Endnote 28 – “Secret Mark”: Morton Smith—Forger

I found Jeffery’s 340-page tome immensely erudite but largely irrelevant to the question of whether Morton Smith forged the Clement letter. The following paragraph will give a sense of the argument of Jeffery’s book:

“When the Mar Saba fragment is viewed through the binocular optic of its sexology and its liturgiology, it is easier to see that it exhibits many strange features that (considered individually) could have been written by an ancient author but (taken together) produce a textual whole that is very difficult to locate in any identifiable Sitz im Leben in the ancient world. To get to that point, however, is a journey of many steps, for the letter of Clement to Theodore, though short, is actually extremely complicated. Indeed it describes no less than five traditions of oral or written doctrine or practice, each of which may reflect a different authorial profile or life situation—each of which, therefore, demands historical investigation on its own terms” (p. 51).

Jeffery encapsulates his own argument as follows: “There are, in sum, three reasons why the Mar Saba text cannot be an ancient document: it presents the wrong kind of liturgy, the wrong kind of homosexuality, and even the wrong kind of humor” (p. 211).