The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity

Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau. The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.

I first met Morton Smith in 1994, three years after he died. As a junior at Brown University, I was a research assistant for Shaye J.D. Cohen, Smith’s literary executor. As part of his duties, Professor Cohen was editing a final collection of Smith’s essays, Studies in the Cult of Yahweh (1996). In addition to checking the accuracy of the footnotes in one unpublished essay, I compiled a list of book reviews of all of Smith’s books to be included in an appendix of Smith’s writings. Professor Cohen gave me a list of book titles and I started poring through copies of Reviews of Books in Religion and L’année philologique.

At one point I told Professor Cohen I was finding a lot of reviews for two books not on the list: Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark and The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel according to Mark (both from 1973). He told me just to stick to the books on the list. In the final appendix, in lieu of listing individual reviews for those books, Cohen referred readers to Smith’s 1982 Harvard Theological Review essay, “Clement of Alexandria and Secret Mark: The Score at the End of the First Decade” (1982).

If Professor Cohen was (perhaps understandably) reticent in the early 1990s to highlight what were arguably Smith’s most (in)famous publications, by the early 2000s their presence in academic circles was unavoidable. At a social gathering in 2002 at the apartment of my doctoral advisor, Elizabeth Clark, Guy Stroumsa casually revealed to the other guests that, in the patriarchal library in Jerusalem in the 1970s, he had seen the copy of the infamous “Secret Gospel of Mark” about which Smith had written. (I had graduated the year before, or else I might have encountered Smith’s shadow in Liz’s Durham apartment, as well!) Clark proceeded to put together a special section in the Journal of Early Christian Studies featuring an assessment of the “Secret Mark stalemate” by Charles Hedrick, a reply by Stroumsa containing his eyewitness account, and a further reply by Bart Ehrman (who had also been at the fateful cocktail party and had written his own assessment in a book that same year).

The first decade of the new millennium saw the presence of Smith’s shadow, and the arguments over “Secret Mark,” intensify: two books, in 2005 and 2007, argued that the gospel was a “hoax” perpetrated by Smith out of either spite or psychosis; a third book, also in 2005, argued that the text was authentically ancient, merely misinterpreted by Smith; in 2008, the SBL held a session on “Secret Mark after Fifty Years” (counting from its discovery by Smith in 1958): the room in Boston’s Hynes Convention Center was packed (I was there, this time) and discussion turned at times raucous and ad hominem (see Tony Burke’s firsthand report on his Apocryphicity blog).

Now, in 2023, Smith’s shade returns once more in an engrossing and detailed study of the unveiling, controversy, and possible origins of Smith’s most famous discovery. Geoffrey Smith (no relation to Morton; to avoid confusion I shall for the rest of this review refer to them respectively as G. Smith and M. Smith) and Brent Landau, scholars of early Christianity who teach at the University of Texas, have not only read every word published about the Secret Gospel of Mark, they have also interviewed experts and eyewitnesses (including the graduate student who typed up M. Smith’s handwritten manuscript of The Secret Gospel), and they have consulted available archives of M. Smith’s writings and surviving correspondence. The result is erudite, accessible, and profoundly sensitive both to the modern scholars embroiled in this decades-old controversy and to the late ancient persons who, they argue, might ultimately be responsible for producing this “scandalous gospel of Jesus.”

At the center of this decades-old fracas are two excerpts of a secret (in Greek mystikos) version of the Gospel of Mark embedded in a fragment of a letter purportedly written by the second-century intellectual Clement of Alexandria to someone named Theodore. The first, and most notorious excerpt, tells of a wealthy young man raised from the dead by Jesus who later came to Jesus “wearing a linen cloth over his naked body,” learned “the mystery of the kingdom of God,” and returned home. A much shorter excerpt sees Jesus refusing to receive the sister and mother of this “young man whom Jesus loved.” M. Smith came across this letter fragment copied into the flyleaves of a 17th-century printed book while cataloguing the library of the monastery of Mar Saba, outside Jerusalem, during a research trip in 1958. He took several black-and-white photographs, left the book in place (a courtesy for which later critics would castigate him), and began studying the text during his summer travels and, in earnest, upon return to the United States.

The Mar Saba monastery outside Jerusalem [Wikimedia].

G. Smith and Landau’s first chapter (“The Announcement”) describes M. Smith’s unveiling of the text at the 1960 meeting of the SBL in New York, drawing on M. Smith’s archives as well as interviews with people who were in the audience. M. Smith had personally invited several press outlets; only the New York Times reported on it, but they put it on the front page. The next two chapters (“The Find” and “The Vetting”) walk us through, in meticulous detail, M. Smith’s time at Mar Saba, his finding the text, and his work from the late 1950s into the 1960s to interpret this tantalizing text. Handwriting experts confirmed M. Smith’s suspicions that the text was probably copied into the book in the eighteenth century (G. Smith and Landau affirm that even such a late attestation of a text might go back to an ancient original). M. Smith’s close study of Clement’s style and vocabulary convinced him (although not some of the experts he consulted) that the letter was authentically Clementine. M. Smith’s own studies of the first century context of Jesus’s movement, including a planned (but never completed) study of the (canonical) Gospel of Mark led M. Smith to conclude that the fragments in the letter provided new and compelling evidence for Jesus himself: a mystagogue who conducted personal initiation rituals involving spiritual possession and “union” between Jesus and his initiates. Already in the 1960 talk, G. Smith and Landau point out, and certainly in the two books that came out in 1973, M. Smith suggested that the “union” was not just spiritual but physical.

The next three chapters treat the unfolding controversy surrounding Secret Mark and M. Smith’s interpretation of it: first in the immediate aftermath of M. Smith’s publications in 1973 of the serious philological study (Clement of Alexandria) and the more popular account of his discovery (The Secret Gospel); and then during a resurgence of interest, and criticism, after M. Smith’s death. “The Skeptic” focuses on Quentin Quesnell, the first scholar to raise the possibility that Secret Mark was a forgery and (obliquely, to be sure) to suggest that M. Smith was the forger responsible. G. Smith and Landau uncover drafts of a letter Quesnell wrote to M. Smith before publishing his 1975 critical review of both books: in early drafts of the letter, Quesnell laid out his theory that M. Smith forged Secret Mark and invited him to confess. The version of the letter he ultimately sent removed this accusation and invitation. From Quesnell’s papers as well as interviews with one of his Smith College colleagues, G. Smith and Landau reconstruct Quesnell’s suspicions of M. Smith’s “malevolent” and “nefarious” motives for forgery: to “prove” that Jesus and his disciples engaged in “homosexual sex” (p. 72).

G. Smith and Landau only briefly consider the accusations leveled by Jacob Neusner soon after M. Smith’s death. Neusner, M. Smith’s alienated former student, was the first person to accuse M. Smith publicly and repeatedly of forging Secret Mark; it was Neusner who coined the hateful and sneering phrase “homosexual magician” to describe M. Smith’s interpretation of Jesus in Secret Mark. Leaving Neusner aside, G. Smith and Landau focus on “The Popularizer”: Bart Ehrman. They single out Ehrman, who wrote about Secret Mark in the early 2000s, as the catalyst for a new era of Secret Mark-skepticism: both in magnitude (which they ascribe to Ehrman’s growing popularity as a public intellectual) and in the style of criticism (the endless quest for “breadcrumbs” left by M. Smith, deliberately or not, that show his hand in the production of Secret Mark). They further link Ehrman’s skepticism toward Secret Mark to his doctoral advisor and mentor, Bruce Metzger, whose paleographic suspicions of M. Smith and pious discomfort with Secret Mark they lay out in some detail.

The next chapter, “The Conspiracy,” consists of a deep dive into the arguments put forward in Stephen Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark (2005), which consisted primarily of a forensic examination of the material and circumstantial evidence for M. Smith’s forgery; and in Peter Jeffery’s The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery, which paints a lurid psychosexual portrait of M. Smith as a broken man, tormented by sexuality, driven to perpetrate a hoax in which he unwittingly left clues of his forgery. G. Smith and Landau draw heavily on the works of others who have unpacked and deconstructed Carlson’s and Jeffery’s arguments, primarily Scott Brown and Timo Paananen. They also in this chapter address the “open secret” of M. Smith’s sexuality (gay but unpartnered for much of his professional life), a persistent motive ascribed to M. Smith for his purported forgery.

The final three chapters turn from discovery and accusation to G. Smith’s and Landau’s own original assessment of Secret Mark: its origins, its context, and its historical significance. In “The Handwriting” they return once more to the vexed question of when the text was copied into the flyleaves of a book and whether or not a modern person—M. Smith or an accomplice—could have convincingly mimicked eighteenth-century Greek cursive. Efforts here are hampered by a lack of access the original pages which have remained, since the 1970s, in the private control of the Patriarchal Library in Jerusalem. As I noted above, Guy Stroumsa and three colleagues were able to see the pages in 1976, but unable to perform any tests on the ink. Quentin Quesnell had covertly made his own trip to see the pages in 1983: he examined the manuscript, ordered color photographs, but was similarly unable to conduct any scientific tests. He kept this visitation with Secret Mark his own secret, revealed by recent work in Quesnell’s archives.

Since then, no one has seen or had any access to the pages (which have been removed from the print book and stored separately). Already during Quesnell’s visit the librarian (since deceased) expressed unease with more visitors coming to see this troublesome text. As G. Smith and Landau point out, scholars have conducted serious research on other lost or missing manuscripts and, in this case at least, they have several sets of high-quality photographs at their disposal. After consultation with several experts in modern Greek script, one of whom reversed his original opinion, they conclude “expert opinion favors authenticity” (p. 145).

They then turn to “The Author” and develop an argument that the text was likely composed sometime after the fourth century (they adduce allusions to Eusebius as a terminus post quem) and describe the fragments of Secret Mark embedded in a pseudonymous letter of Clement as a rewriting of Mark that smooths over three major textual issues: a geographic conundrum in Mark 10; the naked youth of Mark 14; and the mention of a man Jesus “loved,” also in Mark 10 (and echoed more famously by the Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John). The result is an effort at “filling in the gaps” (p. 164), a common enough exercise in apocryphal creativity from the second century onward. Indeed, as they point out several times in the book, this explanation for the late ancient composition of the text was already suggested to M. Smith by his mentor A.D. Nock immediately upon examining the text in the 1950s.

But what of the homoerotic elements of the first fragment that M. Smith so creatively fleshed out and that unsettled critics during his life and enflamed accusations of forgery after his death? To address these, G. Smith and Landau return to “The Monastery,” that is, Mar Saba in the fifth through seventh centuries: a time and place where, they argue, Clement of Alexandria’s texts were popular; themes of death and resurrection proliferated in monastic tales; and early forms of same-sex union between monastic partners (what would later be formalized as adelphopoiēsis) may have been the subject of controversy and debate. “It is therefore possible,” they conclude, “to understand the Secret Gospel—and the Letter to Theodore as a whole—as a document composed by a monk in the fifth, sixth, or seventh century to provide a powerful argument in favor of same-sex monastic partnerships” (p. 181).

The final chapter, “The End,” returns to the world of M. Smith and the last decades of his life and career. They include photographs of his apartment at the time of his death, a “cramped” space where books lined every surface and filled every cavity, including the oven. While published records ascribed his death to heart failure, G. Smith and Landau relate with deep sympathy that M. Smith committed suicide in the face of looming disease. The lack of citation for this detail leads me to assume this came to light in one of their many interviews with M. Smith’s associates and confidants. They assert, once more, how difficult they find the idea that a historian of M. Smith’s caliber, however difficult a person he may have been, would have attempted to falsify the historical record of antiquity. They admit their own argument about a monastic origin for Secret Mark must remain a hypothesis, and welcome further exploration that situates this “controversial gospel” in plausible premodern contexts, particularly the history of sexuality in early Christianity.

This is an excellent book, written with verve and wit, technical without being arcane, and accessible without shortcuts or shoddiness. Readers will learn a great deal from G. Smith and Landau about paleography, apocrypha, monasticism, the history of sexuality, and the strange academic environments in which all of these are explored: filled with curiosity, envy, ambition, and flashes of brilliance. It will find a place on professors’ library shelves, graduate student reading lists, undergraduate syllabi, and bedside tables of readers far outside our arcane scholarly worlds.

The strongest parts of this excellent book are the first and third sections: the examination of M. Smith’s discovery and argumentation, building on their archival research and interviews, and the new explanation for Secret Mark, drawing on their own expertise in ancient Egypt and apocrypha. The middle chapters, on the controversy during and after M. Smith’s life, go over ground which has been explored in various ways in recent years by numerous scholars (including, very briefly, myself). Their novel contribution here is to isolate Ehrman, “the popularizer,” as chiefly responsible for the resurgence in Secret Mark skepticism in the twenty-first century. But given that Jacob Neusner had already been trumpeting M. Smith’s guilt in multiple publications for a decade, and that other works had come out or were already in progress arguing the same, pinning the blame on Ehrman seems both unnecessary and overly tidy and linear.

As G. Smith and Landau note throughout The Secret Gospel of Mark, M. Smith’s text and arguments were provocative from the moment he unveiled his find in 1960 and have remained a constant irritant under the skin of New Testament scholars ever since. Reactions to Secret Mark, Clement’s letter, and M. Smith’s provocations have proliferated chaotically, like spores in the wind or like the seed in Mark’s parable of the sower: sometimes withering without root and sometimes yielding a hundredfold harvest. We are now 65 years after M. Smith’s discovery, 50 years after his books were published, and 30 years after he was first posthumously accused of forgery: the spores keep flying up and taking root where they will. There may be some ingenuous undergraduate right now encountering Secret Mark for the first time—perhaps even through G. Smith and Landau’s excellent introduction—who will find themselves writing another review of another study of Secret Mark thirty years hence.

Andrew S. Jacobs is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and most recently author of Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible (Cambridge University Press, 2023). You can reach him at andrew@andrewjacobs.org and find out more about him at his website.