‘secret’ Gospel of Mark
Jonathan Poletti Feb 23 - 9 min read - Listen
The story of a biblical discovery
OnDecember 29, 1960, a professor of ancient history at Columbia University made an announcement that would startle the Christian world.
Two years prior, Morton Smith had been a graduate student—reinventing himself after a career as an Anglican priest. He’d developed an interest in manuscript hunting. Christian monasteries around the world had libraries with texts whose significance they might not even know.
He’d been at the Mar Saba monastery, an ancient Orthodox Christian site outside Jerusalem. In the tower library, he’d been looking over a pile of old books. Tucked into one written in Latin and printed in 1646 there were three pages of handwriting—in Greek.
As Smith examined them, the pages proved to be the first part of a letter from an extraordinary author, and about an astonishing subject. Clement of Alexandria, the famous second-century Christian teacher, had written to someone named Theodore about a “secret” version of the gospel of Mark—and quoted from it.
Smith couldn’t remove the book. But he took photos.
The letter told a complicated story.
Theodore seems to have had a run-in with members of an early Christian sect called the Carpocratians. They were famous for their belief that the teachings of Jesus created sexual liberation.
Theodore rebuked them, but was troubled. They had spoken of having another version of the Gospel of Mark, with text that was suppressed by the dominant Christian tradition. They mentioned a scene that involved the phrase “naked man with naked man.”
Theodore wrote Clement, asking about it.
Clement replied with praise for Theodore “silencing” the group, whose teachings, he added, lead to “a boundless abyss of the carnal and bodily sins.”
But, he acknowledged, they were right. There was a different, “more spiritual” version of Mark’s gospel, and the Carpocrations had obtained a copy—using “deceitful arts,” he added.
Clement proceeded to tell Theodore what this “more spiritual” version was, but warned: Theodore must deny its existence, even under oath.
Between what is now called Mark 10:34 and 35, there was another scene.
It finds Jesus and the disciples arriving in Bethany, and meeting a woman whose brother had died. This is a scene familiar from the gospel of John. We’re seeing Mary of Bethany, and the raising of Lazarus.
Jesus goes with her to the tomb, rolls away the stone, and goes inside to greet the resurrected Lazarus.
The new scene picks up Lazarus’ story:
“The youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beg him to be with him. They they left the tomb and went to the young man’s house, for he was rich. Six days later, Jesus gave him instructions of what to do and in the evening the youth came to him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth over his naked body. He remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And when Jesus woke up, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.”
A second addition was to be inserted just afterward, in Mark 10:46.
“And the sister of the young man whom Jesus loved was there, along with his mother and Salome, but Jesus did not receive them.”
Clement added that the phrase “naked man with naked man” was not in the secret text.
He then prepares to give Theodore the “real interpretation” of these new scenes—but the letter breaks off.
Morton Smith mulled this puzzle for a decade.
His delay in publishing may have had a secret of its own. He would say there were “production delays,” but he might have held off publishing until he’d gotten tenure at Columbia University.
There was a lot of work to do until then. He pursued authentication of the ‘Letter to Theodore’, working off the photos he had taken. He developed theories to understand the context of the letter.
In 1973, he published two books discussing the ‘secret gospel’: an academic treatment, and a popular one. He detailed his larger theory that Jesus was, not the Christian messiah as usually understood, but a ‘magician’. And that led to the ‘new’ scene with Jesus and Lazarus.
The scene, Smith suggested, was a magical ritual in which “the disciple was possessed by Jesus’ spirit.”
But what was this ‘mystery’ that Jesus had taught?
The “mystery” language is used a few times in the New Testament.
Smith focused on Ephesians 5:32, where the apostle Paul seems to locate the “profound mystery” in a spousal context, i.e. marriage and sex.
Perhaps ‘erotic magic’, Smith reasoned, was involved.
To Christians, that would be utterly unthinkable, but Smith was thinking it. The Carpocratians, he suggested, might have been right that the ‘Jesus teachings’ involved new sexual freedom. Indeed, gay sex might have been part of the theology?
He writes:
“Freedom from the law may have resulted in completion of the spiritual union by physical union.”
Smith’s books got some media play, and a lot of professional blowback. “I’m reconciled to the attacks,” Smith tells the New York Times. “Thank God I have tenure!”
He’d known that Christians would try to have him fired.
A Jesuit scholar named Quentin Quesnell stepped up for a takedown.
In two papers, in 1975 and 1976, Quesnell asked questions. Why had Smith not made more efforts to make this ‘new’ manuscript available?
And why had Smith been interested, for years prior, in the subjects he’d amazingly found in a ‘new’ text? In a 1951 paper, Quesnell noted, Smith had written about “secret doctrine” in early Christianity, and “forbidden sexual relationships.”
And why did this ‘new’ letter from Clement not really sound like him? “I do not find the style typical of Clement,” Quesnell notes.
If not exactly stated, the insinuation was that Smith had forged the text.
Quesnell went to search for proof.
In 1983, he travelled to the Mar Saba monastery. He expected to find an obvious forgery. When the book was before him, he was less sure. It seemed real.
And he saw the monks were very capable of guarding their property. It would be “impossible,” he realized, to remove the book.
He went home, never discussing the trip publicly. Only his notes found after his death revealed that he’d seen the manuscript.
Four other scholars had also gone to see the letter. They took photos, and tried to arrange tests on the paper by Israeli officials. Since that would involve Jews, the monks wouldn’t allow it.
The monastery was getting tired of it all.
Morton Smith had tried to get a BBC camera crew into the library to film the ‘Letter to Theodore’. This disturbance was refused.
Morton Smith died in 1991. Sometime around then—nobody quite knows when—the ‘Letter to Theodore’ went missing.
It seemed that no one besides Smith had seen the manuscript. The profession of Bible scholarship prepared a new wave of critiques based on a reading of his sexuality. He had been an Anglican priest, never married, and brought forward a scene of gay sex with Jesus.
To Christian Bible scholars, the course ahead was clear.
Throughout the 2000s, there was a pile-on.
“Secret Mark’ seemed thoroughly debunked in a series of articles and books. Leading the way: a Catholic Bible scholar named Stephen C. Carlson published The Gospel Hoax in 2005.
In 2007, a Christian music scholar named Peter Jeffery published a more pointed critique, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled. He writes:
“My impression is that Morton Smith was a man in great personal pain, even if (which I don’t know) he was usually able to hide this fact from the people who knew him.”
The critique might be phrased delicately, but the Christian coding was clear: Morton Smith was gay. As an enemy of the faith, he had tried to get a “gay scene” into the Bible.
Expertly, they saw through his ‘hoax’.
The posthumous outing ran into trouble.
In 2010, the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review did a feature on the controversy. Friends of Morton Smith wrote in, disputing that he had been homosexual. He seems to have dated two women. A friend reports:
“I suspect that he was just an Anglican clergyman who had had an unsuccessful love affair and afterward condemned himself to bachelorhood.”
The case against Morton Smith continued to fall apart on other grounds. It turned out that he’d had a longtime correspondence with the famed Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem. In 2008, their correspondence was published. They had talked for years about the ‘Letter to Theodore’.
Smith had written to Scholem in 1974, lamenting his books had been dismissed by Bible scholars. The letter he’d found seemed to be disregarded. He wrote:
“…the text is there and has to be explained, and the problems are there and have to be answered.”
Scholars were finding that ‘Secret Mark’ was helpful.
It seemed to illuminate a series of odd references in the gospels. Take Mark 14:51–52, where there is a young man who is ‘naked’ except for his linen garment. His presence is totally unexplained.
The scholars Winsome Munro and Richard Bauckham looked into the references to women in ‘Secret Mark’, finding a series of startling connections. And Scott G. Brown wrote a dissertation defending ‘Secret Mark’, with many papers to follow.
Handwriting analysis, working off the photographs, continued to suggest that the letter was not a forgery. The tide turned, as ‘Secret Mark’ began to seem like it might have been real, or at least, that most commentary about it had been deformed by homophobia.
A new story for the letter opened up.
Many scholars after Quentin Quesnell had noted his same point: the Clement letter did not actually sound like Clement had written it.
In two papers, in 2017 and 2019, the scholar Michael Zeddies laid out a different case. The letter sounds like it was written by Origen, the key 3rd century Christian scholar—who had a known connection to a man named Theodore!
Origen had presided over Theodore’s “same-sex union rite.”
Theodore’s interest in the “naked man with naked man” language might have, therefore, a bit of context.
Why would the attribution have shifted from Origen to Clement?
That was obvious. Origen had been declared a heretic. A later Catholic copyist would’ve been trying to save the letter from destruction.
And the terms in ‘Secret Mark’, Zeddies suggested, might’ve had meanings not obvious to later readers. The word ‘carnal’, for example, would not suggest sex scenes, but rather, the material world.
And early Christianity seemed to have a spiritual vocabulary of clothes. In Luke 3:10–11, or Matthew 10:10, or a range of other passages, ‘robes’ seem to represent spiritual states.
It’s often unclear when the Bible is about theological metaphors, and when it’s about ‘reality’—if it ever is.
How ‘secret’ had the ‘Secret Mark’ been?
Scholars noticed that a copy of the gospel of Matthew in Hebrew as preserved in Jewish sources had differences from the Christian text in Greek.
At the standard Christian copy of Matthew 21:17, we read:
“And he left them and went out of the city to Bethany, where he spent the night.”
But the Hebrew version has Jesus going to Bethany, and “explaining to them the Kingdom of God.”
This seemed to be the ‘Secret Mark’ scene. Jesus had been in Bethany, apparently, and delivered a deeper set of teachings. The scene didn’t appear to be sexual, or secret.
But why had ‘Secret Mark’ been kept secret?
As I sit with the scholarship, so many issues seem unclear, but chiefly this: Why would there have been intense efforts to suppress the ‘Secret Mark’ text if it only suggested teaching or baptism?
And why had the scene also been removed from Matthew 21:17? That version had no possible erotic cues.
A thought occurs to me. Perhaps the problem was the talk of a ‘mystery’. There are more references to it. In Colossians 1:26, Paul writes of:
“…the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people.”
Later Christians might expect to be told what this ‘mystery’ was. But later Christian teachers didn’t know. 🔶
I research God & sex. jonathan.belover@icloud.com. If switching to paid membership, please support me by signing up here: https://belover.medium.com/membership
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posted by Aloyzio Achutti at 9:25 AM
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