Secret Gospel of Mark
The Secret Gospel of Mark or the Mystic Gospel of Mark, also the Longer Gospel of Mark, is a putative longer and secret or mystic version of the Gospel of Mark. The gospel is mentioned exclusively in the Mar Saba letter, a document of disputed authenticity, which is said to have been written by Clement of Alexandria. This letter, in turn, is preserved only in photographs of a Greek handwritten copy seemingly transcribed in the 18th century into the endpapers of a 17th-century printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch. Some scholars suggest that the letter implies that Jesus was involved in homosexual activity, although this interpretation is contested.
In 1958, Morton Smith, a professor of ancient history at Columbia University, found a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria in the monastery of Mar Saba situated south-east of Jerusalem. He made a formal announcement of the discovery in 1960 and published his study of the text in 1973. The original manuscript was subsequently transferred to the library of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, and sometime after 1990, it was lost. Further research has relied upon photographs and copies, including those made by Smith himself.
In the letter, addressed to one otherwise unknown Theodore, Clement says that "when Peter died a martyr, Mark came over to Alexandria, bringing both his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book the things suitable to whatever makes for progress toward knowledge." He further says that Mark left this extended version, known today as the Secret Gospel of Mark, "to the church in Alexandria, where it even yet is most carefully guarded, being read only to those who are being initiated into the great mysteries." Clement quotes two passages from this Secret Gospel of Mark, where Jesus in the longer passage is said to have raised a rich young man from the dead in Bethany, a story which shares many similarities with the story of the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John.
The revelation of the letter caused a sensation at the time but was soon met with accusations of forgery and misrepresentation. There is no consensus on the authenticity of the letter among either patristic Clement scholars or biblical scholars. As the text is made up of two texts, a handful of possibilities exist: both may be authentic or inauthentic, or one may be authentic and the other inauthentic. Those who think the letter is a forgery mostly think it is a modern forgery, with Smith being denounced the most often as the perpetrator. If the letter is a modern forgery, the excerpts from the Secret Gospel of Mark would also be forgeries. Some accept the letter as genuine but do not believe in Clement's account, and instead argue that the gospel is a 2nd-century Gnostic pastiche. Others think Clement's information is accurate and that the secret gospel is a second edition of the Gospel of Mark expanded by Mark himself. Still others see the Secret Gospel of Mark as the original gospel which predates the canonical Gospel of Mark, and where canonical Mark is the result of the Secret Mark passages quoted by Clement and other passages being removed, either by Mark himself or by someone else at a later stage.
There is an ongoing controversy surrounding the authenticity of the Mar Saba letter. The scholarly community is divided as to the authenticity, and the debate on Secret Mark therefore in a state of stalemate, although the debate continues.
Discovery
Smith's discovery of the Mar Saba letter
During a trip to Jordan, Israel, Turkey, and Greece in the summer of 1958 "hunting for collections of manuscripts", Morton Smith also visited the Greek Orthodox monastery of Mar Saba situated between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. He had been granted permission by the Patriarch Benedict I of Jerusalem to stay there for three weeks and study its manuscripts. It was while cataloguing documents in the tower library of Mar Saba, he later reported, that he discovered a previously unknown letter written by Clement of Alexandria in which Clement quoted two passages from a likewise previously unknown longer version of the Gospel of Mark, which Smith later named the "Secret Gospel of Mark". The text of the letter was handwritten into the endpapers of Isaac Vossius' 1646 printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch. This letter is referred to by many names, including the Mar Saba letter, the Clement letter, the Letter to Theodore and Clement's letter to Theodore.As the book was "the property of the Greek Patriarchate", Smith just took some black-and-white photographs of the letter and left the book where he had found it, in the tower library. Smith realized, that if he were to authenticate the letter, he needed to share its contents with other scholars. In December 1958, to ensure that no one would reveal its content prematurely, he submitted a transcription of the letter with a preliminary translation to the Library of Congress.
After having spent two years comparing the style, vocabulary, and ideas of Clement's letter to Theodore with the undisputed writings of Clement of Alexandria and having consulted a number of paleographic experts who dated the handwriting to the eighteenth century, Smith felt confident enough about its authenticity and so announced his discovery at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in December 1960. In the following years, he made a thorough study of Mark, Clement and the letter's background and relationship to early Christianity, during which time he consulted many experts in the relevant fields. In 1966 he had basically completed his study, but the result in the form of the scholarly book Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark was not published until 1973 due to seven years of delay "in the production stage". In the book, Smith published a set of black-and-white photographs of the text. Earlier the same year he also published a second book for the popular audience.
Subsequent history of the manuscript
For many years it was thought that only Smith had seen the manuscript. However, in 2003 Guy Stroumsa reported that he and a group of other scholars saw it in 1976. Stroumsa, along with the late Hebrew University professors David Flusser and Shlomo Pines and Greek Orthodox Archimandrite Meliton, went to Mar Saba to look for the book. With the help of a Mar Saba monk, they relocated it where Smith presumably had left it 18 years earlier, and with "Clement's letter written on the blank pages at the end of the book". Stroumsa, Meliton, and company determined that the manuscript might be safer in Jerusalem than in Mar Saba. They took the book back with them, and Meliton subsequently brought it to the Patriarchate library. The group looked into having the ink tested but the only entity in the area with such technology was the Jerusalem police. Meliton did not want to leave the manuscript with the police, so no test was taken. Stroumsa published his account upon learning that he was the "last living Western scholar" to have seen the letter.Subsequent research has uncovered more about the manuscript. Around 1977, librarian Father Kallistos Dourvas removed the two pages containing the text from the book for the purpose of photographing and re-cataloguing them. However, the re-cataloguing obviously never happened. Dourvas later told Charles W. Hedrick and Nikolaos Olympiou that the pages were then kept separately alongside the book at least until his retirement in 1990. Sometime after that, however, the pages went missing, and various attempts to locate them since that time have been unsuccessful. Olympiou suggests that individuals at the Patriarchate Library may be withholding the pages due to Morton Smith's homoerotic interpretation of the text, or the pages could have been destroyed or misplaced. Kallistos Dourvas gave color photographs of the manuscript to Olympiou, and Hedrick and Olympiou published them in The Fourth R in 2000.
These color photographs were made in 1983 by Dourvas at a photo studio. But this was arranged and paid for by Quentin Quesnell. In June 1983, Quesnell was given permission to study the manuscript at the library for several days during a three-week period under the supervision of Dourvas. Quesnell was "the first scholar to make a formal case that the Mar Saba document might be a forgery" and he was "extremely critical" of Smith, especially for not making the document available to his peers and for providing such low-quality photographs. Yet, Quesnell did not tell his peers that he had also examined the manuscript and did not reveal that he already had these high-quality color photographs of the letter at home in 1983. Hedrick and Olympiou were not aware of this when they published, in 2000, copies of the same photographs that Dourvas had kept himself. The scholarly community was unaware of Quesnell's visit until 2007 when Adela Yarbro Collins briefly mentioned that he was allowed to look at the manuscript in the early 1980s. A couple of years after Quesnell's death in 2012, scholars were given access to the notes from his trip to Jerusalem. They show that Quesnell at first was confident that he would be able to establish that the document was a forgery. However, when he found something he thought was suspicious, Dourvas would present other 18th-century handwriting with similar characteristics. Quesnell admitted that since "they're not all forgeries" it would not be as easy to prove that the text is a forgery as he had expected. Eventually, he gave up his attempts and wrote that experts had to be consulted.
, the manuscript's whereabouts are unknown, and it is documented only in the two sets of photographs: Smith's black-and-white set from 1958 and the color set from 1983. The ink and fiber were never subjected to examination.
Content according to Clement's letter
The Mar Saba letter is addressed to one Theodore, who seems to have asked if there is a gospel of Mark in which the words "naked man with naked man" and "other things" are present. Clement confirms that Mark wrote a second, longer, mystic and more spiritual version of his gospel, and that this gospel was "very securely kept" in the Alexandrian church, but that it contained no such words. Clement accuses the heterodox teacher Carpocrates for having obtained a copy by deceit and then polluted it with "utterly shameless lies". To refute the teachings of the gnostic sect of Carpocratians, known for their sexual libertinism, and to show that these words were absent in the true Secret Gospel of Mark, Clement quoted two passages from it.There were accordingly three versions of Mark known to Clement, Original Mark, Secret Mark, and Carpocratian Mark. The Secret Gospel of Mark is described as a second "more spiritual" version of the Gospel of Mark composed by the evangelist himself. The name derives from Smith's translation of the phrase "mystikon euangelion". However, Clement simply refers to the gospel as written by Mark. To distinguish between the longer and shorter versions of Mark's gospel, he twice refers to the non-canonical gospel as a , in the same way as he refers to it as "a more spiritual gospel". "To Clement, both versions were the Gospel of Mark". The purpose of the gospel was supposedly to encourage knowledge among more advanced Christians, and it is said to have been in use in liturgies in Alexandria.