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In Stromateis 4.6.28.6–29.4 Clement explicitly grounds a long ethical and ascetical argument in the dominical saying addressed to the rich man: “sell your possessions, give to the poor, and follow me.” The saying is cited in imperative form and remains the controlling axis of the entire passage. In Mark’s Gospel, this command belongs to the heart of the discipleship corridor (Mark 10:17–31), where the cost of following Jesus is disclosed with maximal clarity and narrative force.
Clement preserves the Markan logic of absolute choice. He frames the command as an irreducible opposition between “human threat” and “the love of God,” echoing Mark’s stark either–or structure rather than Matthew’s legal refinement or Luke’s social redistribution emphasis. The exhortation is not softened; instead, Clement radicalizes it by interpreting renunciation as the extinction of sinful action itself, achieved through deliberate non-practice (διὰ τῆς ἀπραξίας). This intensification is fully consonant with Mark’s portrayal of discipleship as existential rupture rather than moral compliance.
Crucially, Clement resists allegorical evasions of the command. He explicitly rejects the claim that “possessions” refer merely to alien elements within the soul and insists that God distributes material goods according to a just economy. Renunciation, therefore, is not a metaphorical gesture but a concrete reordering of life under divine authority. This polemical move presupposes the full force of the original Markan command, whose difficulty cannot be explained away without distortion.
The repeated insistence on ἀκολούθει μοι is decisive. Clement glosses following Jesus as obedience to the Lord’s spoken words and as ascent toward the life of the Spirit, culminating not merely in abstention from evil but in perfected beneficence (κυριακὴ εὐποιία). The movement from renunciation to perfected love mirrors precisely the progression in Mark 10, where dispossession leads not to negation but to participation in the kingdom through suffering and reoriented loyalty.
From the standpoint of the Secret Mark and Eusebian Canon thesis, this passage is methodologically important. Clement is not merely quoting a shared synoptic logion; he is treating a Markan corridor saying as a normative theological engine, capable of sustaining extended ethical and spiritual exposition. This is the same function the Markan rich man pericope performs in Quis Dives Salvetur, where Clement again builds sustained argumentation on Mark’s narrative logic rather than on Matthew’s redactional framing.
Accordingly, Stromateis 4.6.28.6–29.4 provides strong positive evidence that Clement operated with a Mark-shaped understanding of discipleship at a structural level. While the citation itself is synoptically shared, the way it governs argument, choice, renunciation, and ascent aligns most naturally with Mark’s discipleship corridor. This strengthens the case that Clement’s use of Mark was not incidental or merely harmonized, but foundational—supporting the broader claim that a Mark-based gospel tradition underlies both Clement’s theology and, indirectly, Eusebius’s later canonical architecture.
