The Secret Gospel of Mark

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In the preceding article, Rami Khouri lays out the case for identifying Wadi el-Kharrar as the New Testament’s “Bethany beyond the Jordan,” the site where John baptized. There may be another piece of evidence strengthening that case—and it comes from a spectacular source: a long-lost passage from a “mystic” version of Mark’s gospel known as the Secret Gospel of Mark.¹

This gospel passage was rediscovered in 1958 by Morton Smith, who was a respected professor of history at Columbia University. While cataloguing manuscripts in the tower library of Mar Saba, a Greek Orthodox monastery in the Judean wilderness, Smith photographed an 18th-century copy of a Greek letter ascribed to the second-century church father Clement of Alexandria. The author of this letter describes “a more spiritual” version of Mark’s gospel and quotes two passages from it. So Smith did not find a gospel manuscript but, rather, a letter by Clement of Alexandria, which is the only text we have of the Secret Gospel of Mark.

Important finds quickly become magnets for controversy. No sooner had Smith published his discovery than scholars began to debate whether it might be a forgery, some even suspecting Smith himself. Recent evidence, however, tends to exonerate Smith. I will explain why, but first let’s look at what the gospel quotations say and what light they may shed on the location of “Bethany beyond the Jordan.”

The longer of the two quotations from the Secret Gospel describes one of Jesus’ best-known miracles, the raising of a man buried in a tomb. Interestingly, in the canonical Gospels only the Gospel of John (11:1–44) recounts this miracle; the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) do not. If the passage from the Secret Gospel is authentic, then a version of the Gospel of Mark contained this miracle as well.

According to the purported letter of Clement, the raising of the dead man follows Mark 10:34. The Secret Gospel’s account reads:

And they came to Bethany. And there was a certain woman there whose brother had died. And approaching, she prostrated before Jesus and said to him, “Son of David have mercy on me.” But the disciples rebuked her. And having become angry Jesus went away with her into the garden where the tomb was. And immediately a great cry was heard from the tomb. And approaching, Jesus rolled the stone from the door of the tomb, and going in 046immediately to where the young man was, he stretched out his hand and raised him, taking hold of his hand. But the young man, having looked upon him, loved him and began to entreat him to be with him. And going out from the tomb they went into the house of the young man; for he was rich. And after six days Jesus commanded him; and when it was evening the young man came to him wearing a linen sheet about his naked body, and he remained with him that night; for Jesus was teaching him the mystery of the kingdom of God. Then arising, he returned from there to the other side of the Jordan.

The story of Mark as we know it resumes at this point, with James’s and John’s request to sit at Jesus’ right hand and his left in his glory (Mark 10:35–45) and Jesus’ arrival in Jericho (Mark 10:46). Here, according to Clement’s letter, the Secret Gospel adds, “And the sister of the young man whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them.”

Note several things about this story. In the Secret Gospel’s version of the miracle, the young man is not named; in John’s gospel he is called Lazarus. In the Secret Gospel the dead man has one sister, also unnamed; in John he has two, Mary and Martha. In the Secret Gospel, Jesus rolls the stone back himself and raises the dead man by the hand; in the Gospel of John, Jesus stays away from the tomb and calls to Lazarus to come out. This last difference may be significant, for according to Numbers 19, contact with a tomb or a corpse renders a person defiled for seven days—the amount of time Jesus stays at the young man’s house before resuming his journey to Jerusalem and the Temple.

Most intriguingly, however, both accounts involve Bethany. Just before the Lazarus episode begins in John’s Gospel, we are told that Jesus was across the Jordan, “at the place where John [the Baptist] at first baptized” (John 10:40). We know which place John means because he has already told us that John the Baptist first baptized 047at “Bethany beyond the Jordan” (John 1:28). Two days after Mary and Martha inform Jesus by messenger that their brother Lazarus is ill, Jesus tells his disciples, “Let us go into Judea again” (John 11:7). Mary and Martha are also in Bethany, but not the one beyond the Jordan; they are in the Bethany near Jerusalem (John 11:18). According to John, then, the story of the raising of Lazarus begins with Jesus in “Bethany beyond the Jordan” and ends with Jesus in Bethany near Jerusalem.

In the Secret Gospel of Mark, however, the raising of the dead young man takes place entirely in “Bethany beyond the Jordan.” How do we know? From looking at Jesus’ itinerary according to Mark’s gospel. In the first half of Mark, Jesus travels almost aimlessly in and around Galilee. But after Peter recognizes that Jesus is the Christ, near the villages of Caesarea Philippi (Mark 8:27–30), Jesus begins to journey purposefully to Jerusalem, keeping close to the Jordan River. In Mark 10 he travels from Galilee to northern Judea, crosses the Jordan eastward into Peraea (present-day Jordan) and continues heading southward on his way to Jerusalem (Mark 10:1, 17, 32). But before Jesus leaves Peraea, the Secret Gospel narrates his arrival in “Bethany.” So in this longer version of Mark, the place where the bereaved sister contacts Jesus is the Bethany east of the Jordan River—just as in John’s Gospel. After raising the young man from the dead, Jesus spends a week at his home before he “return[s] to the other side of the Jordan,” crossing westward back into Judea.

Since Jericho is the first place Jesus reaches after leaving “Bethany” and crossing westward into Judea (Mark 10:46), it is natural to presume, as scholars already do, that Jesus crossed the river at one of the two fords across from Jericho. And since Bethany is “the place where John at first baptized” (John 10:40), it is reasonable to presume that Bethany was not far from the Jordan River, which is where John baptizes in Mark’s gospel (Mark 1:5, 9).

Combined, these inferences suggest that the place called Bethany in the Secret Gospel is in the vicinity of these fords. Wadi el-Kharrar is, in fact, situated between them, about one mile east of the river. Thus the Secret Gospel of Mark suggests that the area across from Jericho was once called Bethany.²

But how reliable is this evidence from the Secret Gospel? Certainly if it is an early Christian gospel, then there is no reason to presume that its author knew less about Palestinian geography than did the authors of the canonical Gospels. But the authenticity of the Secret Gospel is an extremely controversial issue.

The only evidence we have for the Secret Gospel is the manuscript Smith discovered in Mar Saba in 1958. This 18th-century copy of a letter of Clement of Alexandria, addressed to a man named Theodore, was scrawled on three blank end-pages of a book by Isaac Voss published in 1646. The letter recounts how the evangelist Mark composed a longer, “more spiritual” edition of his gospel for advanced believers in Alexandria, and how the heretic Carpocrates (125 C.E.) stole a copy of this gospel and revised it for his own purposes. Evidently, Theodore had heard about the adulterated version of the raising of the young man from the dead and wrote to Clement to find out whether Mark actually wrote it. Clement quoted the relevant passages “word for word” as proof that the true “mystic gospel” (a more accurate translation than “Secret” Gospel) did not contain the words “naked man with naked man” and other statements that Theodore found disturbing.³

The Letter to Theodore clearly implies that the Alexandrian version of Mark differed significantly from the canonical version of Mark. Clement once described the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke as “bodily” in comparison to John, the “spiritual gospel.”⁴ By this Clement meant that the first three canonical gospels focus on the external realities of Jesus’ ministry—what Jesus actually said and did—while the Gospel of John focuses on the internal meaning of these events, the theological essence or “spirit” hidden within the “body” of the other narratives. According to our letter, the “Secret” Gospel of Mark was “more spiritual” than the canonical gospel. As such it likely helped bring out the theological meaning implicit within various incidents in Mark’s story.

Smith believed that the key to understanding the Secret Gospel is the linen sheet that the young man put on seven days after he was raised from the dead. Taking 048this material to be a baptismal garment, Smith argued that the raising and instruction of the young man was part of the baptism liturgy in Alexandria. Many scholars followed Smith this far, but bid him adieu when he claimed the excerpt was evidence that the historical Jesus performed magical baptisms in which a disciple united with Jesus’ spirit and the two ascended mystically into God’s (heavenly) kingdom, there experiencing freedom from the Law of Moses, which applies only to the lower world. Smith’s further speculation that “Freedom from the law may have resulted in completion of the spiritual union by physical union”⁵—that is, sex between two men—had an enormously negative effect on the reception of the Secret Gospel.

When Smith published the letter of Clement, the Secret Gospel passages and his analysis in 1973, religiously committed scholars made it their business to prove the historical irrelevance of the Secret Gospel, fully confident that Mark would never have written an apocryphal gospel in addition to his canonical gospel. Although greatly impressed by Smith’s technical proficiency and erudition, these scholars ridiculed his theories and banished the Secret Gospel to the abyss of mid-second-century heresy. Talk of forgery soon followed, and scholars became reluctant to use the Secret Gospel as evidence in academic studies.

A few of the scholars Smith consulted in the 1960s thought that both the letter of Clement and the Secret Gospel it defends were ancient forgeries. One scholar of the same generation later declared that “the attribution of the document to Clement is a case of nescience [sic] fiction.”⁶ Nevertheless, most specialists in second-century Christianity who discussed the letter accepted it as authentic, including Claude Mondésert, R. P. C. Hanson, Salvatore Lilla, John Ferguson, André Méhat, Jean-Daniel Kaestli, Alain Le Boulluec (with some hesitancy), Guy G. Stroumsa, Annewies van den Hoek, Arkadi Choufrine and Judith L. Kovacs. Specialists in the New Testament, on the other hand, remained largely unaware of the opinions of experts on Clement. Limited by their lack of relevant expertise, they debated what they comprehended, which too often meant the personality and abilities of Morton Smith.

The course of the debate among New Testament scholars was set in 1975, when Quentin Quesnell (pronounced keh-NELL), a scholar of Catholic theology and the New Testament, challenged Smith to make the manuscript available for verification of its genuineness.⁷ According to Quesnell, no arguments based on the contents of the letter can prove Clement’s authorship, for the scholarly resources used by Smith to authenticate the document could just as well have been used by a contemporary of Smith to fabricate it. The only way to rule out a modern origin, therefore, would be forensic examination of the manuscript. Quesnell made the possibility of recent forgery seem less hypothetical by noting, rather casually, that Smith himself had a plausible motive for forgery (Smith was fascinated with how scholars react to new evidence), had access to the necessary resources (technical studies of Clement) and had the opportunity to plant the book in Mar Saba.

Smith replied to Quesnell’s article with indignation.⁸ He had already answered the vital question of where the manuscript could be found: “So far as I know, the MS is still where I left it in 1958—in the top room of the tower library.”⁹ Moreover, he had informed the 049Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of the importance of this manuscript and published both a set of black-and-white photographs and his inventory of the library’s manuscripts. Given the fact that he lived in America and did not own the library that he catalogued at Mar Saba, Smith had done what he could to safeguard this manuscript and assist other scholars in finding it. Nevertheless, for Quesnell it was axiomatic “that a person who introduces an exciting new manuscript find to the world has the basic responsibility to make the manuscript available for scientific examination.”¹⁰

Observers of this exchange started to wonder aloud why Smith didn’t return to Israel, get the manuscript and lay the controversy to rest. So as the years passed without anyone else claiming to have seen the manuscript, a rumor was born that Smith was preventing scholars from testing it. Scholars who had no expertise in Clement of Alexandria fell back on pseudo-critical skepticism, resolutely distrusting Smith’s account of his discovery while giving credence to gossip. Upon Smith’s death in 1991, this tendency to substitute “widely held surmise” for expertise and research spread into the secondary literature, thanks to the fact that American libel laws only protect the living. Thus, in a book published in 1993, the well-known scholar of Judaica Jacob Neusner simply declared Smith’s discovery “the forgery of the century” and dismissed Smith’s report that he left the book in Mar Saba as “Smith’s quaint explanation of the ‘disappearance’ of the ‘original documents.’” Neusner’s repeated assertion that Smith was “a charlatan and a fraud” who forged the letter as evidence that Jesus was a homosexual is truly remarkable given the fact that Neusner also penned the radiant endorsement on the back cover of Smith’s The Secret Gospel. There he proclaimed that “The discovery itself ranks with Qumran and Nag Hammadi, Masada and the Cairo Geniza, but required more learning and sheer erudition than all of these together.” No doubt Neusner’s “post-Morton” opinion has something to do with the fact that Smith had publicly proclaimed Neusner incompetent as a translator in 1984.¹¹

To this day, skeptics decry that “no one but Smith ever saw the document.”¹² But the implication that he hid it has been untenable for 23 years now. Thomas Talley reported in 1981 that the book by Voss now resides in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate library in Jerusalem, having been retrieved by Archimandrite Meliton, and that the manuscript pages had been removed and were being repaired.¹³ Talley was not shown the manuscript, nor have the many subsequent inquirers managed to see it. So Talley’s second-hand report did not mollify the skeptics.

Fortunately, in recent years, something totally unexpected happened. Charles W. Hedrick, professor of religious studies at Southwest Missouri University, and Nikolaos Olympiou, professor of Old Testament at the University of Athens, published striking confirmation of Talley’s report in the form of better, color photographs of the Clement manuscript taken in 1977 (or perhaps 1976) by Father Kallistos Dourvas, a former librarian at the Patriarchate library.¹⁴ Olympiou acquired these photos from Kallistos, who at one time was his student.

The most remarkable new evidence, however, was published in 2003. Guy G. Stroumsa, professor of comparative religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reported that he took part in retrieving the book from Mar Saba in 1976. Intrigued by Smith’s publications, Stroumsa (at that time a graduate student at Harvard) and the late professors David Flusser and Shlomo Pines, both highly regarded scholars of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, drove to the Mar Saba monastery with Archimandrite 060Meliton and located the book by Voss—complete with the letter of Clement citing the Secret Gospel passages—in the tower library, exactly where Smith claimed he left it.

Accompanied by Meliton, they brought the book to Jerusalem for safekeeping and inquired about having the ink tested. Only the Israeli police had the expertise to do such testing, but Meliton decided against leaving the book in their care, so no testing was performed.

Why did Stroumsa keep this information to himself for so long? In his words, “It was only recently … in talking to American colleagues, that I realized that I am the ‘last living Western scholar’ to have seen the Clement manuscript, and that I had a duty to testify in front of a skeptical scholarly world.”¹⁵

Secret Gospel skeptics can no longer entertain the notion that Smith squirreled away the manuscript because he feared the results of scientific testing. But can we be sure the letter is by Clement? Some knowledgeable scholars have offered arguments against Clement’s authorship based on the letter’s contents.¹⁶ Substantial reasons for suspicion remain. No other ancient documents mention the Secret Gospel, and the one document that does (the letter of Clement copied into the Voss book) is relatively modern. Most importantly, the letter lacks significant copying errors, which you would expect of a text with a lengthy history of scribal transmission.¹⁷

What do Gospel scholars today think about the excerpts from the Secret Gospel? I, for one, side with Clement, who believed that Mark himself created the Secret Gospel in Alexandria by adding more stories to the version of his gospel that is found in the New Testament. A small number of scholars, mostly in America, contend that the Secret Gospel was an earlier form of the canonical gospel.¹⁸ The majority believes that the Secret Gospel is an imitation of Mark from the second century. If it were an imitation, however, it would be superior to any ancient gospel imitation we possess. The known excerpts of the Secret Gospel of Mark not only sound like Mark but also reproduce Mark’s characteristic literary techniques. For example, as religion writer John Dart and I noticed independently, the two parts of the young man’s story quoted in the letter form a literary “frame” around the story of James and John’s request for positions of honor in Mark 10:35–45.¹⁹ The framing of one story inside another is a distinctively Markan literary technique, known as intercalation. This narrative device bids the reader “to read the framed episode in the light of the frame episode and vice versa.²⁰

Secret Mark’s intercalation functions in this manner by underscoring the thematic similarity between the young man’s ritualistic attire and Jesus’ reply to James and John, “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” (Mark 10:38). This strongly suggests that the young man Jesus raised is dressed for baptism, as Smith thought.

If the young man has put on a baptismal garment, then the setting in “Bethany beyond the Jordan” is certainly appropriate, for this is the same village where John the Baptist performed baptisms and Jesus himself may have been baptized. Yet the “cup” and “baptism” that Jesus speaks about to James and John are not literal. These words allude to the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist, but Jesus is really asking the sons of Zebedee whether they are able to undergo his violent fate. Could Jesus’ metaphorical use of baptism in reference to his passion explain why “a certain young man” wearing “a linen sheet upon his naked body” tries, unsuccessfully, to follow Jesus when Jesus is arrested (Mark 14:51–52)?²¹ Has he come prepared, in other words, to share in Jesus’ “baptism” of suffering and death? Such overt symbolism is what we would expect of a “more spiritual gospel.”

Did an authentic passage from a “mystic” version of the Gospel of Mark lay undetected for centuries in the monastery of Mar Saba? Does this “more spiritual” gospel strengthen the claim that Wadi el-Kharrar is the Biblical “Bethany beyond the Jordan,” where Jesus was baptized? I believe the answer to both questions is yes.

In the preceding article, Rami Khouri lays out the case for identifying Wadi el-Kharrar as the New Testament’s “Bethany beyond the Jordan,” the site where John baptized. There may be another piece of evidence strengthening that case—and it comes from a spectacular source: a long-lost passage from a “mystic” version of Mark’s gospel known as the Secret Gospel of Mark.1 This gospel passage was rediscovered in 1958 by Morton Smith, who was a respected professor of history at Columbia University. While cataloguing manuscripts in the tower library of Mar Saba, a Greek Orthodox monastery in the Judean wilderness, Smith […]