At a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in December 1960, Morton Smith announced that he had discovered, two years earlier in 1958 at the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judean desert, an unknown letter written by Clement of Alexandria, which contained a fragment of the Secret Gospel of Mark. As Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau ask in their brilliant tour-de-force of investigative scholarship The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, A Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity, Morton Smith had dropped a bombshell with his words. Had Smith discovered an unknown version of the gospel of Mark that contained a dfferent, longer ending than canonical Mark?
When Morton Smith read from his transcript of Clement’s Letter to Theodore—so named for Clement’s correspondent—he revealed not only Clement’s response to Theodore, but also the fragmentary gospel that contains a passage that implies that Jesus had an intimate—perhaps even an erotic and sexual—relationship with a young man. While his announcement generated excitement and controversy, it initiated a debate that has persisted among biblical scholars since Smith revealed his discovery.
Although Morton Smith did not publish his findings until 1973 in two books—the detailed scholarly monograph, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Harvard University Press), and the more popular The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel according to Mark (Harper & Row)—two divergent responses to his initial findings emerged: either Morton Smith had discovered ancient documents or the documents were 20th-century forgeries, possibly created by Smith himself. In their meticulously detailed analyses, Geoffrey Smith and Landau examine several of the critics of Smith—a few of whom accuse Smith of forging the document outright—and his work. For example, the earliest challenge to Smith’s conclusions came in 1974 from Quentin Quesnell, who “hoped to sow enough doubt about the security of Mar Saba as a repository for manuscripts and about the thoroughness of Smith’s documentation of his find to open the door to the possibility that the manuscript was a modern forgery” (66). While Quesnell stopped short of accusing Smith of creating the forgery himself, he raised questions about Smith’s methods and accused him of not providing enough evidence to support the authenticity of his discovery. As Smith and Landau point out, such an accusation is unrealistic given the “constraints Smith was working under when he made his discovery” (65).
After Quesnell, attention to Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark died down, but Bart Ehrman, among others, revived the conversation in the early 21st century. A New Testament textual critic and historian of early Christianity, Ehrman “considered it fair game to speculate about whether Morton Smith might have forged the Secret Gospel” (101). One of Ehrman’s arguments depended on earlier assertions that since Smith had taken the only known photographs of the manuscript, there was a lack of external verification of the manuscripts by other scholars; that is, if no other researchers had seen the manuscripts, then how could their veracity be verified? As much he popularizes the idea that Morton Smith engaged in the modern forgery of the Secret Gospel of Mark unless it can be proved otherwise, Smith and Landau painstakingly gather evidence to demonstrate the flaws in Ehrman’s argument, including pointing out that at least two other scholars, Charles Hedrick and Guy Stousma, had seen the manuscripts.
After surveying the history of the scholarship surrounding the Secret Gospel of Mark, Smith and Landau judiciously examine the handwriting and the authorship of the document, based on the photographs that exist, as well as the community at Mar Saba where Smith discovered the document. The authors argue for a third way between the published alternatives: the Secret Gospel is neither a Proto-Mark nor is it a 20th-century forgery perpetrated by Smith himself. Smith and Landau don’t aim in their book to solve all the issues raised by the controversies that Morton Smith’s discoveries and writings provoked. Rather, hope that their book refocuses the debates on the evidence we have. For example, the Greek handwriting in the manuscripts is too complicated for Smith to have imitated. Also, why would he have spent so much effort promoting a document he fabricated? The authors also suggest that a plausible context for the Letter to Theodore and the Secret Gospel of Mark might be late antique Palestinian monasticism. They observe that perhaps a monk, perhaps within Mar Saba’s walls, could have composed the douments as a way “to provide scriptural justification for those who would choose to live a life of holiness with a spiritual partner of the same biological sex” (191). Moreover, since the manuscript has been unavailable for scholars to view since 1983—has it been lost? Is it hidden in the Patriarchal Library in Jerusalem?—the authors conclude by encouraging the patriarch to make the manuscript available for examination, including testing the composition and age of the ink.
Although interest in the Secret Gospel of Mark waxes and wanes, Smith and Landau provide an exhilarating journey through the rugged terrain of scholarship surrounding Smith and his work, and they offer a careful, detailed, and thorough path for scholars to follow as they take up their own examinations of the Secret Gospel of Mark.
Henry L. Carrigan Jr. is a senior lecturer at Lake Forest College.
Henry Carrigan
Date Of Review:
February 28, 2024