“Secret Mark”: Was Morton Smith a Great Thespian and I a Complete Fool?

054

Harvard professor Helmut Koester presents a fascinating textual analysis of Secret Mark. Koester includes an account of his relationship with Columbia professor Morton Smith who discovered Secret Mark (or forged it) and why he believes it is authentic.

Secret Mark makes a significant contribution to a better understanding of the transmission and history of the Gospel of Mark as we have it in its canonized edition of the New Testament.

New Testament scholars generally agree that the Gospel of Mark is the oldest of the four canonical gospels, probably written shortly after the year 70 C.E. (the date of the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple). It is also the shortest. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke were, in the view of most scholars, written later, at the end of the first century. Together, these three gospels—Mark, Matthew and Luke—comprise the so-called Synoptic Gospels because they follow a parallel track in telling the story of the life of Jesus. The Fourth Gospel, John, stands by itself and was composed later.

Most scholars also agree that Matthew and Luke used a copy of Mark in composing their own gospels. We know this because of the many instances, known as the Triple Tradition, in which Matthew and Luke are identical, or nearly identical, to Mark.

The quotations from Mark in Matthew and Luke give us our oldest text of the Gospel of Mark. Subsequent to its composition, Mark was edited and revised somewhat by someone scholars call a redactor. How do we know this? Quite remarkably, in a number of instances the text of Mark that Matthew and Luke used and copied in their gospels differs slightly (and sometimes more broadly) from the subsequently revised text that ultimately became the canonized Mark. The revisions to the original Mark were made either by Mark himself or by a subsequent editor. Thus, our earliest copy of Mark is visible in the common agreements of Matthew and Luke in their reproduction of the text of Mark.

The best evidence we have of the subsequent, revised Mark that differs from the 055earlier Mark used by Matthew and Luke is in the instances where canonical Mark is different from (or longer than) the quotations of earlier Mark in these other two gospels. And this is where Secret Mark comes in. Secret Mark can help us understand the history of the text of Mark’s gospel.

Let’s begin with an example. In three parallel passages, Jesus’ disciples ask him why he speaks to the people in parables (Mark 4:10; Matthew 13:10; Luke 8:9). Jesus replies that parables are what the people understand. But to the disciples, the situation is different. For the disciples, “It has been given to know …” Know what? In both Matthew and Luke, it is given to the disciples “to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.”¹ But in Mark, it is “mystery,” in the singular. The plural “mysteries” was, no doubt, what Matthew and Luke must have found in their copies of Mark’s gospel.

The difference is significant.

The term “mystery” was used originally to refer to a single tradition that was communicated in a saying or parable. If the reference was to more than one saying or parable, then the plural, “mysteries,” was appropriate, indeed required. Earliest Mark, as quoted by Matthew and Luke, is referring to more than one parable as a “mystery.” Hence, the plural is required.

The plural “mysteries” is also used in this way—to refer to a plurality of traditions—in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, the commentary on Habakkuk states that God had made known to the Righteous Teacher “all the mysteries of the words of his servants, the prophets” (1QpHab 7:4–5).

Paul (whose letters are the earliest New Testament texts) also uses “mystery” only when referring to a single tradition (saying or parable). Hence, when he refers to more than one of these traditions (sayings or parables), he uses the plural “mysteries.” In 1 Corinthians 13, which includes the famous disquisition on love, Paul is speaking of this requisite attribute: If “I do not have love, I am nothing.” In one of his examples he says that even if “[I] understand all mysteries” (1 Corinthians 13:2)—that is, all the different parables and secret sayings—then “I am still nothing” without love.

Later, the meaning of “mystery” was broadened. Instead of referring to a single tradition, it refers to the entire gospel message. For example, in the later deutero-Pauline letter to the Ephesians (Ephesians 1:9, 3:3),^a the singular is used to designate the entire gospel message; the author uses “mystery” in this broadened way. He is saying that Christ has made known to us “the mystery of his will” (Ephesians 1:9).

Similarly in Ephesians 3:3, when deutero-Paul is preaching to the Gentiles, he tells them how “the mystery was made known to me,” referring to the entire gospel message. Similarly, when the author refers to the relationship of Christ to the church, he says, “This is a great mystery” (Ephesians 5:32). The singular is also used to designate the entire gospel message in other deutero-Pauline letters as well (Colossians 1:26–27, 2:2, 4:3; 1 Timothy 3:9, 16).

In the passage we are dealing with in Mark 4:11, Matthew 13:11 and Luke 8:10, Jesus is talking to his disciples about “sayings” and “parables.” Matthew and Luke have it right—“mysteries” is the 056proper reference. Canonical Mark has the singular, “mystery,” evidently understanding the term to refer to the entire gospel message. The term did not yet have this meaning, however, when Mark originally wrote his gospel. Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, seems to have erred.

The explanation is that the copy of Mark that Matthew and Luke used had it right. Some later editor must have changed the plural “mysteries” in Mark 4:11 that Matthew and Luke read in their text of Mark to the singular “mystery,” referring by that term to the entire gospel message.

This was most likely the same person who inserted (after Mark 10:34, as Clement tells us) the story in Secret Mark of the young man who came to Jesus for the night, during which Jesus taught him the “mystery [singular] of the kingdom of God”; that is, he taught him the entire gospel message.

That this was an act of teaching and not of performing a mysterious rite is explicitly stated in the text of the Secret Gospel as quoted by Clement: “He taught him the mystery.”

Another important trace that the editor (Mark or someone else) of Secret Mark left in the extant text of the Gospel of Mark may be found in the story of the epileptic child whom Jesus resuscitated. The story is told in all three Synoptic Gospels (Mark 9:14–29; Matthew 17:14–21; Luke 9:37–42). In Matthew and Luke, the story is told quite briefly: Jesus rebukes the demon that has entered the child, and the child is healed. In Matthew and Luke, the demon or unclean spirit simply leaves the boy. In Mark the story is more than twice as long. In Mark when the boy is brought to Jesus, the boy falls on the ground foaming at the mouth. Jesus has a conversation with the boy’s father, telling him, “All things are possible to him that believes.” The father replies, “I believe.” All this is absent from Matthew and Luke’s version of the story. Only after all this does Jesus rebuke the demon, as in Matthew and Luke.

Then, in Mark, the evangelist quotes Jesus’ exorcism formula: “You spirit that keeps this boy from speaking and hearing, I command you to come out of him and never enter into him again.” This 057is the longest exorcism formula in the entire gospel literature. It is entirely absent from Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts.

In Mark the unclean spirit then cries out and throws the boy to the ground. He appears to be a corpse. The onlookers cry out: “He has died.” But then Jesus “takes him by the hand and raises him”; the boy is resuscitated.

This, too, is missing from the story as related in Matthew and Luke. They must have gotten their version of the story from a copy of Mark that was different from our extant Mark. By the time the extant Mark was canonized, it contained many more details, especially the detail of the resuscitation of the boy. A later redactor of Mark expanded the older story in this way. The earlier version of Mark must have still been in the text of Mark’s gospel that was used in, and therefore preserved by, Matthew and Luke.

Parallels to this story of the raising of the boy are seen in Secret Mark, which relates the story of a woman who tells Jesus that her brother has died; when Jesus goes to the tomb, a loud cry is heard. Jesus rolled away the stone, went into the tomb where the young man was interred, “stretched out his hand and raised him.”

The close parallels between this story in Secret Mark and the longer, later version of the story preserved in the extant Mark suggests that both stories come from the same redactor. He expanded the story of the boy in Mark to give it the shape of a resurrection story and then added another resurrection story (as preserved in Secret Mark).

The resurrection story in Secret Mark also has a close parallel in the story of the raising of Lazarus told in the Gospel of John (John 11). Both stories occur in Bethany. Lazarus is in Bethany by Jerusalem, and the boy in Secret Mark is in another Bethany, beyond the Jordan.^b In the Secret Gospel, a sister comes to Jesus telling him of her brother who died. In John, the two sisters who come to Jesus are named—Martha and Mary. In both stories, there is a loving relationship between Jesus and the person who is resuscitated. In Secret Mark the young man looks at Jesus and loves him. In John it is reported “how he [Jesus] loved him [Lazarus]” (John 11:36). In Secret Mark a loud voice is heard from the tomb; in John, Jesus cries with a loud voice (John 11:43). Secret Mark’s story is certainly much older in its form than John’s account of the raising of Lazarus. In John the author of the Gospel of John has expanded this story. In John the doubling of the sisters and giving names to them as well as to the man who had died (Lazarus), the long delay in Jesus’ response to the request to come, the encounters with both sisters, the introduction of Jews as bystanders—all these are typical signs of a later literary redaction in John of the older story 058that is still preserved for us, however, in Secret Mark.

Another important trace of the work of the redactor in Secret Mark may be found in the episode at the end of the account of Jesus’ arrest by Roman soldiers in Gethsemene, as described in the extant version of Mark (Mark 14:51–52). A young man in Jesus’ company is dressed in a linen cloth. When the soldiers try to apprehend him, he flees, leaving his linen cloth behind. He is naked. That episode does not appear in Matthew or Luke. It had not yet appeared in the copy of Mark that Matthew and Luke had available to them. It was added only by a later redactor of Mark’s gospel.

There are many other signs that this redactor of Mark was also the redactor who is responsible for Secret Mark.²

The conclusion is clear. The text of the Gospel of Mark that is preserved in the extant manuscripts of this gospel includes the additions of a redactor, the same redactor who inserted the story of the raising of the young man in Secret Mark. That story, however, was not accepted in the final revision that produced the canonical text of Mark. But throughout Mark’s gospel there is evidence that the “author” of the Secret Gospel also made a number of other changes in Mark’s text after that text had been used by Matthew and Luke. These changes were therefore not included in Matthew and Luke’s “copies” from Mark, but they do show up in canonized Mark, which was taken from a subsequently revised version. Most of the changes in this revision survive in the copies of Mark preserved in the manuscript tradition as it was included in the canon of the New Testament.

Secret Mark is a remarkable help in solving the vexing question, much discussed in the history of scholarship, of the “common agreements” of Matthew and Luke in their reproduction of the Marcan text.

Whoever wants to make the case that Morton Smith forged Clement’s letter has to explain why the extant text of the Gospel of Mark differs from the text of the Gospel of Mark that Matthew and Luke used and why these features are so closely related to the Secret Gospel of Mark.

It would also be important to demonstrate how a forger of the mid-20th century could have known so well the conventions of letter-writing in antiquity that only scholarship at the end of the 20th century has clarified—indeed a “superhuman accomplishment,” as Jeff Jay has stated in his recent publication.³ He demonstrates that particular characteristics of letter writing in Clement’s time found in the letter containing the quotes from the Secret Gospel had not yet been recognized as typical at the time Morton Smith published the Secret Gospel.

I first met Morton Smith in 1960 at a conference at which he presented Secret Mark for the first time. After that meeting I sought him out, asked for a copy of the transcribed text and began discussing the matter with him. I especially criticized him for suggesting that the initiation rite in the Secret Gospel indicated some homosexual ritual. He was quite open to my criticism, and we became friends. In 1963, when I was a visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg, Morton had a sabbatical, which he spent searching for magical texts in European museums. He then asked me if he could bring me his manuscript, the first draft of what a decade later was to be published by Harvard University Press under the title Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark. We met several hours a day for a whole week, discussing details of the interpretation of Secret Mark. During those days, I learned that Morton seriously struggled to understand and interpret this document; he also had difficulty deciphering the 18th-century handwriting in which the letter had been copied on the blank pages at the end of the 17th-century book. Obviously, a forger would not have had the problems that Morton was struggling with. Or Morton Smith was an accomplished actor and I a complete fool.

There is one additional important detail: Morton Smith was not a good form-critical scholar. He was trained in the older school of source criticism and believed that if you reconstruct the oldest available written source, you have direct information about the historical Jesus. This approach does not account for the several decades of oral tradition that shaped the Jesus tradition before anything was ever put into writing. This process of oral transmission was recognized more clearly only in form criticism that identified other factors that produced the oral forms of the tradition used by the early Christian communities. It was only this form-critical scholarship that was able to explain why the traditions about and from Jesus had been preserved in their characteristic shapes. Morton Smith was knowledgeable in none of this. It would have been completely beyond his ability to forge a text that, in terms of form criticism, is a perfect older form of the same story as appears in John 11 as the raising of Lazarus.

It is high time to bury the senseless attempts—after his death—to prove that Morton Smith, a distinguished historian of antiquity, was a forger. And it is high time that scholars of early Christianity face the fact that the extant text of the canonical Gospel of Mark differs from the original text of this gospel that was used by the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

Harvard professor Helmut Koester presents a fascinating textual analysis of Secret Mark. Koester includes an account of his relationship with Columbia professor Morton Smith who discovered Secret Mark (or forged it) and why he believes it is authentic. Secret Mark makes a significant contribution to a better understanding of the transmission and history of the Gospel of Mark as we have it in its canonized edition of the New Testament. New Testament scholars generally agree that the Gospel of Mark is the oldest of the four canonical gospels, probably written shortly after the year 70 C.E. (the date of […]