‘Cops arrest rabbi in park with naked teenager’

The strange story of the Secret Gospel of Mark

In my last piece - which was about the unexpected finding of religious texts - I left out the most famous example from recent years of such a text being found.

I’d like to focus on that episode in this article. It forms a notoriously difficult and bitter academic puzzle.

An American abroad

In 1958, the American scholar Morton Smith went to the ancient monastery of Mar Saba in Palestine to work on cataloguing the library there. Smith reported that, while engaged in this work, he discovered a copy of a lost early Christian document. The text in question had, he said, been written by hand into the end pages of a 1646 printed edition of the writings of the early church father Ignatius of Antioch. It appeared to be written in a style of Greek handwriting dating from the late seventeenth or eighteenth century. The text claimed to be taken from a letter written by Clement of Alexandria - a big name in the early church - to an unknown individual called Theodore.

The Letter to Theodore deals with a heretical sect called the Carpocratians, whom we know of from other ancient sources. In it, Clement condemns the Carpocratians as sensual sinners. He also reports that a secret version of Mark’s Gospel, which was longer than the one that we have in our Bibles today, was in use in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. This has become known among scholars as the Secret Gospel of Mark (SGM). According to the letter, the Carpocratians had made fraudulent additions to the SGM. The letter contains an extract from the SGM in which Jesus raises a young man from the dead and instructs him in the mysteries of God. Clement reports that one of the additions that the Carpocratians had made to the text consisted of the words “naked man with naked man”.

The homoerotic element of the text guaranteed that it would quickly become notorious. The notion that Jesus was gay was not new - it went back at least to Jeremy Bentham in the nineteenth century - but here was an apparently genuine ancient text that more or less explicitly endorsed the idea.

Smith emphasised this aspect of the SGM when speaking about it publicly. It was he who came up with the phrase that I have used for the title of this piece - ‘Cops arrest rabbi in park with naked teenager’ - because the young man mentioned in the SGM in connection with nudity had been with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane when he was arrested before his crucifixion. Smith seemed to take pleasure in provoking Christian audiences by pointing to the sexual innuendo in this strange text that had fallen into his hands. Maybe this was a salutary challenge to the homophobia of the time; or maybe Smith was just being a dick. Another possibility is that something altogether worse was going on.

A forgery?

Smith announced his discovery in 1960, but it was not until 1973 that he finally published the text of the Letter and his interpretation of it. He did this in two books: a scholarly monograph and a popular work. Most scholars initially welcomed Smith’s find as an important contribution to early Christian studies. But from an early stage doubts began to be voiced about the Letter’s authenticity.

Two early challenges to the genuineness of the text were published in 1975 by a pair of American scholars, the theologian Quentin Quesnell and the classicist Charles Murgia. Debate rumbled on for years, and the dispute was reignited in the early years of this century. In 2005, two writers, Scott Brown and Stephen Carlson, published books taking diametrically opposing positions on the issue. In 2007, the scholar Peter Jeffery published The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled, a somewhat eccentric tome which argued at length that the Letter is a forgery. Clutches of articles appeared, notably in the Journal of Early Christian Studies in 2003 and in the Biblical Archaeology Review in 2009. A useful compendium of conference papers was published in 2013 under the title Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? Since then, discussion has continued - in large part on the internet. The most recent intervention in the debate was a book entitled The Secret Gospel of Mark, which was published in 2023 by Geoffrey Smith (no relation) and Brent Landau.

When it comes to this particular controversy, things can get very heated very quickly. Some scholars who have waded into it have written with real venom. The greater venom seems to come from those who think that Smith was innocent (Smith and Landau’s book, for example, has an unpleasantly aggressive tone at times). The thinking seems to be that Smith was an innocent man whose reputation has been shamefully traduced. One person has even made the laughable suggestion that the forgery theory equates Smith with Bernie Madoff - as if stealing tens of billions of dollars from retirees and charities was remotely comparable to hoaxing a bunch of self-important scholars. Sometimes, Smith’s defenders seem to assume that the only people who are challenging the Letter’s authenticity are disgruntled Christian homophobes - which is certainly not the case.

To add to the mystery, the physical text of the Letter has gone missing. The Ignatius book was taken from Mar Saba in 1976 to the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem. In 1977, the pages containing the text were cut out of the volume by the library staff. They were apparently last seen in 1983, when they were taken to a studio in Jerusalem to be photographed. It has been suspected that they have been deliberately mislaid because of their notoriety and embarrassing content. The church did not have the equipment to examine them forensically; only the Jerusalem police could do that, and the officials at the Patriarchate were not about to hand their document over to the Israeli cops. As it happens, finding the pages would not necessarily get us much further. Scientists could analyse the ink - but it is surprisingly easy for a modern person to make iron gall ink of the sort that was used in the eighteenth century.

Who was Morton Smith?

As to the figure at the centre of the controversy, Morton Smith was by all accounts a difficult man. He didn’t suffer his adversaries gladly, whether they were committed Christians or secular liberals. He even managed to piss off the monks at Mar Saba while he was staying there. He trained as an Anglican priest but lost his faith by around 1950, when he was in his mid-30s, and worked exclusively in academia in later life. It seems that he had been aligned with the conservative high church wing of Anglicanism.

The elephant in the room with regard to Smith’s biography is that he was gay (although there are reports of occasional short-lived romantic relationships with women). This in itself is suspicious. Most people aren’t gay, and the chances that a mysterious lost document implying that Jesus was gay would be discovered by a scholar who also happened to be gay are not high.

There’s more. In 1949, towards the end of his priestly career, Smith wrote a remarkable article for a religious periodical called the Journal of Pastoral Care. In it, he condemned homosexuality and other unorthodox sexual conduct in terms that were harsh even by the standards of the time. Smith was also politically right-wing, and his political writings after his exit from Christianity included homophobic content (at the same time, in fact, as he was joking about rabbis and naked youths). How all this is to be reconciled is a matter of speculation. It might be too glib to say that Smith was driven mad by homophobia, but it is perhaps not too far from the truth. In any event, what we can infer about Smith’s struggle with his sexuality seems to cast a new light on his discovery of the Letter to Theodore.

Is the Letter forged?

The homoerotic element in the Letter is unquestionably its most remarkable and suspicious feature. A gay man who was the victim of modern American Christian homophobia happened to find an ancient text indicating that Jesus was gay; and he then proceeded to parade it gleefully in front of American Christian audiences. It’s all a bit too convenient.

Add to this the fact that the Letter also refers to other known concerns of Smith. In his pre-1958 publications, Smith had shown an interest in secret teachings in early Christianity; the SGM clearly fits into this category. He had also suggested that Mark’s gospel drew on a source linked to John’s gospel; and, lo and behold, the SGM seems to show similarities to John. What is more, we know that Smith was aware of an old scholarly debate about whether Clement of Alexandria condoned lying in certain circumstances. In the Letter, Clement helpfully resolves this debate: he tells Theodore that he can lie by denying “even... on oath” that the SGM is really by Mark.

Keep in mind that Smith was a highly educated Ivy League professor with two doctorates. He was one of the few people in the world who could have pulled off a hoax of this sort. He had access to the scholarly resources that would have been needed: in particular, a fully-indexed edition of Clement’s works that had been published by the German academic Otto Stählin in 1936. It has been observed that the Letter sounds a bit too much like Clement - as if a modern forger had made use of something like Stählin’s edition but had overdone the job in the process. A similar observation has been made about the SGM text contained in the Letter: it is derived from phrases cut and pasted from the canonical version of Mark’s gospel.

When we look at the text of the Letter, we find no smoking gun. But it does have some odd features. Our ancient sources report that the Carpocratians were sexually promiscuous, but they make no claim that they practised homosexuality - indeed, the real Clement alleged that they believed in holding women in common. The Letter uses the phrase “spent that night with him” in the context of Jesus staying with the young man. The use of the phrase “spend the night” as a euphemism for sex is a modern English idiom, not an ancient Greek one. The text refers to a woman called Salome and contains the phrase “truth hidden by seven veils” (although not directly in reference to her). If one finds a mention of the unusual concept of “seven veils” in a short text that also mentions a woman called Salome, it is a reasonable assumption that it was written after 1893, when the gay icon Oscar Wilde wrote the play Salome, in which the title character famously dances the “dance of the seven veils”.

There are other peculiarities relating to Smith’s find. The text of the Letter goes on for long enough to include the attention-grabbing gay innuendo. But it mysteriously breaks off at precisely the point when Clement is about to explain the real truth, as opposed to the Carpocratian lies (the last words of the text are: “Now the true explanation, and that which accords with the true philosophy....”). Moreover, the printed text in the Ignatius book which is immediately opposite the first page of the Letter complains about... falsifications of ancient writings. The photographs of the Letter which Smith published in his popular 1973 book show this. The photos in his academic book - the one which he knew would be pored over by scholars - do not. For what it’s worth, there is no evidence that the Ignatius book was at Mar Saba before 1958. It was not mentioned in past catalogues of the library’s holdings - although it should be noted that those catalogues are not comprehensive.

Reading the handwriting

Is there a technical solution to the case available through analysis of the Letter’s handwriting?

In 2009, Biblical Archaeology Review hired two native Greek experts to examine the photos of the document: Agamemnon Tselikas, an expert in historical palaeography (handwriting); and Venetia Anastasopoulou, a specialist in forged documents. Predictably enough, they came down on opposite sides. Tselikas thought that the writing had suspicious features which were not consistent with the practices of genuine eighteenth-century scribes. Anastasopoulou thought that the writing was quite different from Smith’s known Greek handwriting, and that it must have been written by a native Greek speaker.

For their 2023 book, Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau obtained expert opinions from three more scholars: Panagiotis Agapitos, Erich Lamberz and Zisis Melissakis. These too were inconclusive. Agapitos started out thinking that the text was genuine, but ended up being persuaded by Tselikas’ arguments that it was forged. Lamberz thought that it was genuine. Melissakis noted that the handwriting had some unusual features and suggested that it could be a forgery; but he was of the view that it would have been forged by a nineteenth-century writer.

What a mess. Things get more complicated when one considers that Smith might have enlisted a native Greek colleague to forge the handwriting. And indeed there is some reason to believe that he had an accomplice. Smith dedicated one of his 1973 books to “the one who knows”. In the years since 1973, it has often been asked who “the one” was and what they knew.

Time to let it go?

It is not possible to prove that the Letter to Theodore is a forgery; nor, indeed, that it is genuine.

My views on the matter should be obvious. But it is as well to emphasise that the text could be a real letter of Clement of Alexandria. If a genuine lost Christian document was going to be found anywhere, it would be found at a place like Mar Saba by a scholar like Morton Smith. Ancient texts do sometimes turn up in this kind of way. There is no reason why such a text might not be written into the end pages of a printed book (this was an attested practice at Mar Saba). Certainly, Smith himself never broke character. He behaved as if he had a sincere and lasting interest in the Letter and its meaning.

At any rate, it is probably time to call the debate to an end now. Sometimes historical questions just can’t be answered conclusively. Living with uncertainty is an important life skill for all of us, and historians are no exception to that.