Loading...In this thread I am discussing the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark in 1958. Or was it the forgery of the Secret Gospel of Mark? Entire books have been written on the topic. My first foray into the fields was in my book Lost Christianities (Oxford Press, 2003). Here is how I begin to talk about the matter there:
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The Discovery
We need to begin with the tale of the discovery, as recounted by Morton Smith himself in his sundry publications on the “Secret Gospel of Mark,” especially the two books published fifteen years after the discovery – one for a general audience, a beautifully written piece that reads like a detective novel, and one for scholars, a detailed linguistic and philological analysis of the text and its significance.[1]
In 1941, as a twenty-six year old graduate student, Smith had gone to the Holy Land on a traveling fellowship from Harvard Divinity School. Unfortunately, the Mediterranean was closed by the war, and he was stuck in Jerusalem. While there he became acquainted with a leader of the Greek Orthodox church, who invited him to services at the famous Church of the Holy Sepulchre and, eventually, to visit the famous Orthodox monastery of Mar Saba, some twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem. Mar Saba was established in the fifth century of the Christian era and had been the scene of ongoing monastic activity virtually non-stop ever since.
While Smith was there on his visit, he
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Not finding a single reason why Smith would risk his hard earned reputation with such a fraudulent “discovery”,and finding the conspiratorial belief that he invented the particular scandalous issue -and then some- quite ludicrous and inventive in itself,I can only wish to be convinced by facts that indeed there was deceit .
The content of the letter might explain,if I remember well -I read “The Secret Gospel of Mark” longtime ago-,for example,the presence of an almost entirely undressed young man, assumed to be a student of the secrets of the “Kingdom of God”, right there in Getsemane ,precisely on that terrible night.
Was ” Clement’s” handwriting not known, allowing Smith to invent a “Clementian” handwriting version that could not be compared with anything, thus needing to be accepted at face value?
Let’s say Smith did invent Clement’s handwriting. What if, just as he himself “found” a lost letter, some other document written in Clement’s hand might surface, exposing Smith’s forgery?
Can the writing style, syntax, etc be compared with anything written by Clement, even through the testimony of another?
In short, what have scholars encountered that made/make them doubt the authenticity of the letter?
Will get back to “Lost Christianities”!
I’ll be getting to all that! I’ve decided to devote a longer threat do the issue.
A longer “ threat”, 😂 I love it when things get “corrected” automatically. Once I typed “ Rosh Hashana” and it came out “ Rosa Hashish” .
An unrelated question: some words are relentlessly repeated in, for example, the Gospel of Mark.
Just 2 examples: “ immediately” and “ amazed”.
Why is this? I can’t offer any comparison with the HB, except the very necessary “ Va yomer”, “ and he said” , or perhaps I forget.
But the impatience or urge to maximise a legendary, magical impression in all those “ immediately” in the NT, as well as the additional, also emotional, “ and all were amazed” and similar “ amazed” sayings, are used like recurring motifs.
Have instances such as these been written about? Are there other such “leitmotifs” elsewhere in the NT?
NB: I am not using “leitmotif” literally as Wagner intended, but more like proto-cells that move the narrative along.
Mark’s common words are much talked about by scholars, of course, It’s usually thought that he thought these would move the narrative along (immediately!) and strike the audience (with amazement!)
Can anyone prove that the Carpocratians were behind the ” unsuitable” issues in the document?
Or, can anyone prove that Smith, for all his prodigious knowledge and talent, was not capable of the forgery?
I love this subject. It reads like a detective story😎
We’ll see!
Thank you Dr Ehrman. This is one of my favourite stories from your books. It is full of mystery and intrigue and is a nice self-contained tale too, about which everyone can have an opinion. But I must admit, it does begger belief that Professor Smith would have gone to all that trouble just for a hoax. But, still fascinating, hoax or not.
Hi Dr Ehrman!
I’m watching Tár on Saturday and I remember you posting about it a little while ago. I was just interested to know what you enjoyed/ what stood out the most to you about the movie?
Thank you!
Lots of things: the music itself and the passion for it ; the ironies of the Me Too Movement catching up with a famale (lesbian) conductor, the reflections on woke values, the powerful performances, and lots else!
Bart, what did you think of Smith based on your interactions with him, if there were any?
Like every other graduate student at the time, he scared the hell out of me. He was flippin brilliant and didn’t suffer fools gladly. ANd he thought most scholars were fools.
Fascinating Bart.
I suppose that, if you disparage most scholars in your field, you necessarily denigrate any positive assessment from those scholars of your own scholarly reputation. What is the value of being praised by fools?
Perhaps one way to respond to these circumstances might be to fabricate a text – and observe others being unable to detect the fraud. That way your scholarly self-esteem could be confirmed by successfully gulling the pretended scholars around you.
“And he thought most scholars were fools.” Could THAT have been one key reason he went to all the trouble to fake the document (if it was a hoax)?
Yup. Nothing like putting egg on their face….
Morton Smith lacked credibility.
By hiding out at a Greek monastery in the Levant at the height of a terrible war, he detached himself from the real world and the obligations and sacrifice everyone else experienced.
He supposedly photographed the letter in 1958 then waited 15 years to write books about it; surely Smith’s books/talks on the Mar Saba tales made him very wealthy.
A charismatic personality with special knowledge of religion can become a insight-magnet for the $$$$-paying common man. It doesn’t matter if the personality is an Elmer Gantry or Hubert-the-friar, if the person is a mystical humanist in Gucci slippers trying to suck a boy’s tongue, or if the person uses their expertise to write books like Left Behind or the Smithian-sort that appeals to the Tesla class. Everything, especially in the realm of religion, is open to the dark side of commerce. I do not see Smith as credible; to use Hitchens’ term, another Chaucerian fraud.
Bart, thanks for mentioning Dr. Smith’s dissertation. I was delighted to find I could download it as a free PDF from archive.org.
By the way, did you see my 3/28 email pointing out two typos in the new book?
Yes, sorry not to respond. I jsut am not able to answer emails. But thanks so much!
Yes, sorry not to respond. I jsut am not able to answer emails. But thanks so much!
I love that website Moshe! I use it all the time
Hopefully the court case doesn’t set them back. They still have a chance to appeal. Internet Archive provides a great service!
Eager to read the next article …
Many features in the history makes me think it was a forgery
To begin with, it sounds too good to be true and resembles a lot the discovery of the Sianitucs at Saint Catherine’s Monastery …
Also Bart says that Morton “ thought most scholars were fools”, well ,maybe he wanted to show how foolish those scholars were !
btw…what about the “ Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels,” ? it sounds very interesting to me , maybe it deserves an article
[[for example, fragments of a fifteenth-century manuscript of an otherwise lost work of the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles]]
This kind of stuff always fascinates me. If it was ‘otherwise lost’, how did he have any idea of what he had found?
This strikes me as you or I perusing an estate sale and finding a type-written manuscript without a cover or title page and determining “this must be an unknown work of Stephen King!”.
How are those kinds of recognitions and connections made, when, presumably, you don’t even know what you are looking for?
Identificatoins like this are usually made on the basis of content and writing style; it helps if the content matches a work by an author that is described in other ancient authors, then it can be hypothesized to be just that work (if the writing style works) (an expert can differentiate between the writing styles of, say, Sophocles and Aeschyles). I don’t remember off hand what his arguements were in this case, but I believe they persuaded the experts.