Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark, The

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The Gospel Hoax: Morion Smith's Invention of secret Mark. By Stephen C. Carlson. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2005. xix + 151 pp., $19.95 paper.

Ever since the publication of secret Mark in 1973, there has been speculation that this "new" apocryphal Gospel may have been a forgery perpetrated by its discoverer, Morton Smith. The discovery was initially met with a positive reception as scholars anticipated yet another dramatic and sensational addition to the cache of apocryphal material already collected through twentieth-century excavations. However, it was not long before some scholars raised questions. During Smith's 1958 trip to the Mar Saba monastery outside of Jerusalem, he claims to have found a letter by Clement of Alexandria copied onto the end of a genuine seventeenth-century edition of the epistles of Ignatius. It was this supposed letter of Clement-copied in an eighteenth-century hand-that contained excerpts from the otherwise unknown secret Mark. The problem, however, was that Smith was the only one (and still is) to have ever seen the physical manuscript itself. He only provided photographs to his fellow scholars, and the original manuscript was mysteriously "lost" a few years later. It is not a surprise, therefore, that some scholars have raised serious doubts about secret Mark's authenticity, while others have vigorously defended it, creating a "stalemate" in the academy ever since.

With this scenario in mind, Stephen Carlson, an attorney by trade, has undertaken a new challenge to the authenticity of secret Mark in his recent volume, The Gospel Hoax. Employing forensic and legal skills, Carlson applies modern critical techniques for spotting literary forgeries to the case of secret Mark. Such a methodological approach has taken the discussion in new and fruitful directions, offering a compelling, if not devastating, case against the authenticity of this apocryphal story. Carlson's case can be broken down into four kinds of arguments:

First, using the limited number of photographs available, Carlson focuses in upon the Mar Saba manuscript itself, particularly the handwriting of the author. He points out that in most literary forgeries the forger imitates the handwriting by "drawing" the letters rather than writing them naturally. This process results in noticeable signs: trembling and shaky lines, pen lifts, ink blobs, letters written slowly and deliberately, and portions often retouched by the forger. Carlson demonstrates that these features are clearly present in the Mar Saba manuscript, suggesting it was not written "naturally" but composed by a forger. In addition, Carlson has collected a number of writing samples from Smith where he has written in Greek. He then painstakingly compares various letters in the manuscript to these known samples of Smith's handwriting, showing that they share fundamental similarities at a number of key points. In light of such detailed evidence, it is difficult to believe secret Mark is part of an authentic letter from Clement of Alexandria.

Second, Carlson addresses the content of the letter, questioning whether it can really be shown to be from Clement of Alexandria himself. Carlson argues that the vocabulary usage of the letter is so similar to the vocabulary in other genuine works of Clement that it suggests a deliberate imitation. Clement's other genuine works have a fairly stable percentage of original vocabulary words (hapax legomena)-however, that percentage is even lower in the letter that Smith discovered. Carlson argues that this "hyper-Clementine" style can only be explained by someone intentionally trying to sound like Clement, something that Smith could have done as a scholar very familiar with the works of Clement.

Third, Carlson reminds the reader that forged letters often contain content that is relevant to the time of the forger, but anachronistic when compared to the time in which the letter was purportedly written. He then demonstrates how the content of the supposed letter from Clement fits not with what we would expect from the second or third century but with the modern day-particularly the 1950s and 60s when the letter was discovered:

(a) Secret Mark describes this bizarre scene of Jesus raising a young man from the dead who "looking at [Jesus], loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him . . . 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." The sexual innuendo in this story is obvious to a twentieth-century reader, but would have been missed on a second or third-century reader, argues Carlson, for they would not have recognized a peer-to-peer homoerotic encounter, but only one between men and boys or between men of different social classes (e.g. master and slave). Thus, it is clear that secret Mark is actually relevant to the debates over homosexuality burgeoning in the 1950s and 60s, when the manuscript was "discovered," and would not have connected with an early church audience.