Clement, and Mark

I have some Christian commentary today, so this may be the place to just unload on my favourite topic, the reception-history of Mark's Gospel. Peter Head at the Evangelical Textual Critics had a counterintuitive take lately: that Clement Alexandrine didn't care about Mark. I don't really have any real content to provide here, so... treat this as a "Reaction Video". And imagine me making silly faces at the screen.

Head's take seems to go against interest. As an Evangelical, aren't you on Irenaeus' side on the fourfold canon? I mean, yeah; the facts are the facts... one reason I respect that site, because they (frequently) take sides as aren't necessarily Evangelical sides. Like with Oxyrhynchus-5575.

Now, POxy-5575 might actually be the Gospel of Peter, and in any case is assuredly dependent upon Mark and Matthew. I am still entertaining #5575 mainly inasmuch I don't trust Luke. Anyway. Back to Clement!

Peter Head does have one important point, behind him. In pre-Irenaeus Patristics - Ignatius and Justin and "2 Clement" (no relation) - we do not see the fourfold canon. Ignatius cited outside that, for his take on the postResurrection appearances (Jerome claimed it from the "Gospel of the Hebrews"). Justin used... I don't even know what; Mark and Matthew (at least) were probably behind it all, but Justin's Gospels seem to have been digested for him by his teachers, like a bird. As for "2 Clement", at this point I think he'd used Peter / POxy-4009.

As we get to Clement of Alexandria, the post-Christian decades are becoming centuries. So the proposal that Clement is ignoring Mark, by his time, seems... aggressive? Unsure what the best word is.

Luckily Jacob Rodriguez is on-point in the comments. It seems that Clement did use Mark. He tended to do this in harmonies. Like Justin did, and Tatian afterward. Possibly Clement did his own harmony, rather than relying upon others' like Justin did. Rodriguez may have answered most of our questions in Combining Gospels in Early Christianity.

We all seem agreed that although O. Stählin did fine work in collating where Clement parallels Mark, Stählin probably should have held off on compiling full statistics before ascertaining where a Markan parallel was not a simple Matthean parallel. Matthew was more prominent in Clement's Church.