The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark

This is Bible scholar Morton Smith's story of the most controversial and shocking discovery in Biblical studies history. It is also probably a hoax, along the lines of "The Hitler Diaries" or the purported Howard Hughes interviews. Knowing that the book is almost certainly a fraud makes reading it a very strange experience. The informed reader stands one level removed from the otherwise well-written text, wondering what Smith was thinking when he drafted it. Ironically, our "inside knowledge" about Smith causes us to read the text in a "gnostic" fashion, finding in it an entirely different message than the actual words on the page! Smith alleges that while working in the manuscript collection of the Mar Saba monastery in the Judean desert, he found a letter from Clement of Alexandria that described a Gospel previously unknown to the world: the Secret Gospel of Mark. Clement supposedly was very concerned to defend this Gospel from its misuse by the gnostic Carpocratian sect, who were using it to justify sexual immoralities. Given Clement's brief quotation from the Gospel in his letter, one could see how it could be used in that way. The principal passage quoted by Clement (and in this book, by Smith)involved a young man who came to Jesus wearing only a linen tunic, who is said to have loved Jesus and whom Jesus taught the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. Smith concludes that Jesus taught a secret baptism that granted ecstatic liberation from the Jewish law, and perhaps from all laws. But Smith goes one step further; he concludes that the historical Jesus may also have engaged in ritual sexual union with his disciples. It is perhaps appropriate that "The Secret Gospel" was first published in 1973, at the height of the Sexual Revolution, for the Jesus it presents fits perfectly with the times. We have only the word of ancient heresiologists for what the Carpocratians actually believed and practiced. These heresy hunters were eager to discredit their enemies, and may have misunderstood or simply lied about them. Smith's early libertine Christians, if they ever truly existed, died out or were crushed by the forces of orthodoxy early on. Such were Smith's credentials (and his prickly personality), however, that until his death, most Bible scholars did not dare to challenge the authenticity of Clement's letter. After all, Smith had claimed to have had own reservations about the letter, at first, and had had it authenticated by three sets of experts: experts in handwriting, experts in Clement's letters, experts in the text of the Gospels. Most of the scholars in each category had given it a clean bill of health. Now that Smith is dead, however, the pendulum is swinging the other way. While some scholars, including members of the Jesus Seminar, still vouch for the authenticity of the Secret Gospel, Bible Scholar Bart Ehrman has openly called the "Secret Gospel of Mark" a forgery. Historian Donald Harman Akenson goes furthe