Those who are still curious about the Secret Gospel of Mark may be interested to know that Ariel Sabar, the journalist who debunked the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, has now turned his considerable skills on the much more complex figure of Morton Smith. The first article, which contains a lot of new biographical information, has just appeared in the April 2024 issue of The Atlantic, which you can find here: ** you do not have permission to see this link ** No smoking gun yet, but lots of skeletons in closets.
Peter Jeffery
That will be fun to follow. Thanks for the heads up. That is what always made the question so hard: There are so many reasons for doubt, but despite those, it held up.
I wonder whether he is burying the lede, or whether it is just going to leave the question more or less where it was. I mean, if he had uncovered a smoking gun, I’d expect him to take it to a scholarly journal first, so my strong suspicion is this is a popular piece telling a fun story that lots of Atlantic readers haven’t heard, but he doesn’t ultimately have the goods to move the needle on the authenticity debate.
The problem with these pseudo-discoveries is that they’re . . . too relevant to modern concerns
The piece does draw attention to an interesting thesis (advanced by Brent Landau and Geoffrey Smith), that the monks of Mar Saba would themselves have been very interested in the general question of what sorts of male-to-male friendship and companionship were appropriate for monks to have. He summarizes the thesis,
the Clement letter was written [“between the fifth century, when the monastery opened, and the eighth century, when the Greek Orthodox Church adopted prayers for adelphopoiesis”] by a Mar Saba monk during some ‘in-house’ debate over the propriety of such unions. . . . If Sabas or his successors had enforced too hard a line on same-sex unions, might some monks have pushed back? Might one of them have faked a letter from two unimpeachable authorities—Clement and God—that presented Jesus himself as the model for intimate but still-sacred unions between men?
Of course, the coincidence that the letter was found by a closeted homosexual still stinks to high heaven. But once you show that the text isn’t addressing an *exclusively* contemporary concern, that the concern it addresses is actually, demonstrably, a very old concern, I think the objection you raise loses some of it’s force. And I think that they succeeded in showing that.
BDEhrman
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