The Secret Gospel of Mark

There has recently been quite a buzz concerning the Secret Gospel of Mark, due to Stephen Carlson's upcoming SBL presentation and his forthcoming book. See the articles on Hypotyposeis, Stephen Carlson's weblog. In 1958 Smith claimed to have found a letter by Clement of Alexandria written in on the end leaves of a printed edition of the letters of Ignatius. It seems that Carlson's case for Secret Mark being a forgery is based on the existence of an MS in the Mar Saba library that was identified by Morton smith as a twentieth century hand, but is the same hand as the Clement Secret Mark letter. I have no details beyond this, but I presume that the manuscript written in a twentieth century hand was written by Morton Smith, which would mean that Smith was dropping a hint that the Clement letter is a forgery.

The Secret Mark fragment has always seemed a little 'off' to me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Also, I had trouble believing that Morton smith could put quite so much effort into a forgery. It is usually pointed out that he “discovered” the fragment in 1958 and didn’t publish it until 1973. Sometimes this is used to suggest that the fragment is a forgery, but the delay of 15 years from discovery to publication could equally be seen as evidence against forgery—after all, why would he spend quite so much time on a fake?

In fact, the text was ready for publication in 1966, but took several years to go through the press. This would still mean that Smith spent several years on the fake—presumably preparing it before he revisited Mar Saba in 1958, then actually executing the forgery, then showing it to various experts and finally putting it through his critical analysis and preparing the two books—the scholarly Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, and the popular The Secret Gospel. I also began to see that it might not make any difference to Smith whether the subject of his critical scholarship was a self-penned forgery or an ancient document. The techniques and the processes that he was involved with would be the same, regardless of the authenticity of the document. Performing word counts and applying statistical tests to Secret Mark is just as tedious or pleasurable as performing the same tests on the Egerton Gospel or on another piece of Clement. And his motive in putting across a forgery would make the work seem as exciting or important to him as it would if he felt that he was making a real contribution to scholarship. When I read Bart Ehrman’s chapter on Secret Mark in Lost Christianities, along with many other people, I began to think that Secrety Mark might indeed be a forgery. (I should add that I thought that Ehrman’s chapter on the Gospel of Thomas was rather poor.)

When I asked Steve Davies about this, he mentioned that Morton Smith had been very helpful to him, but added, “But I think he probably did fake the Secret Mark thing. He spent a lot of time alone; probably did it just to show how far ahead of everyone else he was. I'm not sure whether there was an ideological point to it, but it's interesting how Neusner wrote that this was an effort to show that Jesus was a gay magician but Smith was no magician. Actually the first I'd ever thought that Smith was gay occurred after his death when it turned out everybody else thought or knew he was…..
The whole business makes an interesting case for a forger fallacy, or forger paradox, where, if the forger is a leading expert, any tests you can think of to argue that the thing is original is also a test the forger would have thought of in the process of forging. It's Smith who makes the best case against forgery, after all.
Yet, actually, even if it's authentic, as far as I'm concerned that makes it a third century forgery, an early fake Mark, and not some big synoptic discovery.”

I have to admit that Koester’s work on our canonical Mark being an abbreviation of Secret Mark seemed rather silly.

If Secret Mark is a fake, then perhaps Morton Smith left some clues in this direction. Bart Ehrman mentions some of these in his chapter in Lost Christianities—that the edition of Ignatius in which the Secret Mark fragment is included contains a discussion of forgery (on the page opposite the Secret Mark letter), and that the popular book, The Secret Gospel, was dedicated to “The One Who Knows”, while the scholarly Clement of Alexandria book was dedicated to Nock, one of the few who thought that Secret Mark was a fake. I would like to add a couple of pointers, from The Secret Gospel, where Smith might be indicating that Secret Mark is a fraud.

In the preface, Smith writes, “The whole story spans more than thirty years, from 1941 to the present. I am shocked to find how much of it I have already forgotten. No doubt if the past, like a motion picture, could be replayed, I should also be shocked to find how much of the story I have already invented. “ [My emphasis.]

On page 18 (Dawn Horse Press edition) Smith writes of his psychological state following the discovery, “Moments of wild excitement alternated with spells of profound pessimism and even resentment.” This seems a little extreme as a reaction if he had actually discovered the letter. After all, he he could research and write about the discovery as a serious scholar regardless of it being a fake or not. But if he had faked it himself then his swings of exulatation and depression are understandable, since publication of the forgery could either ruin his entire career or successfully bamboozle much of the academy.

Finally, he ends the book, “History, however, is by definition the search for the most probable [Smith’s emphasis] explanations of preserved phenoma. When several explanations are possible, the historian must always choose the most probable one. But the truth is that improbable things sometimes happen. Therefore truth is necessarily stranger than history.” [My emphasis.]

If Secret Mark really is a forgery, then this last sentence could easily mean that historical analysis would seem to affirm the authenticity of the fragment against its true position as a forgery. I look forward to Stephen Carlson’s book.