Was a ‘Secret’ Version of the Gospel of Mark Found in 1958?
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Religion, Christianity, Books, Bible, History

Was a ‘Secret’ Version of the Gospel of Mark Found in 1958?

Morton Smith made an announcement

Mar Saba monastery, Palestine (2011; Creative Commons license)

On December 29, 1960, at a meeting in New York of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, an assistant professor of history at Columbia University named Morton Smith announced an exciting manuscript discovery. Two years prior, he said, he’d been looking over some old Latin books in the top room of the tower library at the Mar Saba monastery, which is outside of Jerusalem.

At the end of a book printed in 1646, he’d noticed two and a half pages of handwriting. It was a text, in Greek, identified as a letter by Clement of Alexandria, the second-century Christian, addressed to a person named Theodore. The letter discusses, and quotes from, a “secret” version of the gospel of Mark.

One would have to appreciate, at least, a good story? A scholar, well-regarded in his field, had found in an old book a copy of a secret teaching of a sacred text, kept hidden since the origins of the faith. He wasn’t allowed to remove the book, so it remained locked up in the monastery.

But he had taken photos.

Morton Smith, “Secret Mark” (1958; public domain; colorized)

There were ‘new’ scenes with Jesus, his mother and Mary Magdalene, and a resurrected Lazarus

The most detailed scene was a passage to be inserted between Mark 10:34 and 35. It was, Clement prefaces, a “more spiritual” version of the gospel.

“And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.”

Clement adds, in reference to a question from Theodore, that the phrase “naked man with naked man” wasn’t in the secret text.

The day following Smith’s presentation, newspapers around the country report on the matter, framing it as a curiosity.

The Hackensack Record, December 30, 1960.

Was it an eerie moment in Christian history?

Since 1945, ‘new’ biblical text had been shocking the established religious traditions: the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi codex. Christians were being pressed to consider manuscripts for religious acceptability of which they had no knowledge!

However, Christians knew that Jesus was not a “magician,” or something on the level of a hypnotist, and had not had an erotic scene with a young man—which was the case that Smith set out to prove.

Along the way, he kept up a correspondence with Gershom Scholem, the great Jewish scholar. No matter how reluctant, Christian scholars will have to deal with the matter, Smith writes to him, as “the text is there and has to be explained, and the problems are there and have to be answered.”

Is the text saying that Jesus and Lazarus were sexual? As Smith writes in his resulting 1973 book, “there is no telling how far symbolism went,” though the key moment in the ritual, he thinks, would be when “the disciple was possessed by Jesus’ spirit.”

This “mystery” language is given a spousal context in Ephesians 5:32, and Paul and Peter do issue those warnings against ‘immorality’. To Smith, it seems the early Christians had gotten a little licentious, and the scene with Jesus and the young man might provide the reason.

His book got media play and professional blowback. “I’m reconciled to the attacks,” he tells the New York Times. “Thank God I have tenure!”

However, from the establishment of Biblical scholarship, the feeling might be that he was fired.

A Jesuit scholar named Quentin Quesnell was suspicious

In two papers, in 1975 and 1976, he broached the matter. Why had Smith not taken more efforts to secure this supposed manuscript, and make it available for public scrutiny?

Why would it be, he mused, that Smith had—all his professional career—been interested in the very subjects his discovery seemed to verify? Even in his 1951 dissertation, Smith had written about “secret doctrine” in early Christianity and “forbidden sexual relationships.”

The hazy suggestion is that Smith might have forged it, but Quesnell allows that Smith might have found a text forged by someone else. “I do not find the style typical of Clement,” he notes.

In 1983, Quesnell traveled to Mar Saba to examine the manuscript, expecting to find an obvious forgery. His knowledge of this field, as he writes in his notes, included “what I read about forgeries in detective stories.”

When the book was finally before him, just as Smith had described it, Quesnell realized he wasn’t sure. He saw the librarians were good at guarding their property, and it would be “impossible” to remove the book. Quesnell went home, never to discuss the experience publicly.

About four other scholars had also gone to see the letter. They’d taken more photographs, and tried to arrange tests on the paper by Israeli scientists. As this would involve Jews, the monks wouldn’t allow it.

The monastery had begun to see Smith as publicity-hungry. He tried to get a BBC camera crew into the library. This disturbance was refused. Somewhere along the way, the letter went missing.

For years it seemed Smith had been the only person to see the ‘Letter to Theodore’

A theory formed among the skeptics. Quesnell’s notes, found after he died in 2012, note the talk that “psychological explanations” account for Smith’s forgery. He’d never married and was an Anglican priest in early life.

Morton Smith in 1989 by Allan J. Pantuck (public domain)

In 2005, Stephen C. Carlson published The Gospel Hoax, a dismissal of “Secret Mark” as a forgery motivated by Smith’s homosexuality. In 2007, Peter Jeffery published a similar critique, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled.

Jeffery writes:

“My impression is that Morton Smith was a man in great personal pain, even if (which I don’t know) he was usually able to hide this fact from the people who knew him.”

The posthumous ‘outing’ by Bible scholarship was done without biographical investigation. In 2010, Biblical Archaeology Review did a feature on the controversy. Friends of Smith wrote in, disputing he’d been homosexual. He’d dated at least two women. A friend reports: “I suspect that he was just an Anglican clergyman who had had an unsuccessful love affair and afterward condemned himself to bachelorhood.”

Scholars continued to dismiss “Secret Mark”

Academics as illustrious as Larry Hurtado, Bart Ehrman, and Craig Evans, saw it as more or less a ruse on Smith’s part. Among Bible scholars this might even have been a required view.

A South African feminist scholar named Winsome Munro had a 1992 paper, “Women Disciples: Light from Secret Mark.” And other non-American scholars, like Richard Bauckham and Scott G. Brown, examined how the ‘new’ text could illuminate some famous problems in the gospel narratives — as if a piece, removed, had been placed back in.

Timo Paananen, from the University of Helsinki, analyzed the handwriting in the photos of the letter, finding a case for forgery rather weak.

In 2008, the correspondence between Smith and Scholem was published. One watches Smith thinking, and re-thinking, the letter over time. The idea of his being a forger, the editor thinks, had emerged “from quite unscholarly grounds,” and in retrospect the evidence:

“…strongly points to the total trustworthiness of Smith’s account of his important discovery (though not necessarily of his interpretation of the document).”

An independent scholar named Stephan Huller did a series of blog posts on the matter, noting possibilities. Following textual clues, this ‘Theodore’ seemed to be an early Christian about whom more was known—like that he’d a “same-sex union rite” and been “united to another man in this city with Origen of Alexandria presiding over the ceremony.”

That connection was noticed by an independent scholar named Michael Zeddies. In two papers, in 2017 and 2019, he traces the possibility that the ‘Letter to Theodore’ wasn’t written by Clement at all. It sounded more like Origen, the key third-century Christian scholar.

Origen had been declared a heretic in 553, some two hundred years after his death. A misattribution of the letter could have been the key to its survival. A story, that is, of Christians saving texts from Christians.

The idea of a ‘secret’ teaching was hardly new

Zeddies writes:

“Origen would have been quite comfortable with suggesting that some parts of Scripture were to be literally withheld from the spiritually unprepared.”

Smith’s ideas of erotic scenes might have been overdone. Religions often have their own specialized vocabulary. For Origen, the word “carnal,” for example, would point to the material world.

The “Secret Mark” scene might just describe a baptism, which in early Christianity had been done at night, all night, and fully naked. The early motto, Zeddies points out, was: “naked to follow the naked Christ.” The follower is shedding humanity along with clothes, dreaming of a new spirit form that is yet to be.

Whatever this “mystery” had been, it didn’t seem too lurid, at least, in 1 Corinthians 2:7, which notes the “mystery that has been hidden…”

What might not be clear is that it was ever revealed.