“Secret Mark”: Morton Smith—Forger

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In true BAR fashion, we wanted to present the case for a forgery, a position numerous scholars hold. After being turned down by three major scholars who embrace this position, editor Hershel Shanks undertook to summarize the evidence himself.

An increasing number of scholars are concluding that the Clement letter containing excerpts from Secret Mark is a forgery and that Morton Smith is the forger, according to University of North Carolina professor Bart Ehrman. Among those reaching this conclusion are senior scholars such as Ehrman, University of California professor Birger Pearson, Yale University professor Adela Yarbro Collins,¹ Acadia Divinity College professor Craig Evans² and Peter Jeffery, Princeton musicologist and author of The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery,³ as well as less-prominent scholars such as one of Ehrman’s Ph.D. students, Stephen Carlson, author of The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark.⁴

On the other hand, University of Toronto’s Scott Brown and University of Chicago’s Jeff Jay have written books and articles defending the authenticity of the Clement letter.⁵ And Southwest Missouri State University professor Charles Hedrick, who set the stage for this BAR discussion (“Secret Mark”: An Amazing Discovery), and Harvard professor Helmut Koester (“Secret Mark”: Was Morton Smith a Great Thespian and I a Complete Fool?) are also in Morton Smith’s corner. Hebrew University professor Guy Stroumsa, too, is convinced of the letter’s authenticity; the contention that it is Morton Smith’s modern forgery is, he says, “absurd and slanderous.”⁶

In 2003 Hedrick wrote that “Clementine scholars have, in the main, accepted the authenticity of Clement’s letter.”⁷ For Larry Hurtado, professor of New Testament at Edinburgh University Divinity School, “the matter appears now rather clearly settled”—but the other way! According to Hurtado, 050the “case against the authenticity of the text is persuasive, decisive, practically unanswerable.”⁸

The arguments in favor of a verdict of forgery are essentially two:

1. Morton Smith had the scholarly expertise required to create the forgery.

2. The document itself contains flaws and anachronisms that affirmatively show that it is a forgery.

A subsidiary issue is whether Smith had a motive to forge the document. However, even Ehrman recognizes that motives are so complex and mixed that no argument as to Smith’s motives is ultimately persuasive. Some scholars explain the forgery as Smith’s anger at being denied tenure at Brown. (Actually, he was not denied tenure; his contract was not renewed. He was tenured at Columbia before his books on Secret Mark were published.) Smith’s suspected (but unproven) homosexuality is another whispered and sometimes explicitly alleged motive. Smith, a former Episcopal deacon who drifted away (he never formally resigned), supposedly sought theological justification for homosexuality. In Smith’s view, as Birger Pearson has described it, “The historical Jesus was a libertine Jewish magician who engaged in homosexual acts with his initiates.”⁹ In Pearson’s judgment, Smith “had come to hate the Christian religion that he had once served as an Episcopal priest.”¹⁰ There are other possible motives as well. As Bart Ehrman has noted, “It is not at all inconceivable that sometimes one would forge a document both to see if he could get away with it and to see if he could make experts in his field look foolish.” Peter Jeffery reasoned similarly: He described the Clement letter as “arguably the most grandiose and reticulated ‘Fuck You’ ever perpetrated in the long and vituperative history of scholarship.”¹¹ For others it is an “ironic gay joke … [an] amusing bit of post-modern scholarly theatre.”¹² Jeffery agrees: Smith’s “proposal” keeps “dissolving into dirty jokes.”¹³ Or as Pearson described it: “I can just see Smith laughing from his grave at having duped so many well-trained scholars with his cleverly composed ‘gospel.’ ”¹⁴

Smith’s defenders of course find these suggestions as to motive far-fetched and 051unpersuasive. “Recent scholars … continue to search for a plausible motive that can convict Smith himself of forgery,” writes Jeff Jay.¹⁵ In his judgment, they have found none.

Did Smith have the necessary skills to forge the document? To pull off this forgery, the forger would need expertise in several scholarly areas:

1. He would need to know enough to forge the two fragments of Secret Mark. Thus, he would have to be an expert in composing Greek, but also in New Testament textual criticism sufficient to fool a text critic like Harvard’s Helmut Koester. The complexity of such text criticism is illustrated in Koester’s contribution to this discussion of Secret Mark (“Secret Mark”: Was Morton Smith a Great Thespian and I a Complete Fool?). (It must be added that not all scholars would agree with Koester’s analysis. For example, Adela Collins believes that even “if Secret Mark is authentic, it is more likely to be derived from canonical Mark than vice versa.”¹⁶ This is the opposite of Koester’s view, as expressed in “Secret Mark”: Was Morton Smith a Great Thespian and I a Complete Fool?.)

2. Smith as forger would also have to be an expert in Clement, the purported author of the letter, as well as in the various subjects, like the Carpocratians, mentioned in the letter. He would also have to have sufficient knowledge of Latin to forge the Latin passage in the letter.

3. Finally, he would have to be an expert in 18th-century handwriting (paleography), when the second-century Clement letter was apparently copied in the back of the copy of a 1646 edition (by Isaac Voss) of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch.

In early scholarly discussions, Smith’s defenders maintained that he did not have one or more of these skills, so the letter could not have been forged by Smith. This, of course, led to detailed investigations of the scholarly apparatus that Smith controlled. Those scholars who conclude that the letter is a forgery did in-depth studies of Smith’s scholarly credentials and scholarly relationships. What they found was that Smith did have all the scholarly skills needed to forge the document. Paradoxically, this led to one of the few agreements between the letter’s detractors and the letter’s defenders. In the words of critic Stephen Carlson: Smith was “one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century.”¹⁷ All would agree, in Bart Ehrman’s words, that “Morton Smith’s text is nothing if not brilliant.”¹⁸

Moreover, Smith had the training, interest and skills needed to forge the letter. In addition to his Harvard Ph.D. under famed New Testament scholar Arthur Darby Nock, Smith had a second Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in Greek manuscript studies.

Did he know enough about Clement of Alexandria, the Church Father who supposedly composed the letter? A search of Smith’s bibliography showed that he indeed had an interest and background in patristics (the works of the Church Fathers). One of Smith’s scholarly articles cited Clement four times. An examination of Smith’s private correspondence also revealed his interest in patristics. In one letter Smith wrote that in a six-month period, he was devoting half his studies “to the early Fathers, especially to Clement.”

What about his ability to forge the 18th-century handwriting of the surviving copy of the Clement letter? Another letter from Smith’s private correspondence revealed his intention to study paleography. Moreover, in Bart Ehrman’s judgment, it is easy to fake an 18th-century Greek hand: “It is not hard, by the way, to think that he fabricated an 18th-century hand; with some knowledge of paleography, a few dated specimens, any skill at all, and a little practice, it could be done easily enough.”¹⁹

Stephen Carlson, one of Smith’s chief critics, concludes that “the various technical details required to produce Secret Mark were within his documented capabilities.” On the other hand, another of Smith’s major critics, Peter Jeffery attributes the letter’s flaws to Smith’s ignorance; in Jeffery’s words: “For someone who wrote as much as [Smith] did about early Christian worship, it is remarkable how little he read, even of what was considered required reading in his time.”²⁰ Smith is damned, it seems, for knowing too little and too much.

But even if Morton Smith had the necessary skills to forge the document, that does not indicate, let alone prove, that he did in fact forge it.

For some, the forgery is obvious. As one critic put it: “Anyone who could not 052spot it [the Clement letter as a forgery] from a height of 3,000 feet should not be allowed to make authoritative pronouncements on the authenticity of texts that relate to [Jesus].”²¹ Other, perhaps even better qualified, scholars have concluded, however, that the letter is indeed authentic.

Smith’s critics have raised a number of factors that arouse suspicion. For instance: Smith admitted that he did not look closely at the letter on the visit to Mar Saba when he discovered and photographed it. He never went back to examine it more carefully—to see under a magnifying glass whether there were stray marks or limned letters that would not appear in the photograph or to examine the ink and its penetration into the page, etc. In Bart Ehrman’s words, “Smith was an expert in the field and surely knew that the only way to verify a claim to authenticity is to examine the physical specimen.”²² Why, then, did Smith never go back to Mar Saba to look at the letter again? In his peroration to one presentation, Ehrman concludes: “Anyone who believes that Smith did not forge the document has to answer that question.” I’m not so sure of Ehrman’s logic. That Smith never returned to Mar Saba may raise suspicions, but this is hardly proof that Smith forged the letter.

However, numerous scholars have also uncovered alleged errors that, if correct, do demonstrate that this letter is a forgery (and even that Smith is the forger). Fortunately, many of these demonstrations were summarized by Birger Pearson at a symposium on Secret Mark at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature held in Boston in November 2008. Much of what follows is drawn from Pearson’s paper.²³ You may wonder why I didn’t ask my friend Birger to write this section of our Secret Mark coverage. I did. Birger was reluctant to write in opposition to the conclusion of his Doktorvater, Helmut Koester, for whom Pearson has enormous respect. Koester wrote the following section in this BAR discussion, supporting the authenticity of the letter, after providing a formidable text-critical analysis of Secret Mark and canonical Mark. I must add, however, that Birger’s hesitation to write in opposition to Koester in the pages of BAR did not stop him from plainly expressing his view in a scholarly journal: “I cannot see how anyone … could entertain the possibility that the Secret Gospel of Mark plays any role at all in the development of the canonical Gospel of Mark.” I also asked Bart Ehrman to write this section of our coverage, but he was overtaxed with other assignments. Stephen Carlson declined because he understandably felt it would be unfair to put him up against two giants like Helmut Koester and Charlie Hedrick. So the task fell to me.

Let us turn to some of the flaws in the Clement letter that demonstrate the document is a forgery.

One passage explains how the Carpocrations have adulterated Mark’s gospel. In Clement’s judgment the Carpocrations have done this by mixing good with evil. Clement expresses this by a simile: The result of what the Carpocrations have done is like salt that has been adulterated. The exact quote from the Clement letter is: “True things, being mixed with inventions [the views of the Carpocratians], are falsified, so that, as the saying goes, even the salt loses its savor.” This is an anachronism, says Stephen Carlson (and others). Carlson points out that the only way salt can be mixed with another substance to adulterate it is if it is in a form that can be poured—and that was not possible in antiquity. The technology for transforming rock salt into granulated salt is a modern technique. This fabricated passage from Secret Mark was supposedly especially delightful to Morton Smith because the technology to granulate salt was devised by the Morton Salt Company, a pun on his name: Even when it rains, Morton’s salt pours. This is the first and most frequently mentioned flaw that demonstrates that the Clement letter is a forgery and Morton Smith is the forger.

The second most commonly identified anachronism in Secret Mark relates to homosexuality, another subject in which, it is hinted, Morton Smith had a special interest. (According to one commentator, “The historic Christian opposition to 053homosexuality was a subject of great personal importance to Smith.”²⁴) In Mark 14:51–52, a young man following Jesus in Gethsemene is seized by the Roman soldiers but runs away to escape his captors, who hold on to his linen tunic, exposing the fact that he is otherwise naked. According to Smith’s detractors, Smith interprets the naked man as having sought a sexual encounter with Jesus. Again according to Smith’s detractors, Smith finds this same kind of interpretation in Secret Mark. In Secret Mark, Jesus resuscitates a youth who, in Pearson’s words, is “turned on” by Jesus. The youth invites Jesus to his house. Again quoting Pearson: “What they do there is not stated, but the two meet again after six days. The youth comes to Jesus [quoting Secret Mark:] ‘wearing a linen cloth over his naked body,’ and they spend the night together. Jesus initiates the youth into [again quoting Secret Mark:] ‘the mystery of the kingdom of God,’ presumably involving sexual intercourse.” According to Pearson, “The view of homosexuality that is found in the letter and the Secret Gospel is rooted in the mid-20th century and is totally inconsistent with attitudes toward what we call homosexuality that were found in ancient Greco-Roman culture.” Others have made basically the same argument.

Other flaws in the letter are often difficult for the layperson to understand or appreciate. Pearson and Swedish scholar Per Beskow noticed a number of phrases in Secret Mark that are also found in the canonical Gospels of Mark and John that are “inappropriate contexts” in Secret Mark. Examples are “Son of David, have mercy on me” (Mark 10:47) and “She prostrated herself before Jesus” (John 11:32). These, says Pearson, “convey an impression of inauthenticity.”²⁵

Another alleged anachronism: The letter of Clement to one Theodore begins by identifying Clement: “From the letters of the most holy Clement the author of Stromates (Miscellanies).” The letter was purportedly written in the late second or early third century. But Clement, it is said, was not known by the title Stromates until later. (But this identification seems as if it was written not by Clement but by a later scribe.)

Stephen Carlson sees traces of what is known as “forger’s tremor” in the handwriting of the Clement letter: shaky lines and pen lifts in the middle of strokes: “The forger’s tremor is manifest … Pen lifts are evident.”²⁶ Based on his paleographical analysis, he finds the letter to be a 20th-century attempt to imitate an 18th-century hand. Carlson speculates that Morton Smith bought the 17th-century book (available then for about $300) before going to the Mar Saba monastery. Smith then wrote the letter of Clement in an 18th-century hand on the blank end-pages at the back of the book. According to this scenario, he planted the book in the Mar Saba library. (Smith himself cites ten scholars, however, who dated the handwriting to about 1750, plus or minus about 50 years.²⁷ )

Other alleged flaws in the Clement letter are so complex and esoteric that neither I nor the vast majority of BAR readers could understand them, let alone assess them. All we can do is report that they are numerous and heatedly asserted and denied.

Still other alleged flaws are understandable but nevertheless difficult for a lay reader to assess. For example, Peter Jeffery, the Princeton musicologist, finds that features of Alexandrian church liturgy implicit in Smith’s text did not in fact appear in the liturgy until centuries after Clement’s time. (I wonder if there is any liturgiological expert who has expressed agreement with Jeffery’s liturgiological argument.²⁸)

On the other hand, a professor of church liturgics at the General Theological Seminary in New York and a leading liturgiologist (now deceased), Thomas Talley, found Smith’s “meticulous literary analysis” to have “profound significance for the study of New Testament tradition and its relation to liturgical tradition.”²⁹ (Jeffery himself acknowledges that Talley’s book is “a very original and important book on the development of the Christian liturgical year.”³⁰)

And so it goes—scholar pitted against scholar while Morton Smith rests, perhaps uncomfortably, in his grave.

In true BAR fashion, we wanted to present the case for a forgery, a position numerous scholars hold. After being turned down by three major scholars who embrace this position, editor Hershel Shanks undertook to summarize the evidence himself. An increasing number of scholars are concluding that the Clement letter containing excerpts from Secret Mark is a forgery and that Morton Smith is the forger, according to University of North Carolina professor Bart Ehrman. Among those reaching this conclusion are senior scholars such as Ehrman, University of California professor Birger Pearson, Yale University professor Adela Yarbro Collins,1 Acadia Divinity […]