Loading...Later scholars have sometimes claimed Morton Smith forged the Secret Gospel of Mark; he claimed he *discovered* it. Which is it? Here I continue with my account of how he said it all happened. In my previous post I indicated that in 1958 Smith was catagaloguing the books of the library of the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem, when he found a book that had a text written into its final (blank) pages. It was allegedly a letter of Clement of Alexandria, a famous theologian and ethicist who lived and wrote around 200 CE.
Smith immediately recognized that it was a letter we did not have before. And here is how I discuss what he did next, in my book Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003).
******************************
On the spot, Smith decided to photograph the three pages that contained the handwritten copy of Clement’s letter, but chose to hold off translating the entire text until later, reasoning that if some such treasure had turned up, there might be more where that came from; given his limited time, he did not want to miss a thing. Using a hand-held camera, he took three sets of photos, just to be sure. And then he went about his business hunting for other significant finds and cataloguing the results.
Nothing else of comparable significance turned up. And Smith did not realize the full significance of this handwritten letter until later, when he translated it and saw what it actually contained. The letter is addressed to an otherwise unknown person named Theodore, written in response to some of his queries about a particularly notorious sect of early Christians known as the Carpocratians, named after the founder of their sect, Carpocrates.
We know about Carpocrates and his followers from the other writings of Clement, and from those of his younger contemporary Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, and some years later, from Hippolytus of Rome.[1] The Carpocratians were particularly vilified by such proto-orthodox authors because they were believed to engage in wild licentious activities as part of their liturgical services of worship, which were reputed to
Get access to Dr. Ehrman's library of 4,000+ articles plus five new articles per week about the New Testament and early Christianity. It costs as little as $2.99/mth and every cent goes to charity!
Unlock 4,000+ Articles Like This!
Bart,
Forgive me for the 101’ness of this question but after an extensive google search and reading many commentaries I’m still unsure what:
The poor you will always have with you – from Matt 26 riffing on Deut 15
What is this really supposed to mean ontologically? Yes, we will always have poor…duh Ms. Ada.
Especially in light of in Matt it being coupled with the use of expensive oil for burial. Elsewhere NT Jesus stresses giving things away – but not here – dont give it away. Use this expensive product for this temporary fleeting purpose instead of perhaps giving it to a homeless widow with children for example.
Try as I might – I just dont get the logic here. I’m obviously missing something.
Can you please explain this to a slow old man like me lol,
Thanks for your time,
SC
In its context it simply means that the disciples shouldn’t worry about giving the money from sale of perfume ot the poor. They can help the poor some other time. Jesus is worht the expense. I doubt if the saying goes back to Jesus.
Bart,
Just for context I would like to also add I work with the homeless daily thru the charity I started years ago Bags O joy. I’ve given much of my money and time since retirement to this cause. And I’ve helped many people – I’ve even saved some lives.
But I’m also realistic. While we can help – and should take every oppt to do so – the problem is never going to go way as long as human beings have mental health issues. Issues that not only impact individuals but expand out and impact whole societies in various ways.
But we should take every oppt we see to help where we can. And in the case of use of the expensive oil it seems an oppt was lost due to base theological posturing. Just sell the oil already and change a poor widows and her kids life.
We cant solve being poor / poverty in the richest country in the world. The meta mental health issues all humans deal with daily lead to all the other many diverse complex reasons why the problem of being poor / poverty will never completely go away in humans.
TY,
SC
today I used the restroom next to St Anthony’s a Catholic Church.
telling them [two employees] of my experience for 40 years in brief.
I was congratulating the leadership of the success of their programs.
One responded: we try.
you are doing improving the society & Tenderloin!
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.7836756,-122.4127362/Saint+Boniface+Catholic+Church,+133+Golden+Gate+Ave,+San+Francisco,+CA+94102/@37.7826804,-122.4149103,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m9!4m8!1m1!4e1!1m5!1m1!1s0x8085809ad5535691:0xa5407b4d6336a078!2m2!1d-122.4131197!2d37.7817163
I look forward to hear your reasons for believing Smith concocted such an elaborate, many layered discovery.
It seems to me that the due diligence needed in explaining every allegedly fraudulent move,considering the various personae and complex twists and turns,each with its own “what if” set of probabilities,far outweigh the meager arguments there may be -I await to be proven wrong-to credibly sketch a motive for a highly conspiratorial proposition and to dismiss the letter and all its ramifications as a clever fraud (I would even say “genius virtuosic erudite fiction”,from someone who never wrote fiction before).
In other words,were this a crime on trial in front of a court of justice,unless the prosecution comes up with stellar evidence and a smoking gun,it is the defense which holds a reasonable, Occam’s razor direct telling of the story, which also matches the Gethsemane NT testimony.There seems to be no balance between the two positions. Thus I await to hear the incriminating arguments with much curiosity.
Do we know, in Christian scholarship,of a similar or even remotely relevant hoax, from which such scandalous mind-bending conclusions could be reached? Just as courts of justice consider “precedence”, which is immensely important in such endeavors.
I’ll be taking a break from Secret Mark but hope to get back to reasons for thinking it’s a forgery. And yes, we do know of modern Christians forging Gospel passages to see if they can get away with it. I should post on that!
It’s accepted that one of the greatest scholars, Erasmus, forged De duplici martyrio ad Fortunatum.
If he would do that, then it’s not out of the question for anyone to forge a document.
Would Morton Smith, unanimously described as brilliant, need significant time in order to understand such a short text?
There are verses in Galatians I’ve read for 50 years that I don’t understand.
I understand you. But let me try to rephrase.
I find it suspicious that Morton Smith would photograph the pages but not even glace at them long enough to see that they included new parts of Mark. I imagine he would be so excited that *of course* he would take at the very least a slightly closer look at this wonderful discovery then and there.
I understand also that you find Morton Smith’s story suspicious for other reasons, but I am not sure what you think of this specific bit.
Yeah, he could read ancient Greek easily, so it’s surprising to me as well.
With what we now know about AI, do think it feasible that in the future AI “may” be able to assist in answering some of these manuscript questions?
I’ll have to ask ChatGBT….
Bart,
Last post on this topic I promise – sorry its just something very close to my heart. TY for the work you’ve done thru your charity work and the >1 million raised here on the blog.
Its A Vicious Cycle
Poverty can contribute to mental health issues
Mental health issues can contribute to poverty
Society at large also contributes via attitudes/bias toward the homeless and poor. Viewing people as the other. Meta global issues of war, displacement, ethnic and religious differences, etc
Some people stigmatize the poor and homeless to the point I’ve had to intervene and make someone stop berating a homeless man. “Go take a shower!” says a man in a suit…Where? The one spot way downtown miles away in a shelter where you have a good chance of getting whatever meager belongings you have stolen?
SC
The thing to keep in mind is that when he claimed to have discovered this text, Smith was not a renowned scholar of early Christianity or patristics, but basically a young assistant professor of Classics and, secondarily, Second Temple Judaism. In other words, if he was hoping to fraudulently establish himself in his chosen scholarly field, this seems to have been a highly risky and unorthodox way of doing so. Why not come up with some crazy lost variant from the Septuagint or something? The idea that he could have, as a young scholar outside the field, come up with a fluent text in Late Antique, Clementine Greek to copy into the back pages of an obscure book in an Orthodox monastery is, well, unlikely in my opinion. Could the text have been an ancient, or even early modern, forgery? Sure. Perhaps an early Christian writer felt that the Carpocratian message had never been refuted quite strongly enough, so took quill to papyrus to make sure that “Clement” had put the issue to rest once and for all. But I’ve never seen any convincing evidence that Smith simply concocted it out of thin air.
“Why not come up with some crazy lost variant from the Septuagint or something?”
Go big or go home.
Bart, I’m currently reading “Veritas” by Ariel Sabar, about the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” forgery, and he mentions Secret Mark. Sabar uncovered letters that Morton Smith wrote to eminent papyrologist Roger Bagnall in 1977, regarding Bagnall’s book “The Florida Ostraka” and his decision not to publish a specific one he deemed to be a fake. Smith wanted to know details about exactly why Bagnall thought one was a fake, requesting photographs and lots of further information. Sabar noted that “it looked very much as if Smith were fishing for insights into how to get a forgery past the likes of Roger Bagnall.” Bagnall did eventually publish the ostrakon in 2010, saying that he had concluded it might be authentic after all. It had no verifiable provenance, and it was a ribald, homoerotic, comic speech written in bulky writing very unlike the other ostraka in the collection (which were army records). Sabar hints that Smith might have been behind it. Have you ever heard of this incident?
Only what I read in Sabar’s book.
What I’ve always found suspicious is that Morton Smith worked on his book about it for 15 years, but never went back to make sure the manuscript was safe. I can’t imagine discovering something so important and just letting it sit on a random shelf somewhere. No one had even seen it until 3 years after he published his book.
Adding to my skepticism is that his photographs were low quality and I find it difficult to belief that he wouldn’t want higher quality photos available when he finally published his book after so long.
I agree with the first point. For the second, he used the camera he had with him. He wasn’t planning on needing something high tech. (However high tech it *could* have been in 1958!)
In general, cameras are are far from high-tech. You can get stunning photographs from a pinhole camera, anyone who’s visited San Francisco’s Camera Obscura can attest to what’s possible with zero-tech equipment. The high-tech comes in when you want a small device that can take good pictures over a wide range of lighting conditions. There were some pretty good compact cameras around from well before the 1950s. I have no idea what kind he had but if he had wanted high-quality, high resolution images he could have gotten them. Or was it the case that that he had to act surreptitiously? That would have necessitated compromising the quality for size, portability, and lighting.
He was in a wilderness area remote from civilizatoin. He just brought his camera along.
There were very good cameras available back then. The only problem is that they were bulky and you needed to wait on having the film developed.
It sounds as though he had years of opportunity to go back and take higher-quality pictures, but somehow he neglected to do so.
That’s what I don’t understand. Why he wiouldn’t have gone back. Any expert in forgery knows that photos aren’t good enough. You need to examine the pages themselves under some kind of magnification.
Is there any other example of a proto-orthodox author referencing a “secret” writing?
Happens all the time in Irenaeus’s books Against the Heresies, and numerous other authors.
Dear Bart,
This is fascinating – I’m hooked! I’d like to ask what your view is on this – specifically:
1. Do you think these are the words of Clement?
2. If so, do you think the quotations of Secret Mark are Mark’s words?
I’ve read a little, and it seems that Clementine scholarship would answer the first question positively, whereas biblical scholars are split, and I’m curious about your view. I noticed that you skillfully avoid offering your view in ‘Lost Scriptures’.
1. No. 2. No. I deal with all that in subsequent posts, or see my chapter in Lost Christianities and, almost concurrently, in my article in JECS.
Thanks Bart. You may find it amusing (I did) that I spent some time searching for your article in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (https://www.bsecs.org.uk/journal/) as I was unfamiliar with JECS, and given that the Mar Saba letter was supposedly composed by an 18th C hand, I thought it was an appropriate journal. I was wrong. It is found in the Journal of Early Christian Studies: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/43641
I’ve now read both your chapter and your article on this, and I’m glad I did. I agree that until the ink is tested, there’s no way we can definitively settle this, and the questions that remain open deserve our attention.
One detail that caught my attention – Clement mentions that Mark arrives in Alexandria after Peter has died, but I can find this claim nowhere else in Clement’s writings. Eusebius claims Mark arrived much earlier under Claudius. If the Mar Saba letter is forged, why do you think they would include this discrepancy?
Ah, right. That’s a journal you should spend time getting to know. It is the premier journal of early Christian studies in the U.S. and one of the two (or three) most prestigious anywhere. Very important material published there. As to contradictions between Eusebius and other earlier church fathers on biographical details, you’ve probably noticed that happens a good deal (because of the nature of our sources)