“Secret Mark”: Restoring a Dead Scholar’s Reputation

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Hershel Shanks reveals his own conclusion about Secret Mark as a result of his study of the opposing arguments.

My earlier contribution to this discussion of the letter containing Secret Mark is headed “Morton Smith—Forger”. My task was to present, as fairly as I could, the argument that the letter is Morton Smith’s modern forgery. I conscientiously tried to do this. But here I must confess that as I read the arguments and researched the issues, I could not help but conclude that Morton Smith was being very badly treated. So here let me state my own candid conclusion.

It seems to me the very plethora of flaws that Smith’s detractors have found in itself undermines their case. It is not (at this point) that they are not all actually flaws (they prove too much), but that Smith himself must have realized that forging a document like this without detection would be well-nigh impossible. You would have to forge beyond detection a version of Mark and a second–third-century letter of Clement and the 18th-century handwriting in which the letter was written. It is not simply that, to accomplish this, a forger would have to have a great number of esoteric skills and the chutzpah to do this. It is that Morton Smith surely knew two things: (1) A single clear flaw would unmask him; and (2) if he were caught, the consequences would be horrendous—he would be drummed out of the academy and his scholarly career would be forever destroyed. It is inconceivable to me that he would take this chance, especially given the range of expertise in a variety of different disciplines required to make a successful forgery and where one clear mistake would expose him. In these circumstances, would Smith have dared try to fool the world of scholarly experts?

But it is worse than this. According to Morton Smith’s detractors, he planted flaws—as a joke! The clearest and most frequently cited flaw is the reference in the Clement letter to adulterated salt. This, their argument goes, is an anachronism because the technique for granulating salt was invented only in the 20th century—by the Morton Salt Company! Morton made a pun on his own name—in effect planting evidence of forgery. Smith’s detractors would have us believe that Smith not only 060took a chance that he could produce a manuscript that would fool the experts, but that he would deliberately plant a flaw—the pun on his name—as a kind of higher-level joke.^a It is impossible for me to believe this.

Stephen Carlson explains the salt anachronism in his 2005 book The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark. Clement criticizes the Carpocrations for mixing bad doctrine [i.e., their additions to Secret Mark] with good doctrine [i.e., the “undoctored” Secret Mark]. When the good and the bad are “mixed,” says Clement, it is like salt that has lost its “savor.” According to Carlson (and others), you could not “mix” salt with something in ancient times (thus adulterating it) because granulated salt had not yet been invented. This happened only in the 20th century. Here is how Carlson puts his argument:

“[The Clement letter] presupposes salt-making technology that did not exist in Clement’s place and time … For salt to be mixed with such an adulterant, it would have to be loose and free-flowing, but free-flowing salt is a modern invention. Pure salt draws moisture from the air, forming clumps, and often requires a mallet to be broken apart for domestic use.”¹

The first thing to notice about the Carlson quotation is that he didn’t include any footnotes. This is strange in a book with only 102 pages of large-type text supported by 28 pages of dense, small-type footnotes. Were there no references to salt in antiquity that would support this argument? Did Carlson look—and find none?

The fact is there are dozens of ancient references to salt in ancient rabbinic as well as classical literature. Here are a couple from the Mishnah, the earliest rabbinic code, dating to about 200 C.E., that flatly contradict the “anachronistic” salt argument:

It is permitted to “scatter salt on the Ramp [of the Temple altar] so that [the priests] will not slip.”² This is a clear indication that loose salt was available in ancient times.

A second, even clearer example requires us to enter more deeply into the abstruse world of rabbinic texts. A passage from the Mishnah discusses foods “of [made by] the gentiles” that are “forbidden” to Jews, although Jews may “benefit” from them—for example, by selling them. Among these foods forbidden to Jews if made by gentiles is salt.³ The Talmud explains the reason for this: The salt is forbidden to Jews because it may have been “mixed” with unkosher fish, that is, fish without scales (see Leviticus 11:9–12 and Deuteronomy 14:9–10).⁴

The point here is that even in antiquity salt could be “mixed” with other substances. It can be—and these passages give instances where it was—adulterated with unkosher substances that would make it unfit for Jews. It is thus quite clear that there is nothing anachronistic about the sentence in the Clement letter that tells us that “true things being mixed with inventions are falsified so that, as the saying goes, even the salt loses its savor.” In antiquity salt was regularly mixed with other substances.

What about the alleged invention of granulated salt by the Morton Salt Company? All that the Morton Salt Company did was add magnesium carbonate to the salt, which acted as an anticaking agent, so that the salt would flow freely through the tiny holes of a salt shaker even in humid weather. (The additive has since been changed to calcium silicate.) But the company was selling granulated table salt long before it decided to add an anticlumping agent. When the water in salt water evaporates, what is left is loose salt, easily adulterated.

Hence there is no substance to the salt argument. Salt in ancient times was often “adulterated” and would sometimes lose its “savor” (or saltiness).

The second argument that Carlson and Peter Jeffery tout most strongly relates to homosexuality. The attitudes toward homosexuality reflected in the Clement letter are those of the 1950s, not the attitudes toward homosexuality in ancient times, they say. As Carlson puts it: “Secret Mark exude[s] the sexual mores of the 1950s.”⁵ I am by no means an expert on homosexuality, but I do know that there is great disparity among scholars as to what ancient homosexuality was. I recently read a review of a new book titled The Greeks and Greek Love,⁶ which the reviewer describes as “a counterblast to Kenneth Dover’s classic Greek Homosexuality (1978).” Clearly scholars vehemently disagree about the nature of ancient homosexuality, as I suspect they do about modern homosexuality. This is hardly enough to establish that the document has been forged.

Carlson also claims that he detects 061characteristics in the Clement letter that expose it as a forgery—so-called “forger’s tremor,” the slow and unaccustomed hand of a forger’s copycat writing, shakes, stops and starts. So far as is known, Carlson is no handwriting expert, let alone a Greek handwriting expert. We may be able to comment more on this argument of his, once we have in hand the report of the Greek handwriting expert who is in the course of examining the documents. (Carlson apparently did not take the precaution of consulting a handwriting expert.) In the meantime, we note that the Clement letter is indeed “a copy.” It was made in the 18th century, presumably by a monk, who copied it from an earlier copy or even the original of the Clement letter. The monk who wrote out the text was not simply smoothly writing out his own thoughts, but was copying another manuscript, which may account for the “forger’s tremor” and other characteristics of forgery that Carlson claims to detect.

Carlson also has other reasons on which to rest his case. For example, another alleged flaw identified by Carlson (and Bart Ehrman) is that the letter is “more like Clement than Clement ever was.” One scholar (A.H. Criddle) looked at Clement’s other writings and identified some words that appeared only once. Yet some of these words appear several times in the Clement letter. In Bart Ehrman’s words: It is “as if someone knew Clement’s rare words (easily done since Stahlin’s 1936 list of Clement’s vocabulary) and wanted to use a number of them to show the Clementine distinctive vocabulary (but overdoing it).”⁷ Ehrman could find no plausible reason consistent with authenticity that would explain this oddity. Really? Scott Brown cites a study using similar methodology that demonstrates that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare.⁸ In Scott Brown’s view, “In most cases, the very thing Carlson asserts are uncharacteristic of Clement or of an authentic letter are precisely what one might expect of a real letter by Clement.”⁹

Not only is the Clement letter too Clement to be Clement, but the quotations from Mark are “too Marcan to be Mark.”¹⁰

I am also impressed by the fact that Smith spent 15 years studying and researching the letter before publishing it. And, as even Bart Ehrman, one of Smith’s detractors, recognizes, Smith’s scholarly publication at the end of this time required “slow, arduous and painstaking work” with an “impressive” result.¹¹ This is inconsistent with forgery. It is not simply that he took the time (15 years), but that he interacted with close and admired colleagues. In Helmut Koester’s contribution to this BAR discussion, he mentions an occasion when he and Smith spent several hours a day together for a week discussing the details of Smith’s interpretation of the document. Smith struggled to understand and interpret it. He had difficulty deciphering the 18th-century hand in which the letter was written. As Koester says, if it is a forgery, Smith was a great actor and Koester a complete fool.

There is another situation much like this that strongly supports the authenticity of the document. Hebrew University professor Guy Strousma has examined some 40 years of correspondence between Smith and Gershom Scholem, then the world’s leading authority on Jewish mysticism and, in Stroumsa’s words, “one of the brighter stars in the Jerusalem firmament.”¹² Scholem was one of Smith’s closest mentors. Smith spent the war years in Jerusalem studying at the Hebrew University for his Ph.D. When he returned to the United States, he began a correspondence with his mentor. That relationship continued until Scholem’s death in 1982. This correspondence includes detailed descriptions of Smith’s struggles to understand the letter containing Secret Mark. Is it reasonable to conclude that Smith would have prevaricated like this to his mentor to whom he was so devoted? For Stroumsa, these letters “are enough to convince even the most skeptical reader 090about Smith’s honesty … No one can seriously deny that [Smith’s] discovery of the Clementine letter was genuine.”

Much of the criticism directed at Smith concerns his commentary on, rather than the text of, the Clement letter. In the view of his critics (especially Peter Jeffery), Smith’s commentary is concerned with establishing a sanction for homosexuality. Smith does interpret the text of the letter as involving homoeroticism. Many scholars disagree with Smith’s interpretation of the text, but disagreeing with this commentary is not tantamount to establishing forgery of the text. As Scott Brown has observed, “Jeffery [and other scholars] has confused Morton Smith’s misinterpretation of the letter with the letter itself.”¹³ Smith’s interpretation of the letter may be wrong, but this does not justify a finding of forgery based on this misinterpretation rather than on the text of the letter itself, quite apart from Smith’s view of the letter.

The major compilation of alleged flaws most frequently cited to establish the forgery of the document is Stephen Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax. Carlson is a lawyer (some may say this is the kind of thing a lawyer should not get involved in!), and his book, not surprisingly, reads like a lawyer’s summation to a jury in a murder trial: detail upon detail, piled up higher and higher, until the jury is convinced that the defendant did it. Carlson contends he has met his burden of establishing “means, motive and opportunity.”¹⁴ In slightly different words, as Larry Hurtado’s preface states, “Smith uniquely had the abilities, the opportunity, and the motives” to forge the document.¹⁵

There is a fundamental difference, however, between this case and a murder trial. Here there is no corpus delicti. In a murder trial there is no question that someone has been murdered. The only question is whether the defendant is the murderer.

If it were conceded that the document was forged and the only question was who committed the forgery, we would have a valid analogy to a murder trial where ability, opportunity and motive may be enough to establish the identity of the murderer. But here Carlson is attempting to use these elements to establish the preliminary issue, that there was, in fact, a murder, that the document was, in fact, a forgery.

If a difficult, cantankerous and demanding old man died in a hospital and it was shown that a nurse had given him an injection shortly before his death, showing that the nurse had the ability, opportunity and motive to commit a murder would not be enough to establish that she had murdered him. The prosecution would first have to prove that the old man had been murdered and had not died of natural causes.

In the same way, ability, opportunity and motive become relevant only if the forgery of the document has first been established and we use this evidence to establish who did it. That is not this case. Even if Smith had the ability, opportunity and motive to forge the document, that does not prove that it has been forged.

Yes, Carlson does discuss various flaws that supposedly expose the forgery for a fact, but the one that Carlson touts most strongly—the allegedly anachronistic reference to granulated salt—actually demonstrates the weakness of his case. This abundance of weak arguments weakens rather than strengthens the detractors’ case.

Morton Smith deserves to have his reputation restored.

Hershel Shanks reveals his own conclusion about Secret Mark as a result of his study of the opposing arguments.