The Secret Gospel of Mark
The Secret Gospel of Mark
At the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting in New York in 1960, Morton Smith announced that during his sabbatical leave in 1958, at the Mar Saba Monastery in the Judean wilderness, he found the first part of a letter of Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) penned in Greek, in what he suggests was an eighteenth-century hand, in the back of a sixteenth-century edition of the letters of Ignatius. In 1973 Smith published two editions of his find, one learned and one popular. From the start scholars suspected that the text was a forgery and that Smith was himself the forger. Many scholars, including several members of the Jesus Seminar, defended Smith and the authenticity of the Clementine letter.
Two quotations of a mystical or secret version of the Gospel of Mark made the alleged find controversial, quotations of passages not found in the public Gospel of Mark. In the first, longer passage Jesus raises a dead man and then later, in the nude, instructs the young man in the mysteries of the kingdom of God. The homoerotic orientation of the story is hard to miss.
Despite the fact that no one besides Smith has actually studied the physical document and that the paper and ink have never been subjected to the kinds of tests normally undertaken, many scholars have accepted the Clementine letter as genuine and its testimony that there really was in circulation, in the second century, a secret version of the Gospel of Mark as valid. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that Secret Mark may help us nuance the solution of the Synoptic problem, and, of course, some scholars have suggested that Secret Mark is older and more original than public Mark.27
The sad thing is that all of this labor has been misspent; the Clementine letter and the quotations of Secret Mark embedded within it constitute a modern hoax, and Morton Smith almost certainly is the hoaxer. Several scholars have for years suspected this to be the case, but the clear, color, recently published photographs of the document,28 have given experts in the science of the detection of forgeries the opportunity to analyze the handwriting of the document and compare it with samples of the handwriting of the late Professor Smith. The evidence is compelling and conclusive: Smith wrote the text. Stephen Carlson and Peter Jeffrey have compiled and analyzed the evidence, some of which is as follows:29
1. Magnification of the handwritten text reveals the telltale presence of what handwriting experts call the “forger's tremor.” That is, the handwriting in question is not really written; it is drawn, in the forger's attempt to imitate a style of writing not his own. These telltale signs are everywhere present in the alleged Clementine letter.
2. Comparison of the style of the Greek of the handwritten text with Morton Smith's style of writing Greek (as seen in his papers and marginal notes in his books) has shown that Smith is the person who wrote (or “drew”) the Clementine letter. For example, Smith had an unusual way of writing the Greek letters tau, theta, and lambda. These unusual forms occasionally intrude in what otherwise is a well-executed imitation of eighteenth-century style of Greek handwriting in the document in question.
3. Some of the distinctive themes in the document are in evidence in some of Smith's work published before the alleged find in 1958.30
4. The discolored blotch that is plainly visible in the lower left-hand corner of the final page of the printed text of the volume and in the lower left-hand corner of the second page of the handwritten text prove that the handwritten pages were originally part of the printed edition of the letters of Ignatius. These corresponding blotches, as well as many of the other blotches and discolorations that can be seen in the color photographs, are mildew. The presence of this mildew strongly suggests that the book in question was not originally a part of the library of Mar Saba, whose dry climate is not conducive to the production of mold and mildew in books. The mildew in the printed edition of the letters of Ignatius suggests that book spent most of its existence in Europe. We may speculate that in Europe, or perhaps in North America, the book was purchased and the Clementine letter was drawn onto the blank end papers. The book was then taken to the Mar Saba Monastery, where it was subsequently “found” in the library.
5. One of the Mar Saba documents cataloged by Smith is written in the same hand as the alleged Clementine letter. This document Smith dated to the twentieth century (not to the eighteenth century, as in the case of the Clementine letter). Moreover, the document Smith dates to the twentieth century is signed “M. Madiotes.” This name is a pseudo-Greek name, whose root means “sphere” or globe,” or, in reference to a person, “swindler” or “baldy.” Carlson plausibly suggests that here Smith, who was bald, is facetiously alluding to himself (i.e., “M[orton] the baldhead”).
6. The entire story—finding a long-lost document in the Mar Saba Monastery that is potentially embarrassing to Christianity—is adumbrated by James Hunter's The Mystery of Mar Saba.31 Indeed, one of the heroes of the story, who helps to unmask the perpetrators and expose the fraud, is Scotland Yard Inspector Lord Moreton. The parallels between Morton Smith's alleged Mar Saba discovery and Hunter's Mar Saba mystery are fascinating. It should be added that Smith says in the preface to his publication of the Clementine letter that his invitation to visit Mar Saba came in 1941 (the year after the publication of Hunter's novel).
7. Carlson identifies very plausibly the motives behind Smith's playful deception. We need not go into these details in this context. They possess a great deal of explanatory power. It is hard not to reach the conclusion that Morton Smith penned Secret Mark.