Secret Gospel of Mark
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The Secret Gospel of Mark refers to a non-canonical gospel which is the subject of the Mar Saba letter, a previously unknown letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria which Morton Smith claimed to have found transcribed into the endpapers of a 17th century printed edition of Ignatius. The authenticity of both the Mar Saba letter and of the Secret Gospel itself are disputed.

Content

In the Mar Saba letter, the Secret Gospel of Mark is described as a second "more spiritual" version of the Gospel of Mark composed by the evangelist himself. Its purpose was supposedly to encourage knowledge (gnosis) among more advanced Christians, and it was said to be in use in liturgies in Alexandria.¹

The letter includes two excerpts from the Secret Gospel. The first is to be inserted, Clement states, between what are verses 34 and 35 of Mark 10:

And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, 'Son of David, have mercy on me.' But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.

The second excerpt is very brief and is to be inserted, according to Clement, in Mark 10:46:

And the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them.

While Clement endorses these two passages as authentic to the secret gospel of Mark, he rejects as a Carpocratian corruption the words "naked man with naked man".

Very shortly after the second excerpt, as Clement begins to explain the passages, the letter breaks off. Just before that, Clement says, "But the many other things about which you wrote both seem to be and are falsifications."

These two excerpts comprise the entirety of the secret gospel material; no separate text of the secret gospel is known to survive, if indeed such a text or any further material contained within this gospel ever existed.

Lacunae and continuity

The two excerpts suggest resolutions to some puzzling passages in the canonical Mark.

The Young Man in the Linen Cloth

In Mark 14:51-52, a young man in a linen cloth is seized during Jesus' arrest, but he escapes at the cost of his clothing. To some interpreters, this passage may seem to have nothing to do with the rest of the narrative, and it has been suggested that the young man is Mark himself. The first excerpt, however, recounts an earlier encounter of Jesus with such a young man in a cloth. However, the majority of commentators hold that the boy lived in or near the garden and after being awakened, ran out, half-dressed, to see what all the noise was about (vv. 46-49). W. L. Lane thinks that Mark mentioned this episode in order to make it clear that "all [not only the disciples] fled, leaving Jesus alone in the custody of the police."²

The Lacuna in the Trip to Jericho

The second excerpt fills in an apparent lacuna in Mark 10:46:

They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside.

The lack of any action in Jericho is interpreted by some as meaning that something has been lost from the text, and the second excerpt gives a brief encounter at this point. Helmut Koester and J. D. Crossan have argued, because of the narrative discontinuity, that Secret Mark preceded the canonical Mark, leaving open the question of whether the canonical Mark is an abbreviated Secret Mark, with an original "Mark for the uninitiated" having been lost.

Issues of authenticity

The Secret Gospel is known only from the Mar Saba letter, which is itself only known from the copy discovered by Morton Smith. Therefore at least three questions of authenticity arise:

1. whether the Mar Saba letter is a genuine letter of Clement
2. whether Clement's quotations are accurate
3. whether the excerpts quoted reflect a genuine Marcan tradition

In 1982 Morton Smith summarized the state of the question as follows:

1. Attribution to Clement was accepted.
2. Clement's attribution of the excerpts to "Mark" was rejected.
3. The source of the excerpts was variously ascribed to a separate apocryphal gospel, a pastiche of canonical material, or an expansion of the canonical text using early material of unknown provenance.

The authenticity of the Mar Saba letter itself has long been the subject of controversy. The manuscript and the book where it was found have disappeared; all that remains are photographs made by Professor Smith in 1958 and by other scholars in 1976.³ Morton Smith's discovery was for long never scrutinized by other experts, because the copy of the letter had been seen by no other scholar than Smith. In 1976, G.A.G. Stroumsa and three other scholars relocated the document and took color photographs. The book was taken from Mar Saba to the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem in 1977, where the letter (a manuscript) was cut from the book (a print) as part of the library's scheme to house such material separately; it was again photographed, by librarian Kallistos Dourvas. The manuscript cannot now be relocated and the second and third photo series were only published after 1999. Thus, the letter is presently only documented in the three sets of photographs, at least one photo of which shows Smith's initials written on the page. The ink and fiber was never subjected to examination.⁴

In addition, prior to Smith's discovery of the Secret Gospel, he had written about Mark's mystery of the Kingdom of God and forbidden sexual practices, which coincidentally were a key part of the Gospel that he then discovered.^{citation needed}

Further when Peter Jeffery examined the photographs supplied by Smith, he claimed to observe a "forger's tremor." The letters had not actually been written at all, but drawn with shaky pen lines, and with lifts of the pen in the middle of strokes. Comparisons with Morton Smith's own rendering of Greek letters revealed that the same unusual formation of the letters theta and lambda in the Secret Gospel of Mark matched Smith's own peculiar formation of those letters.^{citation needed}

Scholars Philip Jenkins, Robert M. Price and Scott G. Brown noticed parallels between The Secret Gospel of Mark and a novel by James Hunter published in 1940 entitled The Mystery of Mar Saba.⁵

A fuller account of the evidence for both the forgery of this letter and Dr Smith's part in it is spelt out in Stephen Carlson's The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2005).

Interpretation of Secret Mark

According to N. T. Wright most scholars who accept the text as genuine see in the Secret Gospel of Mark a considerably later gnostic adaptation of Mark in a gnostic direction.⁶

F. F. Bruce sees the story of the young man of Bethany clumsily based on the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John and evidently no independent parallel or even source to this story.⁷

The statement "Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God" has been interpreted as a reference to the rites of baptism. The idea that Jesus practised baptism is absent from the synoptic gospels, though it is introduced in the Gospel of John. Several further echoes of Secret Mark are identifiable in the canonic Mark, according to textual analysts.

Further interpretation of Secret Mark in a context within canonical Mark, suggests a correspondence between the youth in Secret Mark, and the mysterious almost-naked figure who is in the company of Jesus but flees when he is arrested at Mark 14:51, and also with the figure present in the empty tomb at Mark 16:5. By understanding the earlier incident in Secret Mark as an initiation, the figure may be symbolic of an individual's progress through Christianity, or as a gnostic esoteric twin of Jesus (compare the name of Didymus Judas Thomas).

The theory of a "secret initiation"

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Another theory was presented in the May 9, 2005 Issue of the Canadian Magazine Maclean's by Brian Bethune:

"One of these techniques is known as intercalation: the evangelist frames one story within another, leading readers to understand the first in light of the second."

In Mark 10:35, James and John ask Christ for positions of higher honour once Jesus is an earthly ruler. Jesus responds "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?"

This baptism is thought to represent Jesus' crucifixion.⁸ If the boy whom Jesus raised from the dead in the Secret Gospel of Mark was taken privately to learn the secret that was available only to those who had died and were "reborn," through knowing Jesus, it would be, by speculation, the true price one has to pay to enter the kingdom of God. However, Jesus' statement in verse 45, that he came "to give his life as a ransom for many," makes such a reading of his previous statement problematic.

Morton Smith did not see this encounter as sexual in nature^{citation needed} but saw it as evidence that Jesus gave a secret initiation to certain people into the kingdom of heaven within, this being what was transpiring in the garden with the young man. This, he says, would have been considered sorcery, which was punishable by death in Roman law, and Morton Smith speculated that this might have been the real reason for Christ's death sentence, the reasons normally given being controversial because they allegedly do not fit the strict execution of Roman law at the time.

Notes

References

• Stephen C. Carlson, Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark, Baylor University Press, 2005.
• Peter Jeffery, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (Yale University Press, 2006 ISBN: 0300117604)
• Robert M. Grant, A Historical Introduction to the New Testament Harper and Row, 1963: Chapter 8: The Gospel of Mark
• Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark Harvard University Press, 1973 [the scholarly version].
• Morton Smith, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark [updated version 2005 with foreword from Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels
• Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and Secret Mark: The Score at the End of the First Decade. in series Studies in Homosexuality, Vol XII: Homosexuality and Religion and Philosophy. Ed. Wayne Dynes & Stephen Donaldson. New York and London: Garland, 1992. pp. 295-307.
• Morton Smith, Jesus, the Magician, (New York: Harper & Row) 1978.
• The Apocryphon of James, or, "The Secret Book of James" http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/secretjames.html
• Catholic Encyclopedia, "Clement of Alexandria," http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04045a.htm
• Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1971. pp. 122-126.
• Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New Testament, Pilgrim Press, 2003.

External links

• What happened to the copy of Clement's letter?
• Second Thoughts on the Secret Gospel by Robert M Price
• Charles W. Hedrick with Nikolaos Olympiou, "Secret Mark" The Fourth R, Volume 13,5; (Sept/Oct 2000): contains account of manuscript history and color images of the manuscript
• Review of Stephen Carlson's "The Gospel Hoax" - review of book which presents evidence that Smith created Secret Mark as a hoax.
• Wieland Willker, "Secret Gospel of Mark Homepage": detailed description of the manuscript, images, Greek and English text, current developments.
• Early Christian Writings website: Secret Mark. Text and on-line resources.
• Early Christian Writings website: the "Mar Saba Letter" of Clement
• Miles Fowler, "Identification of the Bethany Youth in the Secret Gospel of Mark with other Figures Found in Mark and John" proposes that some 1st-century Christians understood that up to five seemingly separate youths now found in Mark, Secret Mark, and John, were identical.
• Shawn Eyer, "The Strange Case of the Secret Gospel According to Mark: How Morton Smith's Discovery of a Lost Letter by Clement of Alexandria Scandalized Biblical Scholarship": scholarly and popular response to the discovery
• Brian Bethune, "Mark's secret gospel": Macleans article discussing the secret gospel and controversy surrounding it.
• F. F. Bruce: The 'Secret' Gospel of Mark (Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the University of London on 11 February 1974)
• "Secret Gospels and Lost Christianities" (Review Article)