The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery

by Peter Jeffery

In 1958, Bible scholar Morton Smith announced the discovery of a sensational manuscript-a second-century letter written by St. Clement of Alexandria, who quotes an unknown, longer version of the Gospel of Mark. When Smith published the letter in 1973, he set off a firestorm of controversy that has raged ever since. Is the text authentic, or a hoax? Is Smith's interpretation correct? Did Jesus really practice magic, or homosexuality? And if the letter...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300117604
• ISBN13: 9780300117608
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Another Debunking

When I wrote my own book about Secret Mark, I felt that I was just barely scratching the surface on the full extent of both Smith's personality and the anachronisms suffused in the text. For those of you who enjoyed, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2005), yet still want to read more, I think that you will like Jeffery's further explorations about Smith and his involvement in the text. Our approaches are complementary.

Morton Smith's demons

Like Stephen Carlson a year ago, Peter Jeffery is able to show how obvious it is that Morton Smith fabricated Clement's letter to Theodore. One would think that Carlson exhausted all of Smith's anachronisms (the "bald swindler" M. Madiotes, Morton Salt, and modern gays in the 1950s being arrested in public Gethsemanes), but Jeffery has spotted more: * The three features of Secret Mark's initiation rite -- resurrection symbolism, a period of teaching followed by a night vigil, and the wearing of a white cloth -- point to the Anglican Paschal liturgy as it was before the 1960s liturgical renewal movement. In addition, Clement and the Alexandrian church had a theology of baptism that was based not on the easter event of Jesus' resurrection, but on the epiphany event of Jesus' baptism by John. Secret Mark should thus have epiphany motifs (i.e. creation, the heavens opening with light, the descent of the Holy Spirit and fire, the seal of priestly and messianic anointings) rather than easter motifs (i.e. Pauline associations between baptism and resurrection). * The homoeroticism in Secret Mark makes no sense in an ancient context. Adult males were supposed to pursue young boys/men, who in turn were supposed to acquiesce only after "playing hard to get" and only if the boy perceived that the sex would have intiatory value (i.e. that the man would go beyond sex and educate him in proper mores). But in Secret Mark, Jesus does not pursue the young man: just the opposite if anything, and this would have been shamefully unacceptable. Secret Mark was evidently written by a modern person who assumed that ancient homosexuality would have followed Plato's model of an older teacher with a young disciple, but who didn't quite understand how the roles played out -- and such misunderstandings were common in academic circles before the work of K.J. Dover in the late 70s. (This would seem to improve on Carlson, who argued that the homoeroticism in Secret Mark makes no sense since Jesus and the young man are depicted as social peers. But a "young man", however rich, suggests they're not quite peers.) * Clement's letter is riddled with allusions to Oscar Wilde's 19th-century play, Salome, and Wilde was a homosexual martyr to boot. In the play Salome does the "dance of the seven veils", which is punned by Smith's Clement, who writes about "the truth hidden by seven veils". She is punned, in turn, by Smith's Salome, whom Jesus rejects along with the rest of the female race. On top of this, Jeffery catches Smith in some pretty amusing lies. A notable one: whereupon discovering Clement's letter, Smith says he went to Vespers instead of staying to investigate his discovery, apparently forgetting what he said two pages earlier (in The Secret Gospel, p 10) -- that he had stopped attending religious services because he no longer "responded" to them. Jeffery examines Smith's brief career as an Anglican priest, noting his excessively harsh judgments on homosexuals in a 1949

recommended

This volume offers further evidence that Morton Smith composed the manuscript claimed to be a Letter of Clement of Alexandria that quoted a Secret Gospel of Mark. Jeffery examines the history of liturgy and finds that Smith's imagined initiation ceremony did not fit the practice in Alexandria at the time. Jeffery shows that Smith pursued fairly desultory work in cataloging the Mar Saba library, if that had been his main purpose. For example, why didn't Smith examine the folder of old manuscript fragments, if his interest had been to find old texts? Smith didn't bother to check in the Jerusalem library (where most Mar Saba manuscripts had been moved) for texts by the same hand as his claimed find. And, as I noted previously, why didn't Smith--who published the admonition for scholars to check old books for marginal annotations--write anything about the 1646 Voss book margins? (That's the book in which Smith claimed to find the letter.) Jeffery engages previous critiques of Smith's claims mostly merely quite briefly, and goes his own way. So the work of integrating his insights with previous scholarship remains for reviewers to evaluate. The book is not free of errors; on page 2 Jeffery says Smith got his "second doctorate" at Hebrew University, but that 1945 degree was before his 1957 Harvard Th.D. Page 13 does not clearly distinguish Smith's sending of photos for paleography analysis from his sending of copies of his text commentary for review. Perhaps others will comment on Jeffery's Roman Catholic perspective on the Anglican Church and on homosexuality. In any case, this is a learned and lively book that, in my view, shows even more than before that Smith wrote the Letter with Secret Mark. Jeffery wrote (p.263 n.65) that Smith's 1958 private publication Manuscript Material from the Monastery of Mar Saba, Discovered, Transcribed and Translated by Morton Smith "no doubt" included photographs. Perhaps so, but he has not seen it (nor have I). [Update: I now know the 1958 pamphlet had no photographs included.] It was an exceedingly limited publication. The Smith papers (minus [personal] letters destroyed; except for the Scholem correspondence, originals of both sides, preserved in Jerusalem) are being cataloged at Jewish Theological Seminary. Those papers may provide more insight. [The Smith Scholem Correspondence is now in print; see my review.] The first individual Smith mentioned that he showed his text was not a Greek Orthodox at the Mar Saba but Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem. Smith previously studied with that great scholar of Jewish mysticism and author of Shabbatai Sevi, The Mystical Messiah, a seventeenth-century figure. In a 1976 letter to Scholem Smith wrote: "I think I've learned more about Jesus from you and Shabbatai Zvi (I'm sometimes not sure which is which) than I have from any other source except the magical papyri..." I suggest that Smith may indeed have mixed the two, and projected the antinomian, anti-Torah behavior of Sevi onto h