Stephen C. Carlson,
The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark. Baylor
University Press, 2005.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
Stephen
Carlson first happened upon a reference to the Secret Gospel of Mark
when he was a teenager. It was in the mid-eighties, and he was perusing
one of the Lincoln-Baigent-Leigh Holy Blood-Holy Mackerel books,
and Morton Smith’s “discovery” was appealed to as one of the buckets of
sand upon which the authors erected their unstable house. Little did he
know he would grow up to reveal that Smith was in the same camp as the
Holy Blood trio: a purveyor of spurious ancient lore concerning
Christian origins. This reviewer was a college sophomore in 1973 when
Smith’s books Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark
and The Secret Gospel appeared. I saw and read only the latter at
the time, but I immediately smelled a rat. I thought at once of the
ancient Pauline pastiche, the Epistle to the Laodiceans. Secret Mark
read as precisely the same sort of cento of phrases lifted from
canonical scripture, mainly, of course, from Mark. In the intervening
years, I became more than half persuaded that the Secret Gospel was
real, at least a genuinely ancient Apocryphon. Recent years shook my
tentative confidence, however, and now I may say that the able Mr.
Carlson has marked the case closed. It no longer belongs in the X-Files
of New Testament scholarship.
Carlson is not by trade a
biblical scholar, though one would not guess it from this book except
for the fact that he brings to bear on his task considerable skills from
another field: law and forensics. He has learned much, more apparently
than most biblical specialists, for all our would-be critical acumen,
about the motives and methods of hoaxers and forgers, as well as how to
spot them. And he applies them comprehensively, concisely, and
convincingly to the case of the Gospel according to Mort.
Close inspection of the
handwriting shows that the letters are carefully drawn, not
spontaneously written. The ink seems to have penetrated the paper,
blotting to a degree impossible had the text of the ostensible
Clementine letter to Theodore been written close to the time of the
publication of the 16th century book in which it appears. The
shapes of some of the letters do not match other eighteenth century
handwriting in the Mar Saba manuscripts (i.e., annotations or hand
copies of texts made by monkish scribes at the library where Smith
claimed to have made his discovery). But they do match perfectly the
shapes of the same letters in a twentieth-century scribal hand
reproduced by Smith in another publication, writing that appears to be
his own, hidden behind a clever pseudonym,
MadiothV,
not a modern Greek
name at all, but rather pun denoting both “baldy” and “bald-faced liar,”
both of which would have applied to Smith if he were dropping hints of
his identity as a hoaxer.
The Theodore letter refers
to the interpolation of the Secret Mark text by Carpocratian heretics
using the metaphor of the salt losing its savor by adulteration. Trouble
is: this image presupposes poured salt that does not clump together, an
innovation made only in 1910 by the good folks at, ahem, Morton
Salt! Plus, it does not appear that salt was ever adulterated in the
ancient world; it was already so cheap nobody bothered, as they did
other food substances. “Clement” cites Jeremiah 28:17, tantalizingly
omitting a phrase containing the word “goldsmith.” So we have
Morton Salt and goldsmith. This calls for wisdom: let him who
has understanding reckon the number of the Beast, for it is the number
of a man.
“Clement” also makes a
punning catchword linkage between (the rest of) Jeremiah 28:17 (LXX) and
Matthew 5:13, a pun, however, that only works in English, as both
verses, in English translation, use the word “cast,” albeit in different
senses, rendering two very different Greek words.
As Quentin Quesnell pointed
out thirty years ago, the Clementine vocabulary of the letter fragment
is not remarkable for a forger working with a copy of the recently
available concordance to Clement’s writings. But the forger did his work
too well: the language is too Clementine, going to such trouble to use
authentic vocabulary that he shortchanged “Clement” on hapax legomena,
more of which must have appeared, even in so short a writing sample, if
it were genuine.
Why does “Clement” quote a
nice chunk of the Secret Markan text to Theodore, who ostensibly had his
own copy in front of him and only wanted to know if Clement’s copy
contained a particular offensive passage (“naked man with naked man”)
urged upon him by the local Carpocratian carpers. Why doesn’t he just
say, “No, it’s not there”? He does eventually say it, so why quote the
rest? Simply because the letter is a vehicle to smuggle the hoax text
before the eyes of the reader.
In his analysis of the
text, Smith had claimed to find the depiction of Jesus’ homosexual
practice. But the portions of the text, chiefly the phrase, “and he
stayed the night with him,” is only employed as a euphemism for a sexual
tryst in modern times. And in light of his scene of the naked youth
wearing only a sheet approaching Jesus for nocturnal initiation, Smith
seemed to want us to read the similarly half-clad youth at Gethsemane as
another nubile nudist seeking out Jesus for a sexual experience, only to
be rounded up by the Gay-bashing cops, led by Judas (whose catty
homosexual jealousy I suppose we might infer from his kiss and his
betrayal!). But homosexuality was not persecuted in this manner in the
ancient world. Rather, it represents the treatment of Gays in 1950s
America, at the very time Smith claimed to have discovered the text.
Carlson avoids mentioning Smith’s own homosexuality and the hatred he
reportedly bore the church for opposing it (of course, in today’s
Episcopal Church, Smith would have been made a bishop!).
Smith has Clement and
Secret Mark combine references to Mark 4:11’s “mystery of the kingdom of
God,” to male homosexuality, and to secret tradition, precisely the same
unlikely combination Smith had made in another article, in an entirely
different context, about a year earlier. Coincidence? Not likely.
Defenders of Morton Smith
have sometimes contended that Smith could not have carried off the
forgery in the brief time available to him in the Mar Saba monastery,
but Carlson shows that it is more likely that Smith brought the book
containing the already-forged Clement/Mark text with him and then
“planted” it in the Library. Some say Smith lacked the skills in Greek
and the patristic erudition to carry off such a hoax, but Carlson shows
that Smith’s previous publications easily belie such a claim, itself
reminiscent of claims for illiteracy on the part of Muhammad and Joseph
Smith, and for the same reason: to deny them authorship of a piece of
scripture.
Carlson is certainly no
self-righteous crusader seeking to attack Smith and those who have taken
his invention seriously in their own scholarly reconstructions. Unlike
crooked parapsychologists who fake lab data to “prove” their theories
since no real evidence is available, Smith never framed a theory based
on the Secret Mark text. Even the nonsense he cooked up in The Secret
Gospel about Jesus being a Gnostic libertine was just window
dressing for the hoax. In his own serious work, like Jesus the
Magician, he never made much of Secret Mark. In the last analysis
Carlson paints a sympathetic portrait of a mischievous Loki who composed
a test to see if his scholarly colleagues were worth their salt. Could
they follow his trail of crumbs? Were they up to the Higher-Critical
task of spotting and proving a spurious text? If not, they deserved to
be taken in. If they wind up as embarrassed as Hugh Trevor-Roper who
prematurely authenticated the bogus Hitler Diaries, they asked for it!
Carlson seems to deem it a fair challenge, and any who fell for it ought
to be ready to eat crow.
We owe a great debt to
Stephen C. Carlson for settling a debate that has simmered for over
thirty years now. Let me put it this way: if anyone, after reading this
devastating book, is still inclined to accept Smith’s gospel as a
genuine ancient text, then he is only signaling, whether he means to or
not, that there are and can be no “assured results of criticism.” If
this isn’t one of them, then there is no such thing.