Oh my God. A friend noted there was this weird conversation going on at a place I used to frequent. I have to mention it because it epitomizes the emptiness I left.
My reason for leaving was simple. The site owner deliberately provokes "ambiguity" "conflict" "I am not sure" behavior to stimulate traffic at his site. In common parlance (or what used to be common parlance in the 1850s) he "plays the harlot" in order to stimulate participants.
My dog does this at the dog park. I really have one of the cutest dogs on the planet so my comparison of my dog with the site owner should flatter Peter Kirby. But I've noticed that my dog deliberately greets and fawns over other dogs owners in order to provoke a reaction from his companion canine.
I think it cute in Tiger, not so cute in a "serious" discussion board.
Anyway Peter's "taking seriously" of certain "anachronisms" with the Letter to Theodore - specifically an attributive adjective modifying its cognate abstract noun - is just bullshit. Clement, Stromata 6.12.97.1 has:
καὶ εἰκόνα τῆς ἰδίας ἰδιότητος ἐποίησεν αὐτόν
“and he made him an image of his own distinctive nature.”
So just fuck right off. This is just a ruse on his part to "stimulate" discussion. The same old same old. I hope the coffee he bought at Starbucks was worth it.
The never-ending controversy over Secret Mark increasingly resembles a marriage in which one spouse can always find room for criticism. Answer one complaint and another takes its place; explain the offending words and the objection shifts to how they were phrased. In a recent discussion, the Letter of Clement’s reference to “true truth” begins as evidence of modern philosophical perspectivism. When ancient parallels enter the conversation, attention shifts to the precise Greek adjective–noun combination. Each objection deserves consideration, but so does the movement between them. What, exactly, is supposed to be modern here: the idea, the wording, or the English translation? Before bringing Nietzsche into the marriage, we might let Clement speak.
The discussion on the Early Writings forum begins with an argument reproduced from Craig Evans, drawing on Peter Jeffery: the Letter’s “true truth” allegedly reflects a modern conception of truth foreign to antiquity. Later contributions concentrate on whether the precise Greek expression, ἀληθοῦς ἀληθείας, occurs elsewhere in ancient literature.
These are different questions. A phrase can be unusual without expressing an unfamiliar idea. It can also be unattested elsewhere in the surviving literature without being anachronistic. The distinction becomes particularly important when Clement’s undisputed writings supply close parallels for the thought under examination.
Consider Stromata 1.17.85:
ἐν δὲ τοῖς ψεύδεσι καὶ ἀληθῆ τινα ἔλεγον οἱ ψευδοπροφῆται
“Among their falsehoods, the false prophets also said some true things.”
Clement proceeds to invoke Hermas, explaining that a false prophet can speak true words while serving a destructive purpose. Accurate statements do not automatically establish the authority or truthfulness of the person delivering them.
This is immediately relevant to the Letter’s warning against agreeing with the Carpocratians merely because they say something true. Clement’s undisputed work already recognizes the underlying problem: genuine material can occur within deceptive teaching. The recipient must judge more than the isolated accuracy of a statement.
The Letter itself explains its apparently paradoxical assertion that not all true things are truth. Immediately afterward, it states:
συγκεκραμένα γὰρ τἀληθῆ τοῖς πλάσμασι παραχαράσσεται
“For true things, mixed with fabrications, are falsified.”
The problem is identified in the verbs: true material has been mixed with inventions and adulterated in transmission. Its presence does not authenticate the resulting account.
We encounter this distinction constantly. An account can contain accurate quotations, correctly named individuals, and authentic events while arranging them into a misleading story. Recognizing that possibility does not require us to believe that truth is socially constructed. It requires us to distinguish the truth of particular details from the truthfulness of the account containing them.
Litwa’s objection, quoted in the discussion, treats the Letter as asserting that some true things are untrue. But this interpretation needs to address the author’s explanation about mixture. The Letter does not leave its maxim suspended in philosophical abstraction. It applies it to the transmission of material about Mark’s Gospel.
The distinction between the plural “true things” and the abstract noun “truth” makes that reading possible. The following sentence makes it contextually persuasive. The presence of true material does not guarantee truthful transmission.
There is another difficulty with the suggestion that the Letter’s hierarchy of truth sounds modern. Clement explicitly distinguishes forms of truth in Stromata 1.20.97–98. After discussing geometry, music, and philosophy, he writes:
χωρίζεται δὲ ἡ Ἑλληνικὴ ἀλήθεια τῆς καθ’ ἡμᾶς
“Greek truth is distinguished from our truth.”
He adds that they share the same name while differing in the extent of knowledge, the authority of demonstration, and divine power.
Clement’s belief in the unity of truth therefore coexists with distinctions among the ways people possess and understand it. Calling something “truth” does not, for him, erase differences between philosophical knowledge and divine instruction. A claim that such distinctions belong to modern esotericism must first explain their explicit presence in Clement.
The strongest comparison comes from Stromata 6.15.122–126. There Clement speaks of:
ἡ ὄντως ἀλήθεια
“Genuine truth,” or “the truth that really is.”
He connects this truth with the teaching of the Son and the power of faith. Shortly afterward, he considers heretics who speak of one God and praise Christ, yet concludes:
κατὰ περίληψιν λέγουσιν, οὐ πρὸς ἀλήθειαν
“They speak in general terms, not in accordance with truth.”
His explanation concerns their understanding of God and Christ. The familiar religious language does not guarantee agreement with the teaching transmitted through the prophets. The same chapter then discusses accommodation for salvation and the concealment of scriptural mysteries from unsuitable hearers.
This continuous argument deserves more attention than it receives. Genuine truth, faith, misleading religious statements, selective communication, and concealed mysteries occur together in undisputed Clement. We do not have to assemble them from unrelated authors separated by centuries.
Andrew Criddle’s suggestion that emphatic truth language associated with secrecy sounds characteristically modern encounters a substantial obstacle here. Clement himself supplies an ancient setting for that combination. This does not settle every question about the Letter’s treatment of secrecy, but it prevents the combination from functioning as a self-evident chronological marker.
The appeal to perspectivism is also difficult to reconcile with the Letter’s actual argument. The author assigns authority to truth according to faith and rejects the priority of what appears true according to human opinions. He asserts a governing standard. Whatever one thinks of that standard, identifying it with a denial of objective truth requires an argument that the phrase “true truth” cannot supply on its own.
Peter Kirby’s examination of the proposed parallel from Plato makes a legitimate correction. In Theaetetus 162a, the question is whether Protagoras’ Truth is true. That does not furnish the same attributive construction found in the Letter. There is no reason to pretend otherwise.
But conceding that point does not establish anachronism. The reported searches show that the exact expression has not been located in the material searched. That is relevant to its rarity and potentially to an assessment of style. Establishing a modern date requires an additional explanation of why the expression belongs to a later linguistic or intellectual environment.
Nor can the English translation carry that burden. Finding “true truth” in modern English does not establish that the Greek was composed under its influence. The suggestion that a forger worked on Greek and English simultaneously remains a proposed reconstruction, not something demonstrated by the two Greek words.
The positive evidence from Clement must still be weighed. He acknowledges true statements within false prophecy. He distinguishes Greek truth from Christian truth despite their shared name. He speaks of genuine truth in connection with faith, and he discusses concealed mysteries within the same argument. These passages provide a recognizable Clementine setting for the Letter’s language.
They do not prove that Clement wrote the Letter. A later imitator could have understood Clement’s thought. But that possibility is a different claim from the assertion that the thought is alien to Clement or necessarily modern. An argument for forgery must preserve those distinctions if it is to remain an argument rather than an accumulation of suspicions.
There will always be room for another criticism of Secret Mark. The question is whether the criticism establishes what it claims. Here, the exact wording may remain unusual, but the conceptual setting has substantial ancient parallels in the very author whose name the Letter bears. Before concluding that Clement could not have written it, we should give his surviving Greek more weight than the unfamiliar sound of its English translation.
So happy to go back to my job, not back to responding there.
