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119-407: 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 kilometres (12 miles) 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

238-495: A transcription of the letter with a preliminary translation to the Library of Congress . After having spent two years comparing the style, vocabulary, and ideas of Clement's letter to Theodore with the undisputed writings of Clement of Alexandria and having consulted a number of paleographic experts who dated the handwriting to the eighteenth century, Smith felt confident enough about its authenticity and so announced his discovery at

357-456: A Secret Gospel of Mark was not published until 1973 due to seven years of delay "in the production stage". In the book, Smith published a set of black-and-white photographs of the text. Earlier the same year he also published a second book for the popular audience. For many years it was thought that only Smith had seen the manuscript. However, in 2003 Guy Stroumsa reported that he and a group of other scholars saw it in 1976. Stroumsa, along with

476-461: A complex theory of 'chiasms' (or ' chiasmus ') running through the Gospel of Mark – a type of literary device he finds in the text. Dart "[recovered] a formal structure to original Mark containing five major chiastic spans framed by a prologue and a conclusion." According to Dart, his analysis supports the authenticity of Secret Mark. His theory has been criticized, as it presupposes hypothetical changes in

595-399: A contemporary named M. Madiotes ( M. Μαδιότης ), and that he afterwards corrected the name Madiotes to Madeotas ( Μαδεότας ) which may, in fact, be Modestos ( Μοδέστος ), a common name at Mar Saba. In particular, on the subject of the handwriting, Roger Viklund in collaboration with Timo S. Paananen has demonstrated that "all the signs of forgery Carlson unearthed in his analysis of

714-430: A copy by deceit and then polluted it with "utterly shameless lies". To refute the teachings of the gnostic sect of Carpocratians, known for their sexual libertinism, and to show that these words were absent in the true Secret Gospel of Mark, Clement quoted two passages from it. There were accordingly three versions of Mark known to Clement, Original Mark , Secret Mark , and Carpocratian Mark . The Secret Gospel of Mark

833-555: A few modifications, Hans-Martin Schenke supported Koester's theory, and also John Dominic Crossan has presented a to some extent similar "working hypothesis" to that of Koester: "I consider that canonical Mark is a very deliberate revision of Secret Mark ." Marvin Meyer included Secret Mark in his reconstruction of the origin of the Gospel of Mark. The allegations against Smith for having forged

952-532: A formal case that the Mar Saba document might be a forgery" and he was "extremely critical" of Smith, especially for not making the document available to his peers and for providing such low-quality photographs. Yet, Quesnell did not tell his peers that he had also examined the manuscript and did not reveal that he already had these high-quality color photographs of the letter at home in 1983. Hedrick and Olympiou were not aware of this when they published, in 2000, copies of

1071-505: A healing story quite like other miracle stories in the Synoptic Gospels ; a story that progressed smoothly without any obvious rough connections and inconsistencies as is found in the corresponding story of the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John . Like Smith, they mostly thought that the story was based on oral tradition , although they generally rejected his idea of an Aramaic proto-gospel. The first scholar to publicly question

1190-523: A leader of the Greek Orthodox Church, who gave him a tour of various places, one of which happened to be the Mar Saba monastery. While there, Smith was given access to the libraries of the monastery. Years later, in 1958, having landed a teaching career at Columbia, Smith was awarded a sabbatical. With his sabbatical, Smith decided to return to Mar Saba, having since become very interested in the Mar Saba library. He recalled that during his first visit,

1309-430: A lecturer in religion until 1990. On July 11, 1991 two Columbia professors found Smith dead in his New York City apartment. His death was ruled a suicide. Smith was well-known for his sharp wit when it came to religious debates. He made regular scholarly contributions in many fields, including but not limited to Greek and Latin classics, New Testament , Patristics , Second Temple Judaism , and rabbinics . Despite

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1428-474: A lengthy article in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly , where he even suggested that Smith had forged the document himself, and then photographed his alleged forgery. An incensed Smith issued a furious rebuttal, whereupon Quesnell disclaimed any personal accusations against Smith. In 1985 in his Strange Tales Per Beskow of Lund cast doubt on the Gospel. Smith responded by threatening to sue

1547-532: A misreading, and he thought Murgia "fell into a few factual errors". Although forgers use the technique of "explaining the appearance and vouching for the authenticity", the same form is also often used to present material hitherto unheard of. Even though none of Clement's other letters have survived, there also seems to have been a collection of at least 21 of his letters at Mar Saba in the 8th century when John of Damascus , who worked there for more than 30 years ( c.  716–749 ), quoted from that collection. In

1666-401: 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

1785-463: A permanent minority; although sometimes able to win over a king like Josiah to their cause. Meanwhile, the population at large, including most of the kings, remained stubbornly polytheistic, worshipping the same gods as their neighbours in Moab , Ammon etc. In the post-Exilic period the idea of Yahweh as the only god of Israel finally triumphed, but a new division emerged, between the separatists, who wished

1904-509: A physical union. In the first phase, the letter was thought to be genuine, while Secret Mark often was regarded as a typical apocryphal second-century gospel sprung from the canonical traditions. This pastiche theory was promoted by F. F. Bruce (1974), who saw the story of the young man of Bethany clumsily based on the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John. Thus, he saw the Secret Mark narrative as derivative and denied that it could be either

2023-449: A pseudonymous twentieth-century individual named M. Madiotes [ Μ. Μαδιότης ], whose name is a cipher pointing to Smith himself." The 'M' would stand for Morton, and 'Madiotes' would be derived from the Greek verb μαδώ , madō meaning both 'to lose hair' and figuratively 'to swindle' – with the bald swindler being the balding Morton Smith. When Carlson examined the printed reproductions of

2142-505: A rebuttal to Evans, he and Allan J. Pantuck find the alleged parallel between the Scotland Yard detective Lord Moreton's last name and Morton Smith's first name puzzling, since Morton Smith got his name long before the novel was written. Francis Watson finds the parallels so convincing that "the question of dependence is unavoidable", while Allan J. Pantuck thinks they are too generic or too artful to be persuasive. Javier Martínez, who thinks

2261-508: A secret gospel whose existence was concealed or a mystic gospel "pertaining to the mysteries" with concealed meanings), in the same way as he refers to it as "a more spiritual gospel". "To Clement, both versions were the Gospel of Mark". The purpose of the gospel was supposedly to encourage knowledge ( gnosis ) among more advanced Christians, and it is said to have been in use in liturgies in Alexandria . The letter includes two excerpts from

2380-617: A small number of Assyrians , Greeks and Georgians . In 2005, Patriarch Irenaios was deposed by the Holy Synod of Jerusalem after being accused of involvement in the sale of church land in East Jerusalem to Israeli investors. A special Pan-Orthodox Synod was convened in Constantinople ( Istanbul ) to review the decision of the Holy Synod of Jerusalem. The Pan-Orthodox Synod under

2499-566: 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

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2618-573: A trip to Jordan , Israel , Turkey , and Greece in the summer of 1958 "hunting for collections of manuscripts", Morton Smith also visited the Greek Orthodox monastery of Mar Saba situated between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea . He had been granted permission by the Patriarch Benedict I of Jerusalem to stay there for three weeks and study its manuscripts. It was while cataloguing documents in

2737-457: Is a forgery and only Morton Smith could have forged it, as he had the "means, motive, and opportunity" to do so. Carlson claimed to have identified concealed jokes left by Smith in the letter which according to him showed that Smith created the letter as a hoax. He especially identified two: the first, a reference to salt that "loses its savor", according to Carlson by being mixed with an adulterant, and that presupposes free-flowing salt which in turn

2856-408: Is described as a second "more spiritual" version of the Gospel of Mark composed by the evangelist himself. The name derives from Smith's translation of the phrase "mystikon euangelion". However, Clement simply refers to the gospel as written by Mark. To distinguish between the longer and shorter versions of Mark's gospel, he twice refers to the non-canonical gospel as a mystikon euangelion (either

2975-643: Is just one subject among several others in the scriptures that the Tannaim deemed should be discussed in secret. Further, they claim that Smith in his 1955 article also only linked the mystery of the kingdom of God to secret teachings. In the third example, an article Smith wrote in 1958, he only "mentioned Clement and his Stromateis as examples of secret teaching". Brown and Pantuck consider it to be common knowledge among scholars of Christianity and Judaism that Clement and Mark 4:11 deal with secret teaching. Morton Smith Morton Smith (May 28, 1915 – July 11, 1991)

3094-508: Is no point in denying the existence of a gospel that the Carpocratians have in their possession. Brown advocates that Theodore instead is told to assure that the adulterated or forged Carpocratian gospel was not written by Mark, which, according to Brown, would be at least a half-truth and also something Clement could have said for the benefit of the church. Smith gave some thought to Murgia's arguments but later dismissed them as being based on

3213-515: Is produced with the help of an anti-caking agent, "a modern invention" by an employee of the Morton Salt Company – a clue left by Morton Smith pointing to himself; and the second, that Smith would have identified the handwriting of the Clement letter as done by himself in the 20th century "by forging the same eighteenth-century handwriting in another book and falsely attributing that writing to

3332-690: Is referred to by many names, including the Mar Saba letter , the Clement letter, the Letter to Theodore and Clement's letter to Theodore. As the book was "the property of the Greek Patriarchate ", Smith just took some black-and-white photographs of the letter and left the book where he had found it, in the tower library. Smith realized, that if he were to authenticate the letter, he needed to share its contents with other scholars. In December 1958, to ensure that no one would reveal its content prematurely, he submitted

3451-702: Is the head bishop of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem , ranking fourth of nine patriarchs in the Eastern Orthodox Church . Since 2005, the Eastern Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem has been Theophilos III . The patriarch is styled "Patriarch of the Holy City of Jerusalem and all Holy Land , Syria , beyond the Jordan River , Cana of Galilee , and Holy Zion ." The patriarch

3570-665: Is the head of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre , and the religious leader of about 130,000 Eastern Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land , most of them Palestinian Christians in Israel and Palestine. The patriarchate traces its line of succession to the first Christian bishops of Jerusalem, the first being James the Just in the 1st century AD. Jerusalem was granted autocephaly in 451 by

3689-404: Is the result of the Secret Mark passages quoted by Clement and other passages being removed, either by Mark himself or by someone else at a later stage. There is an ongoing controversy surrounding the authenticity of the Mar Saba letter. The scholarly community is divided as to the authenticity, and the debate on Secret Mark therefore in a state of stalemate, although the debate continues. During

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3808-696: The Council of Chalcedon and in 531 became one of the initial five patriarchates . On the importance of Jerusalem in Christianity , the Catholic Encyclopedia reads: During the first Christian centuries the church at this place (referring to the cenacle ) was the centre of Christianity in Jerusalem , "Holy and glorious Sion, mother of all churches". Certainly no spot in Christendom can be more venerable than

3927-568: 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. In the letter, addressed to one otherwise unknown Theodore (Theodoros), Clement says that "when Peter died a martyr, Mark [i.e. Mark the Evangelist ] came over to Alexandria, bringing both his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book [i.e.

4046-515: The "correspondence should provide sufficient evidence of his [i.e., Smith's] intellectual honesty to anyone armed with common sense and lacking malice." He thinks it shows "Smith's honesty", and that Smith could not have forged the Clement letter, for, in the words of Anthony Grafton , the "letters show him discussing the material with Scholem, over time, in ways that clearly reflect a process of discovery and reflection." Pierluigi Piovanelli has however contested Stroumsa's interpretation. He believes that

4165-405: The "hermeneutics of suspicion" to devastating effect. His answers are not always convincing but his questions cannot be ignored. Books: Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem The Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem or Eastern Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem , officially patriarch of Jerusalem ( Greek : Πατριάρχης Ιεροσολύμων ; Arabic : بطريرك القدس ; Hebrew : פטריארך ירושלים ),

4284-534: The 18th century. Morton Smith objected to insinuations that he would have forged the letter by, for example, calling Quesnell's 1975 article an attack. And when the Swedish historian Per Beskow in Strange Tales about Jesus from 1983, the first English edition of his 1979 Swedish book, wrote that there were reasons to be skeptical about the genuineness of the letter, Smith got upset and responded by threatening to sue

4403-513: The English language publisher, Fortress Press of Philadelphia , for $ 1   million dollars. This caused Fortress to withdraw the book from circulation, and a new edition was released in 1985 in which passages that Smith had objected to were removed, and with Beskow emphasizing that he did not accuse Smith of forging it. Although Beskow had doubts about the letter's authenticity, he preferred "to regard this as an open question". Morton Smith summarized

4522-521: The Gospel of Mark] the things suitable to whatever makes for progress toward knowledge." He further says that Mark left this extended version, known today as the Secret Gospel of Mark, "to the church in Alexandria, where it even yet is most carefully guarded, being read only to those who are being initiated into the great mysteries." Clement quotes two passages from this Secret Gospel of Mark, where Jesus in

4641-677: The Jerusalem church. As a result of the First Crusade in 1099, a Latin Patriarchate was created, with residence in Jerusalem from 1099 to 1187. Eastern Orthodox patriarchs continued to be appointed, but resided in Constantinople. In 1187, the Latin patriarch was forced to flee the city of Jerusalem due to the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem . The office remained and appointments continued to be made by

4760-652: The Jews to remain strictly apart from their neighbours, (this separation being defined in terms of purity), and the assimilationists who wished for normal relations with them. Ultimately, by the late Persian/early Hellenistic period, the purists won, the modern version of the Hebrew Bible was written, and a recognisably modern Judaism emerged. Smith was admired and feared for his extraordinary ability to look at familiar texts in unfamiliar ways, to re-open old questions, to pose new questions, and to demolish received truths. He practiced

4879-594: The Kidron Valley in the West Bank east of Bethlehem. In 1973 Smith published a book in which he wrote that he had discovered a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria (c.150 - c. 215) while cataloging documents there in the summer of 1958. Right from the start, some scholars voiced the opinion that the letter is not authentic, and that it was either an ancient or medieval forgery. In 1975, Quentin Quesnell published

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4998-480: The Mar Saba manuscript became even more pronounced after his death in 1991. Jacob Neusner , a specialist in ancient Judaism , was Morton Smith's student and admirer but later, in 1984, there was a public falling out between them after Smith publicly denounced his former student's academic competence. Neusner subsequently described Secret Mark as "the forgery of the century". Yet Neusner never wrote any detailed analysis of Secret Mark or an explanation of why he thought it

5117-755: The Patriarch of Rome (i.e. the Pope ) formed the Roman Catholic Church . In 1099 the Crusaders appointed a Latin patriarch . As a result, the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs lived in exile in Constantinople until 1187. Today, the headquarters of the patriarchate is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The number of Eastern Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land is estimated to be about 200,000. A majority of Church members are Palestinian Arabs , and there are also

5236-456: The Secret Gospel. The first passage, Clement says, was inserted between Mark 10 :34 and 35; after the paragraph where Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem with the disciples makes the third prediction of his death, and before Mark 10:35–45 where the disciples James and John ask Jesus to grant them honor and glory. It shows many similarities with the story in John 11 :1–44 where Jesus raises Lazarus from

5355-506: The annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in December 1960. In the following years, he made a thorough study of Mark , Clement and the letter's background and relationship to early Christianity , during which time he consulted many experts in the relevant fields. In 1966 he had basically completed his study, but the result in the form of the scholarly book Clement of Alexandria and

5474-409: The beginning, the authenticity of the letter was not in doubt, and early reviewers of Smith's books generally agreed that the letter was genuine. However, soon suspicion arose and the letter achieved notoriety, mainly "because it was intertwined" with Smith's own interpretations. Through detailed linguistic investigations, Smith argued that it could likely be a genuine letter of Clement. He indicated that

5593-490: The book at least until his retirement in 1990. Sometime after that, however, the pages went missing, and various attempts to locate them since that time have been unsuccessful. Olympiou suggests that individuals at the Patriarchate Library may be withholding the pages due to Morton Smith's homoerotic interpretation of the text, or the pages could have been destroyed or misplaced. Kallistos Dourvas gave color photographs of

5712-461: The book back with them, and Meliton subsequently brought it to the Patriarchate library. The group looked into having the ink tested but the only entity in the area with such technology was the Jerusalem police . Meliton did not want to leave the manuscript with the police, so no test was taken. Stroumsa published his account upon learning that he was the "last [known] living Western scholar" to have seen

5831-492: The conclusion that "[t]here is no alternative but to conclude that Smith is dependent on" The Mystery of Mar Saba , to be "surreal as a work of scholarship". Timo Paananen asserts that neither Evans nor Watson clarifies what criteria they use to establish that these particular parallels are so "amazing, both in substance and in language", and that they reduce the rigor of their criteria compared to how they dismiss "literary dependencies in other context". In 2003, John Dart proposed

5950-484: The correspondence shows that Smith created an "extremely sophisticated forgery" to promote ideas he already held about Jesus as a magician. Jonathan Klawans does not find the letters to be sufficiently revealing, and on methodological grounds, he thinks that letters written by Smith cannot give a definite answer to the question of authenticity. A number of scholars have argued that the salient elements of Secret Mark were themes of interest to Smith which he had studied before

6069-415: The dead. According to Clement, the passage reads word for word ( Biblical Greek : κατὰ λέξιν , romanized:  kata lexin ): And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, "Son of David, have mercy on me." But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where

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6188-480: The discovery had published three studies, in 1951, 1955 and 1958, in which he discussed and linked "(1) "the mystery of the kingdom of God" in Mark 4:11, (2) secrecy and initiation, (3) forbidden sexual, including homosexual, relationships and (4) Clement of Alexandria". This hypothesis has been contested mainly by Brown and Pantuck. First, they reject the idea that something sexual is even said to take place between Jesus and

6307-426: The discovery of the letter in 1958. In other words, Smith would have forged a letter that supported ideas he already embraced. Pierluigi Piovanelli is suspicious about the letter's authenticity as he thinks it is "the wrong document, at the wrong place, discovered by the wrong person, who was, moreover, in need of exactly that kind of new evidence to promote new, unconventional ideas". Craig Evans argues that Smith before

6426-427: The document is a forgery "because no young Judaean man" would approach "an older man for sex" is according to Harris also invalid, since there is "no such statement" in Secret Mark. In 2008, extensive correspondence between Smith and his teacher and lifelong friend Gershom Scholem was published, where they for decades discuss Clement's letter to Theodore and Secret Mark. The book's editor, Guy Stroumsa , argues that

6545-468: The document was a forgery. However, when he found something he thought was suspicious, Dourvas (who was confident that it was authentic 18th-century handwriting) would present other 18th-century handwriting with similar characteristics. Quesnell admitted that since "they're not all forgeries" it would not be as easy to prove that the text is a forgery as he had expected. Eventually, he gave up his attempts and wrote that experts had to be consulted. As of 2019,

6664-399: The early 18th century, a great fire at Mar Saba also burned out a cave in which many of the oldest manuscripts were stored. Smith speculated that a letter of Clement could partly have survived the fire, and a monk could have copied it into the endpapers of the monastery's edition of the letters of Ignatius in order to preserve it. Smith argued that the simplest explanation would be that the text

6783-407: The fact that "the majority of Carlson's claims" have been convincingly dismissed by Brown and Pantuck and that no "clearly identifiable 'joke ' " is embedded within the letter, "tend to militate against Carlson's overly simplistic hypothesis of a hoax." In The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled (2007), Peter Jeffery argued that "the letter reflected practices and theories of the twentieth century, not

6902-509: 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." In The Gospel Hoax (2005), Stephen C. Carlson argued that Clement's letter to Theodore

7021-474: The four canonical gospels, and arrived at the conclusion that it was written after the first century. Helmut Merkel (1974) also concluded that Secret Mark is dependent on the four canonical gospels after analyzing the key Greek phrases, and that even if the letter is genuine it tells of nothing more than that an expanded version of Mark was in existence in Alexandria in AD 170. Frans Neirynck (1979) argued that Secret Mark

7140-432: The handwriting", such as a "forger's tremor", are only visible in the images Carlson used for his handwriting analysis. Carlson chose "to use the halftone reproductions found in [Smith's book] Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark " where the images were printed with a line screen made of dots. If the "images are magnified to the degree necessary for forensic document examination" the dot matrix will be visible and

7259-498: The help of mortar and pestle, an objection that gets support from Kyle Smith, who shows that according to ancient sources salt both could be and was "mixed and adulterated". Having gained access to the original uncropped photograph, Allan Pantuck and Scott Brown also demonstrated that the script Carlson thought was written by M. Madiotes actually was written by someone else and was an 18th-century hand unrelated to Clement's letter to Theodore; that Smith did not attribute that handwriting to

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7378-537: The highest rank in the Church), to the bishop of Jerusalem. Jerusalem continued to be a bishopric until 451, when the Council of Chalcedon granted Jerusalem independence from the metropolitan of Antioch and from any other higher-ranking bishop, granted what is now known as autocephaly , in the council's seventh session whose "Decree on the Jurisdiction of Jerusalem and Antioch" contains: "the bishop of Jerusalem, or rather

7497-459: The late Hebrew University professors David Flusser and Shlomo Pines and Greek Orthodox Archimandrite Meliton, went to Mar Saba to look for the book. With the help of a Mar Saba monk, they relocated it where Smith presumably had left it 18 years earlier, and with "Clement's letter written on the blank pages at the end of the book". Stroumsa, Meliton, and company determined that the manuscript might be safer in Jerusalem than in Mar Saba. They took

7616-506: 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 by the editor Ursula Treu to be provisional. In 1995, Andrew H. Criddle made

7735-569: The later 1st and 2nd centuries also affected the city's Christian community, and led to Jerusalem gradually being eclipsed in prominence by other sees, particularly those of Constantinople , Antioch , Alexandria , and Rome . However, increased pilgrimage during and after the reign of Constantine the Great increased the fortunes of the see of Jerusalem, and in 325 the First Council of Nicaea attributed special honor, but not metropolitan status (then

7854-495: The letter and Secret Mark were authentic. The same year Stephen C. Carlson published The Gospel Hoax in which he spells out his case that Morton Smith, himself, was both the author and the scribe of the Mar Saba manuscript. And in 2007, musicologist Peter Jeffery published The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled , in which he accuses Morton Smith of having forged the letter. In Mark's Other Gospel (2005), Scott G. Brown challenged "all previous statements and arguments made against

7973-413: The letter as genuine but do not believe in Clement's account, and instead argue that the gospel is a 2nd-century Gnostic pastiche . Others think Clement's information is accurate and that the secret gospel is a second edition of the Gospel of Mark expanded by Mark himself. Still others see the Secret Gospel of Mark as the original gospel which predates the canonical Gospel of Mark, and where canonical Mark

8092-514: The letter found in Smith's scholarly book, he said he noted a "forger's tremor." Thus, according to Carlson the letters had not actually been written at all, but drawn with shaky pen lines and with lifts of the pen in the middle of strokes. Many scholars became convinced by Carlson's book that the letter was a modern forgery and some who previously defended Smith changed their position. Craig A. Evans, for instance, came to think that "the Clementine letter and

8211-448: The letter to be authentic, "and probably a somewhat smaller majority agreed that the quotations of Secret Mark actually derived from a version of Mark." The two camps could be illustrated, on the one hand by Larry Hurtado , who thinks it is "inadvisable to rest too much on Secret Mark" as the letter "that quotes it might be a forgery" and even if it is genuine, Secret Mark "may be at most an ancient but secondary edition of Mark produced in

8330-479: The letter's authenticity was Quentin Quesnell (1927–2012) in 1975. Quesnell's principal argument was that the actual manuscript had to be examined before it could be deemed authentic, and he suggested that it might be a modern hoax. He said that the publication of Otto Stählin's concordance of Clement in 1936, would make it possible to imitate Clement's style, which means that if it is a forgery, it would necessarily have been forged after 1936. On his last day of stay at

8449-444: 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

8568-401: The letter. Subsequent research has uncovered more about the manuscript. Around 1977, librarian Father Kallistos Dourvas removed the two pages containing the text from the book for the purpose of photographing and re-cataloguing them. However, the re-cataloguing obviously never happened. Dourvas later told Charles W. Hedrick and Nikolaos Olympiou that the pages were then kept separately alongside

8687-408: The letter. Michael Zeddies suggested in 2017 that the letter was actually written by Origen of Alexandria ( c.  184 – c.  254 ). The author of the letter is identified only in the title and many ancient writings were misattributed. According to Zeddies, the language of the letter, its concept and style, as well as its setting, "are at least as Origenian as they are Clementine". Origen

8806-452: The letters "will not appear smooth". Once the printed images Carlson used were replaced with the original photographs, the signs of tremors also disappeared. On the first York Christian Apocrypha Symposium on the Secret Gospel of Mark held in Canada in 2011, very little of Carlson's evidence was discussed. Even Pierluigi Piovanelli – who thinks Smith committed a sophisticated forgery – writes that

8925-435: The library had been a terrible mess, and according to Smith no one had bothered to catalog it. Smith reported he found the manuscript in the Mar Saba monastery in 1958, photographed it carefully, and then left the book where he found it. He first publicized the discovery in 1960 but, due to various delays, his main publications on the subject did not come out until 1973. Mar Saba is a Greek Orthodox monastery overlooking

9044-431: The list was far from complete and the silence from incomplete catalogues cannot be used as arguments against the existence of a book at the time the catalogue was made, Smith argued. Although Quesnell did not accuse Smith of having forged the letter, his "hypothetical forger matched Smith's apparent ability, opportunity, and motivation," and readers of the article, as well as Smith himself, saw it as an accusation that Smith

9163-497: The longer passage is said to have raised a rich young man from the dead in Bethany , a story which shares many similarities with the story of the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John . The revelation of the letter caused a sensation at the time but was soon met with accusations of forgery and misrepresentation. There is no consensus on the authenticity of the letter among either patristic Clement scholars or biblical scholars . As

9282-479: The manuscript to Olympiou, and Hedrick and Olympiou published them in The Fourth R in 2000. These color photographs were made in 1983 by Dourvas at a photo studio . But this was arranged and paid for by Quentin Quesnell. In June 1983, Quesnell was given permission to study the manuscript at the library for several days during a three-week period under the supervision of Dourvas. Quesnell was "the first scholar to make

9401-402: The manuscript's whereabouts are unknown, and it is documented only in the two sets of photographs: Smith's black-and-white set from 1958 and the color set from 1983. The ink and fiber were never subjected to examination. The Mar Saba letter is addressed to one Theodore ( Biblical Greek : Θεόδωρος , romanized:  Theodoros ), who seems to have asked if there is a gospel of Mark in which

9520-450: The manuscript, Scott G. Brown noted that he was in no position to do so. The manuscript was still where Smith had left it when Stroumsa and company found it 18 years later, and it did not disappear until many years after its relocation to Jerusalem and its separation from the book. Charles Hedrick says that if anyone is to be blamed for the loss of the manuscript, it is the "[o]fficials of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem ", as it

9639-499: 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. In 2001, Philip Jenkins drew attention to a novel by James H. Hunter entitled The Mystery of Mar Saba , which first appeared in 1940 and was popular at the time. Jenkins saw unusual parallels to Clement's letter to Theodore and Smith's description of his discovery in 1958, but did not explicitly state that

9758-452: The monastery, Smith found a catalogue from 1910 in which 191 books were listed, but not the Vossius book. Quesnell and others have argued that this fact supports the supposition that the book never was part of the Mar Saba library, but was brought there from outside, by for example Smith, with the text already inscribed. However, this has been contested. Smith found almost 500 books at his stay, so

9877-476: The most holy Church which is under him, shall have under his own power the three Palestines". This led to Jerusalem becoming a patriarchate , one of the five patriarchates known as the pentarchy , when the title of "patriarch" was created in 531 by Justinian I . When the Great Schism took place in 1054 the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the other three Eastern Patriarchs formed the Eastern Orthodox Church , and

9996-421: The novel inspired Smith to forge the text. Later Robert M. Price , Francis Watson and Craig A. Evans developed the theory that Morton Smith would have been inspired by this novel to forge the letter. This assumption has been contested by, among others, Scott G. Brown, who writes that apart from "a scholar discovering a previously unknown ancient Christian manuscript at Mar Saba, there are few parallels" – and in

10115-468: The numerous accusations of forgery against Smith's finding, Smith was seen as a dedicated scholar when it came to research. He devoted fifteen years of his life to just studying his finding of the Secret Gospel. In 1941, Smith, at age 26, was on a trip to the holy land with the Harvard Divinity School. Due to issues relating to the war, he was stuck in Jerusalem, where he made acquaintances with

10234-644: The place of the Last Supper, which became the first Christian church. In the Apostolic Age the Christian Church was organized as an indefinite number of local Churches that in the initial years looked to that at Jerusalem as its main centre and point of reference. James the Just , who was martyred around 62, is described as the first bishop of Jerusalem. Roman persecutions following the Jewish revolts against Rome in

10353-462: The presidency of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I , overwhelmingly confirmed the decision of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre and struck Irenaios' name from the diptychs . Metropolitan Cornelius of Petra was chosen to serve as locum tenens pending the election of a replacement for Irenaios. On August 22, 2005, Theophilos , the former Archbishop of Tabor ,

10472-539: The publisher, Fortress Press of Philadelphia, "for a million dollars" and the publisher amended the offending paragraph. Smith is featured discussing the Mar Saba letter in the UK television documentary series, Jesus: The Evidence (1984: Channel 4). Smith's contribution to Old Testament studies was contained in his Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament (1971). Using form criticism to reconstruct

10591-454: The question of forgery is open to debate, regards the suggestion that Hunter's novel would have inspired Smith to forge the text to be outlandish. He wonders why it took more than four decades after the story of Smith's discovery made the front page of the New York Times before anyone realized that this so popular novel was Smith's source. Martínez finds Watson's methods, by which he reaches

10710-408: The question of the authenticity of the text and the validity of Smith's interpretations" by attacking Smith and his interpretation and not Secret Mark. The homoerotic argument, according to which Smith would have written the document to portray Jesus as practicing homosexuality, does not work either. In his two books on Secret Mark, Smith "gives barely six lines to the subject". Jeffery's conclusion that

10829-554: The quotations of Secret Mark embedded within it constitute a modern hoax, and Morton Smith almost certainly is the hoaxer." However, these theories by Carlson have, in their own turn, been challenged by subsequent scholarly research, especially by Scott G. Brown in numerous articles. Brown writes that Carlson's Morton Salt Company clue "is one long sequence of mistakes" and that "the letter nowhere refers to salt being mixed with anything" – only "the true things" are mixed. He also says that salt can be mixed without being free-flowing with

10948-435: The same photographs that Dourvas had kept himself. The scholarly community was unaware of Quesnell's visit until 2007 when Adela Yarbro Collins briefly mentioned that he was allowed to look at the manuscript in the early 1980s. A couple of years after Quesnell's death in 2012, scholars were given access to the notes from his trip to Jerusalem. They show that Quesnell at first was confident that he would be able to establish that

11067-437: The second century by some group seeking to promote its own esoteric interests", and by Francis Watson , who hopes and expects that Secret Mark will be increasingly ignored by scholars to avoid "that their work will be corrupted by association with it". On the other hand, by Marvin Meyer , who assumes the letter to be authentic and in several articles, beginning in 1983, used Secret Mark in his reconstructions, especially regarding

11186-633: The second", and that Smith wrote Clement's letter to Theodore with the purpose of creating "the impression that Jesus practiced homosexuality ". Jeffery reads the Secret Mark story as an extended double entendre that tells "a tale of 'sexual preference' that could only have been told by a twentieth-century Western author" who inhabited "a homoerotic subculture in English universities". Jeffery's thesis has been contested by, for example, Scott G. Brown and William V. Harris . Jeffery's two main arguments, those concerning liturgy and homoeroticism, are according to Harris unproductive and he writes that Jeffery "confuses

11305-409: The secrecy of something which you are in the process of disclosing". Later Jonathan Klawans, who thinks the letter is suspect but possibly authentic, bolstered Murgia's argument by saying that if Clement had urged Theodore to lie to the Carpocratians, it would have been easier for him to follow "his own advice" and lie to Theodore instead. Scott Brown, however, finds this argument to be flawed since there

11424-444: The secret Gospel adds only": And the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them. Clement continues: "But the many other things about which you wrote both seem to be and are falsifications." Just as Clement is about to give the true explanation of the passages, the letter breaks off. These two excerpts comprise the entirety of the Secret Gospel material. No separate text of

11543-411: The secret gospel is known to survive, and it is not referred to in any other ancient source. Some scholars have found it suspicious that an authentic ancient Christian text would be preserved only in a single, late manuscript. However, this is not unprecedented. Among scholars, there is no consensus opinion on the authenticity of the letter, not least because the manuscript's ink has never been tested. At

11662-612: The situation in a 1982 article. He argued that "most scholars would attribute the letter to Clement" and that no strong argument against it had been presented. The attribution of the gospel to Mark was though "universally rejected", with the most common opinion being that the gospel is "a pastiche composed from the canonical gospels" in the second century. After Smith's summary of the situation, other scholars did support Secret Markan priority. Ron Cameron (1982) and Helmut Koester (1990) argued that Secret Mark preceded canonical Mark, which in fact would be an abbreviation of Secret Mark. With

11781-461: The social background to the Old Testament, Smith advanced the proposal that two parties had vied for supremacy in ancient Israel, the first composed of those which worshipped many gods of which Yahweh was chief, while the other, the "Yahweh-alone" faction, was largely the party of the priests of Jerusalem, who wished to establish a monopoly for Yahweh. In monarchic Judah the Yahweh-alone party were

11900-459: The source of the story of Lazarus or an independent parallel. Raymond E. Brown (1974) came to the conclusion that the author of Secret Mark "may well have drawn upon" the Gospel of John, "at least from memory". Patrick W. Skehan (1974) supported this view, calling the reliance on John "unmistakable". Robert M. Grant (1974) thought that Smith definitely had proved that the letter was written by Clement, but found in Secret Mark elements from each of

12019-411: The text is made up of two texts, a handful of possibilities exist: both may be authentic or inauthentic, or one may be authentic and the other inauthentic. Those who think the letter is a forgery mostly think it is a modern forgery, with Smith being denounced the most often as the perpetrator. If the letter is a modern forgery, the excerpts from the Secret Gospel of Mark would also be forgeries. Some accept

12138-416: The text of Clement had been designed as a sphragis , a "seal of authenticity", to answer questions from the readers why Secret Mark was never heard of before. Murgia found Clement's exhortation to Theodore, that he should not concede to the Carpocratians "that the secret Gospel is by Mark, but should even deny it on oath", to be ludicrous, since there is no point in "urging someone to commit perjury to preserve

12257-417: The text of Mark in order to work. The fact that, for many years, no other scholars besides Smith were known to have seen the manuscript contributed to the suspicions of forgery. This dissipated with the publication of color photographs in 2000, and the revelation in 2003 that Guy Stroumsa and several others viewed the manuscript in 1976. In response to the idea that Smith had kept other scholars from inspecting

12376-412: The tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he

12495-446: The tower library of Mar Saba, he later reported, that he discovered a previously unknown letter written by Clement of Alexandria in which Clement quoted two passages from a likewise previously unknown longer version of the Gospel of Mark , which Smith later named the "Secret Gospel of Mark". The text of the letter was handwritten into the endpapers of Isaac Vossius ' 1646 printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch . This letter

12614-583: The two quotations go back to an original Aramaic version of Mark, which served as a source for both the canonical Mark and the Gospel of John . Smith argued that the Christian movement began as a mystery religion with baptismal initiation rites, and that the historical Jesus was a magus possessed by the Spirit. Most disturbing to Smith's reviewers was his passing suggestion that the baptismal initiation rite administered by Jesus to his disciples may have gone as far as

12733-479: The words "naked man with naked man" (Biblical Greek: γυμνὸς γυμνῷ , romanized:  gymnos gymnō ) and "other things" are present. Clement confirms that Mark wrote a second, longer, mystic and more spiritual version of his gospel, and that this gospel was "very securely kept" in the Alexandrian church , but that it contained no such words. Clement accuses the heterodox teacher Carpocrates for having obtained

12852-443: The young man ( neaniskos ) "as a model of discipleship", and by Eckhard Rau, who argues that as long as a physical examination of the manuscript is not possible and no new arguments against authenticity can be put forward, it is, although not without risk, judicious to interpret the text as originating from the circle of Clement of Alexandria. Other authors, like an Origenist monk in the early 5th century, have also been proposed for

12971-497: The young man in Secret Mark, and if that is the case, then there are no forbidden sexual relations in the Secret Mark story. Second, they challenge the idea that Smith made the links Evans and others claim he did. They argue that Smith, in his doctoral dissertation from 1951, did not link more than two of the elements – the mystery of the kingdom of God to secret teachings. Forbidden sexual relations, such as "incest, intercourse during menstruation, adultery, homosexuality, and bestiality",

13090-400: Was "copied from a manuscript that had lain for a millennium or more in Mar Saba and had never been heard of because it had never been outside the monastery." Murgia anyway ruled out the possibility that Smith could have forged the letter as, according to him, Smith's knowledge of Greek was insufficient and nothing in his book indicated a fraud. Murgia seemingly thought the letter was created in

13209-523: Was a forgery. Most scholars who have studied the letter and written about it 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

13328-453: Was also influenced by Clement and "shared his background in the Alexandrian church". Furthermore, Origen actually had a pupil named Theodore. The debate intensified with the publication of three new books. Scott G. Brown's revised doctoral dissertation Mark's Other Gospel from 2005, was the first monograph that dealt only with Secret Mark since Smith's books in 1973. Brown argued that both

13447-474: Was an American professor of ancient history at Columbia University . He is best known for his reported discovery of the Mar Saba letter , a letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria containing excerpts from a Secret Gospel of Mark , during a visit to the monastery at Mar Saba in 1958. This letter fragment has had many names, from The Secret Gospel through The Mar Saba Fragment and the Theodoros . Smith

13566-536: Was born in Philadelphia on May 28, 1915. He received his bachelor's degrees from Harvard College and the Harvard Divinity School , a Ph.D. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a Th.D. in theology from Harvard Divinity School . He taught at Brown University and Drew University and then he became a teacher at Columbia University in 1957. He became professor emeritus in 1985 and continued as

13685-461: Was elected as the 141st Patriarch of Jerusalem. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 raised the bishop of Jerusalem to the rank of patriarch (see Pentarchy ). However, Byzantine politics meant that Jerusalem passed from the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Antioch to the Greek authorities in Constantinople. For centuries, Eastern Orthodox clergy, such as the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre , dominated

13804-411: Was lost while it was in their custody. In 2003 Charles Hedrick expressed frustration over the stalemate in the academy over the text's authenticity, even though the Clementine scholars in the main had accepted the authenticity of the letter. The same year, Bart Ehrman also stated that the situation still was the same as it was when Smith summarized it in 1982, namely that a majority of scholars considered

13923-523: Was rich. 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. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan. The second excerpt is very brief and was inserted in Mark 10:46. Clement says that "after the words, 'And he comes into Jericho' [and before 'and as he went out of Jericho']

14042-401: Was the culprit. Since at the time, no one but Smith had seen the manuscript, some scholars suggested that there might not even be a manuscript. Charles E. Murgia followed Quesnell's allegations of forgery with further arguments, such as calling attention to the fact that the manuscript has no serious scribal errors, as one would expect of an ancient text copied many times, and by suggesting that

14161-479: Was virtually "composed with the assistance of a concordance" of the canonical gospels and wholly dependent on them. N. T. Wright wrote in 1996 that most scholars who accept the text as genuine see in the Secret Gospel of Mark "a considerably later adaptation of Mark in a decidedly gnostic direction." However, approximately the same number of scholars (at least 25 versus at least 32) did not consider Secret Mark to be "a worthless patchwork fabrication" but saw instead

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