page_title: Secret Gospel of Mark
section_title: The language and style of the Clement letter
hierarchical_section_title: Secret Gospel of Mark / Debate on authenticity and authorship / 1991 (after Smith's death) to 2005 / The language and style of the Clement letter
caption_attribution_description: English: Mar Saba Monestary עברית: מנזר מר סבא, על גדת נחל קדרון
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: Most scholars who have "studied the letter and written on the subject" assume the letter was written by Clement. Most patristic scholars think the language is typical of Clement and that in manner and matter the letter seems to have been written by him. In "the first epistolary analysis of Clement's letter to Theodore", Jeff Jay demonstrates that the letter "comports in form, content, and function with other ancient letters that addressed similar circumstances", and "is plausible in light of letter writing in the late second or early third century". He claims that it would require a forger with a breadth of knowledge that is "superhuman" to have forged the letter. In the main, the Clementine scholars have accepted the authenticity of the letter, and in 1980 it was also included in the concordance of the acknowledged genuine writings of Clement, although the inclusion is said to be provisional.
  In 1995, Andrew H. Criddle made a statistical study of Clement's letter to Theodore with the help of Otto Stählin's concordance of the writings of Clement. According to Criddle, the letter had too many hapax legomena, words used only once before by Clement, in comparison to words never before used by Clement, and Criddle argued that this indicates that a forger had "brought together more rare words and phrases" found in the authentic writings of Clement than Clement would have used. The study has been criticized for, among other things, focusing on "Clement's least favourite words" and for the methodology itself, which turns out to be "unreliable in determining authorship". When tested on Shakespeare's writings only three out of seven poems were correctly identified.
caption: The Northern Tower with the library where Smith found the Clement letter.
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