page_title: Secret Gospel of Mark
section_title: Mark's Other Gospel
hierarchical_section_title: Secret Gospel of Mark / Debate on authenticity and authorship / 2005 to the present / Mark's Other Gospel
context_page_description: The Secret Gospel of Mark or the Mystic Gospel of Mark, also the Longer Gospel of Mark, is a putative longer and secret or mystic version of the Gospel of Mark. The gospel is mentioned exclusively in the Mar Saba letter, a document of disputed authenticity, which is said to be written by Clement of Alexandria. This letter, in turn, is preserved only in photographs of a Greek handwritten copy seemingly transcribed in the eighteenth century into the endpapers of a seventeenth-century printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch.
  In 1958, Morton Smith, a professor of ancient history at Columbia University, found a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria in the monastery of Mar Saba situated 20 kilometers south-east of Jerusalem. He made a formal announcement of the discovery in 1960 and published his study of the text in 1973. The original manuscript was subsequently transferred to the library of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, and sometime after 1990, it was lost. Further research has relied upon photographs and copies, including those made by Smith himself.
context_section_description: In Mark's Other Gospel (2005), Scott G. Brown challenged "all previous statements and arguments made against the letter's authenticity" and he criticized those scholars saying that the letter was forged for not offering proof for their claims, and for not making a distinction between the letter and Smith's own interpretation of it. Brown claimed that Smith could not have forged the letter since he did not comprehend it "well enough to have composed it." Brown also criticized the pastiche theory, according to which Secret Mark would be created from a patchwork of phrases from especially the Synoptic Gospels, for being speculative, uncontrollable and "unrealistically complicated". Most parallels between Secret Mark and Matthew and Luke are, according to Brown, "vague, trivial, or formulaic". The only close parallels are to canonical Mark, but a characteristic of Mark is "repetition of exact phrases", and Brown finds nothing suspicious in the fact that a longer version of the Gospel of Mark contains "Markan phrases and story elements". He also explored several Markan literary characteristics in Secret Mark, such as verbal echoes, intercalations and framing stories, and came to the conclusion that the author of the Secret Gospel of Mark "wrote so much like Mark that he could very well be Mark himself", that is, whoever "wrote the canonical gospel."
caption: Mark the Evangelist, who according to Clement was the author of Secret Mark. Painting by Bronzino from c. 1525, in Barbadori Chapel, Florence.
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