The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity

Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2023; xi + 227 pp., hardcover, $35.

One of the greatest twentieth-century puzzles in New Testament scholarship is a letter discovered at the Mar Saba monastery in present-day Israel by the biblical scholar Morton Smith in 1958.

It is a fragment of a letter from the second-century church father Clement of Alexandria to one Theodore, and it discusses a secret version of the Gospel of Mark. According to this letter, Theodore (whose own letter has not survived) has an alleged copy of this text, but believes it has been corrupted by insertions of the Carpocratians, a libertine sect of the era.

Clement claims that this secret, longer version of Mark—“a more spiritual gospel for the benefit of those being made perfect”—was still preserved in the church of Alexandria in his time, though it was “very well guarded, being read only by those being initiated into the great mysteries.”

Clement also writes that he has a copy of this Gospel and compares his version with passages sent to him by Theodore. Clement quotes a passage from this secret Gospel. It describes the resurrection of a “young man” like the Lazarus of the Gospel of John. One evening six days later, says this Gospel, “the young man comes to him wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, because Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.”

Some people see sexual antics here, and so apparently did the Carpocratians, because their version of this Gospel adds the expression “naked man to naked man,” but this and other passages mentioned by Theodore “are not found” in the authentic Secret Gospel, writes Clement.

Smith introduced this text to the learned world at a biblical conference in 1960, arousing a tumult that has not settled to this day. Smith’s own view of this letter was straightforward: he considered it to be a genuine document by Clement and that it described an initiation involving “the mystery of the kingdom of God.”

Many other scholars scoffed at this suggestion with cruel vehemence. Smith himself, some claimed, had forged the letter as an elaborate practical joke, leaving hidden “clues” to his identity in his handiwork. To give one especially ridiculous example, at one point Clement writes, “true things mixed with fictions are effaced, so that, as it is said, even salt loses its saltiness.” Guess what? This supposedly points to Morton Smith as the forger, because—Morton Salt! Get it?

Many other such pieces of “evidence” range from the ludicrous to the insane, but over decades of scrutiny, certain facts were sifted out. To judge from the handwriting, the text, found written in the inside of a seventeenth-century Latin volume, probably dates from the eighteenth century, so it was not from the author’s own hand (but that is true of practically all texts from antiquity). Its literary style is completely like Clement’s—too much so, some contend, that very fact marking it as a forgery.

This new book on the Secret Gospel controversy takes the discussion further. It goes through the previous claims of forgery by Smith and refutes them in a way that would be difficult to counter. Nevertheless, say the authors, the letter is a forgery—only not by Smith, who published it in good faith. They contend that it was written between the fifth and seventh centuries by an unknown monk supposedly legitimating “same-sex pairings through the special relationship he had with one younger, ‘beloved’ male disciple.” As these authors indicate, the Greek Orthodox church did in that period have a rite of adelphopoiesis (“making brothers”), which joined two men in a quasi-sacramental bond of chaste friendship that some have likened to gay marriage. The authors contend that Secret Gospel was written to vindicate this kind of same-sex relationship, chaste or not. Indeed the Secret Gospel says that after his resurrection, “the young man, looking at him [Jesus], loved him, and he began to beg him to be with him.”

This book’s discussion of the Secret Gospel debate from 1960 to the present is clear-headed and enlightening. But Smith and Landau’s arguments for their own hypothesis are almost as absurd as the ones they refute, and in fact they put their idea forward only in the briefest and sketchiest terms at the end of the book. In the first place, they make no reference to any polemic about same-sex relationships among monks, either in the period they mention or at any other point, so we have no reason to believe that this was an issue to begin with.

Furthermore, anyone wanting to concoct Scriptural evidence for same-sex relationships would not have written this text: it is too oblique for that purpose. It does not even mention same-sex relationships, except in the reference to “naked man to naked man”—but the letter itself says that this detail is not authentic to the Secret Gospel. Moreover, someone engaging in this supposed polemic could just as well have used quotes about the beloved disciple from the Gospel of John, which was universally accepted as canonical.

As for the fact that the young man “loved” Jesus, the Greek word here is egapesen—from the familiar Greek word agape—which does not connote any erotic or amorous themes; indeed it is the word the ancient Greeks used when those elements were absent.

It makes sense that Smith and Landau would see this text in the light of same-sex relationships, since present times are preoccupied with them and find homoerotic connotations wherever they exist and in many places where they do not. But the absurdity of their own theory merely vindicates Smith, who at least did not resort to hilariously speculative overcomplications.

Why have so many scholars refused to take this letter of Clement at face value and contrive so many ridiculous theories to explain it away? Because it points to something much more disturbing to contemporary New Testament scholars than mere homosexuality, which in any event they understand. It is evidence of an early initiatic Christianity that has been almost completely lost to memory, and which scholars do not understand.

Indeed the fact that the young man comes “wearing a linen cloth over his naked body” is evidence for this initiatic element, because that was the garment worn for initiation into the mysteries, as we see, for example, in Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Linen, being a vegetable rather than an animal product, was believed to be purer than wool.

The possibility of an authentic secret Gospel disturbs contemporary scholarship, because it would mean that everything they know of early Christianity is preliminary material only, “milk, and not . . . strong meat” (Hebrews 5:12). All memory of this initiatic Christianity would have been lost or more likely suppressed, although a few vague hints were permitted to survive in the New Testament, such as “we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7).

But “the mystery of the kingdom of God” did not survive in any apparent way, as will be obvious to anyone who reads the clownish attempts of New Testament scholars to explain what the “kingdom of God” actually is. This hidden wisdom was probably not identical with Gnosticism as known in the second century, although arguably it was close enough that it was swept away when the proto-catholic church in the second and third centuries purged itself of Gnostic elements.

Clement, then, living around the turn of the third century, would be a transitional figure: more than almost anyone else (even the Gnostics themselves), in his authenticated works he speaks of the “Gnostic” (gnostikos) and claims that the true Christian is also a true Gnostic. But as the Letter to Theodore indicates, he was committed to keeping this wisdom hidden: “One must never . . . concede that the Secret Gospel is from Mark, but even deny it with an oath. For not all true things are said to all people.”

We can speculate about this hidden wisdom, which Clement in this letter says “is veiled seven times.” But in the absence of better evidence, these will remain as speculations only. At any rate, Smith’s scholarly instincts—superior to those of his critics—were receptive to the possibility of this frustratingly lost Christianity.

This book will not shake your religious faith, if that is a concern to you. But it will do a rough job on your trust in New Testament scholarship.

Richard Smoley

https://www.theosophical.org/publications/quest-magazine

Did Morton Smith Forge the Secret Gospel of Mark?

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May 30, 2023

Last month (April 2023) I published a thread of blog posts on the intriguing and controversial Secret Gospel of Mark, allegedly discovered by Columbia University scholar Morton Smith in the library of the Greek orthodox monastery Mar Saba twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem.  He did not actually discover the Gospel itself, but (allegedly) discovered a letter that described and quoted it, allegedly written by the church father Clement of Alexandria (200 CE or so), allegedly copied by a scribe of the eighteenth century in the back blank pages of a seventeenth-century book otherwise (actually) containing the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (110 CE or so), in which Clement allegedly discusses a potentially scandalous edition of Mark’s Gospel allegedly used by a nefarious Gnostic group called the Carpocratians.  Confused yet?  Read the posts, starting with this one from April 12:

https://ehrmanblog.org/do-scholars-ever-forge-gospels

In my posts I did not give any evidence to show that this “alleged” discovery might not have been a discovery but a forgery, possibly by Smith himself, even though from the outset some (many?) scholars suspected it.  I myself suspect it.  Yet other scholars are quite vehement that it is absolutely authentic and that those of us who wonder/suspect otherwise are barking up the wrong tree.  It is a hot debate.

A new book has just come out on the matter, by two scholars of early Christianity at University of Texas, Brent Landau (whom I’ve known for years) and Geoffrey Smith (whom I know just a bit) The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity.  They argue a new view, that the Secret Gospel is not authentic and is not a forgery by Smith, but a forgery by monk living at the monastery in late antiquity.

I’m completely open to this idea, but I don’t find their book convincing.  I have to admit I was a bit surprised by parts of it.  Landau and Smith maintain that my publications on Secret Mark were influential in re-kindling the debate on it and they take a good bit of time discussing and dismissing my arguments.  I was mainly surprised because I actually don’t think my publications played much of a role at all in the debates (like most authors, I always thought they *should* have made an impact, but I never noticed that they did  ).  More than that, I was a bit disappointed in their discussion of my arguments because they didn’t seem to understand them, or if they did understand them they didn’t quite explain them correctly (making it a bit easier to dismiss them).

In any event, I’ve only published on the matter twice, in my book Lost Christianities (a chapter on the matter, see my earlier posts) and in a more scholarly article that came out about the same time:

“Hedrick’s Consensus on the Secret Gospel of Mark,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003) pp. 155-64.

Since blog folk have asked, I’ve decided to lay out some of the reasons that I suspect Smith may have forged the work.  I’m not definite about the matter, and never have been.  But I do have my suspicions.  Here is how I lay out the the matter in the second half of my article mentioned above.  This will take two posts.

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Let me state as clearly as I can: I am not saying that

I think Smith forged the letter.  I think the jury is still out.  But instead of rendering a judgment before the case is fully considered, I think we would do better to deal with the evidence and to see if any (genuine) new evidence can be found.

Let me summarize what strike me as the issues, under three rubrics: one matter that is hard to understand; several matters that are hard to explain; and a couple of matters that are hard not to find amusing.

(1) What is hard to understand involves the circumstance that Smith knew a lot about Greek manuscripts and ancient forgeries,[1] and must have known full well that in order to detect a forger at work, one needs to examine carefully the physical evidence itself, the manuscript, in hand, under microscope if possible, looking for characteristics of the pen, stray marks, ink bleeding into lines, hard to detect smudging.  In a famous interchange, Q. Quesnell objected to Smith’s claim that the letter was authentic without a scientific evaluation of the physical piece itself.  Smith rightly claimed that he didn’t have the physical specimen, just the photographs he took, but that if anyone wanted to see what it looked like, s/he could go to the monastery of Mar Saba and find the book and see for him or herself.  Fair enough.  But given everything Smith knew or came to know about manuscripts and their forgeries — why did he himself show no interest in going back to examine the manuscript?  He admits that at the time of the discovery he was rushed, and so he took his pictures and put the book back on the shelf.  But why would he spend fifteen years of his life reading and analyzing the words in the photographs knowing full well that the clues to forgery could not be found in the photographs but only in the physical specimen?

In any event, if the manuscript is ever “re”discovered, someone will simply need to test the ink; to argue that Smith fabricated eighteenth-century ink would be a bit of a stretch.  (It is not hard, by the way, to think that he fabricated an eighteenth-century hand; with some knowledge of palaeography, a few dated specimens, any skill at all, and a  little practice, it could be done easily enough.  There are certainly plenty of modern instances.)[2] 

At the end of the day, I don’t think we can say whether or not Smith forged the letter.  We won’t know until, if ever, the manuscript is found and subjected to a rigorous investigation, including the testing of the ink.  Until that happens, some will continue treating the piece as authentic, others will have their doubts.  But to urge that we declare the problem solved on the basis of no new evidence (Hedrick) or to label the question itself “absurd and slanderous”(Stroumsa) seems to me wrong-headed and ahistorical.  The discussions should deal with the issues, rather than pretend they do not exist or wish them away.

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[1]He himself indicates that during his second PhD at Harvard he was influenced by Prof. Werner Jaeger, and “became interested in Greek manuscripts and manuscript hunting” (Secret Gospel, p. 8).  Of course he became yet more expert after he discovered the Clementine letter at Mar Saba.

[2]Examples of the phenomenon abound, ancient, late ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern – as the abundant literature on forgery attests.  Anyone who suspects that such a thing never could or never would be done, should simply read the massive documentation.  The classic study remains J. A. Farrer, Literary Forgeries (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907); for the ancient materials, no one has surpassed Wolfgang Speyer’s magisterial Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum: ein Versuch ihrer Deutung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1971).  For some amusing modern instances — including one perpetrated by two seminary students in the 1930s who managed to fool for a time one of the great experts on ancient Greek uncial manuscripts — see Bruce M. Metzger, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian (Peabody, Mass: Hedirckson, 1997), chap. 11.