines greatness | Matt 18:1–4 | Mark 9:33–37; Luke 9:46–48 | Canon II (Matthew–Mark–Luke), but as one continuous Markan unit | Clement treats humility and the child example as a single instructional scene, matching Mark’s unified discipleship teaching rather than Matthew’s segmented presentation |
In Mark, the child is introduced in 9:33–37 specifically as the answer to the disciples’ question about greatness. That answer is conceptually completed only when Mark immediately resumes the theme in 10:13–16, where childlikeness becomes the criterion for receiving the kingdom itself. The sequence is deliberate and progressive: greatness → humility → reception → kingdom. Nothing in Mark disperses the child motif into unrelated contexts. It functions as a single discipleship lesson unfolding across adjacent scenes within the Markan corridor.
Clement’s use presupposes exactly this kind of closure. He treats the child not as one illustrative motif among many, but as a complete and sufficient interpretive key. He does not follow Matthew’s subsequent expansions into offense, angels, or the lost sheep; instead, he reads childlikeness as the definitive answer both to the question of greatness and to access to the kingdom. That is Mark’s logic, not Matthew’s.
This is why the unit must be described as Markan rather than Matthean. The diction Clement uses is often Matthean—βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν, the μεγαλότης contrast, the παιδίον placed “in the midst”—but the instructional architecture he assumes is not supplied by Matthew. It is supplied by Mark alone. Matthew fragments the child material across multiple contexts and rhetorical purposes; Mark preserves its conceptual unity across the discipleship corridor.
This distinction becomes explicit in Paedagogus 1.5.16.1–3. Clement draws on material corresponding to Matthew 18:1–4, the scene in which the disciples ask who is greatest, Jesus places a child in their midst, and declares that the one who humbles himself like a child is greatest in the kingdom. Clement’s wording is unmistakably Matthean. Yet he does not treat this Matthean pericope as self-contained. He immediately folds into it the saying “ἢν μὴ γένησθε ὡς τὰ παιδία ταῦτα, οὐκ εἰσελεύσεσθε εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ,” corresponding to Matthew 18:3, and insists that it be read not as a comment on childish ignorance but as an ethical statement about humility and simplicity. In Clement’s presentation, Matthew 18:3 and 18:4 are not merely adjacent verses; they are functionally inseparable expressions of a single dominical teaching about παιδικὴ ταπείνωσις.
More importantly, Clement does not stop with this local fusion. Across Paedagogus 1.5.12 and 1.5.16, he repeatedly treats the complex “become like children / humble yourself like a child / receive the kingdom as a child” as a single instructional unit, even though Matthew distributes these elements across different narrative moments and even different chapters. Clement shows no awareness of, and no interest in, Matthew’s segmentation. For him, the child sayings mutually interpret one another and belong together.
This pattern aligns precisely with Mark’s ordering, not Matthew’s. In Mark 9:33–37, Jesus answers the question of greatness by placing a child in the midst and redefining status through humility and service. In Mark 10:13–16, immediately downstream, the child becomes the paradigm for receiving the kingdom itself. Mark thus already treats childlikeness, humility, and access to the kingdom as a continuous conceptual complex spread across adjacent scenes. Matthew fragments this complex; Mark preserves its unity.
Eusebius’s Gospel Canons quietly preserve the same distinction. Matthew 18:3–4 and Matthew 19:13–15 are assigned to different Matthean sections and appear in different canon entries because Eusebius respects Matthew’s dispersed narrative order. By contrast, the Markan parallels—Mark 9:33–37 and Mark 10:13–16—appear as coherent instructional blocks within the Markan run of the discipleship corridor and govern the alignment in their respective Canon II tables. The canon system thus registers Mark’s unity even while recording Matthew’s fragmentation.
Clement’s practice mirrors the Markan side of the canon system, not the Matthean. He consistently reconstructs the unity that Matthew breaks apart and that Eusebius only preserves when Mark governs the table. This is not casual paraphrase but a stable reading strategy, repeated across sections, in which Matthean wording is subordinated to a Mark-shaped instructional spine.
This is exactly what one would expect if Clement were working within an Alexandrian gospel tradition centered on Mark, understood not merely as a text but as a structured teaching corpus—the sort of tradition Clement elsewhere associates with Mark’s authority in Alexandria. In this light, “Secret Mark” need not be imagined as an entirely separate book so much as a harmonized Markan gospel, preserving the discipleship corridor as a continuous sequence while incorporating Matthean expansions.
Seen this way, Eusebius’s Gospel Canons make sense as the later, public codification of that same logic. Officially, the Canons present four Gospels in parallel; structurally, they rely on Mark to supply continuity and order within the Synoptic tradition. That Markan continuity is never advertised as foundational, but it quietly governs alignment where coherence is required. In an Alexandrian context—and in a fourth-century theological environment indebted to Alexandrian authority and to Mark as the apostle of Alexandria—such dependence would hardly be surprising, even if it remained unspoken.
On this reading, the Paedagogus passages are not peripheral illustrations. They provide concrete evidence that Clement reads dominical material through a harmonized Markan framework, and they show how that framework plausibly underlies both the Alexandrian tradition and the hidden mechanics of Eusebius’s Gospel Canons.
