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

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Many scholars have long suspected that Morton Smith fabricated the letter in which Clement of Alexandria cites a homoerotic passage from a supposedly secret version of the gospel of Mark. Now, almost 50 years after Smith's "discovery" in 1958, Stephen Carlson has proven this beyond a reasonable doubt. His case against Smith is strong enough to be deemed conclusive, and can be summarized as follows.

* The author of Secret Mark must have read James Hunter's novel, The Mystery of Mar Saba, published in 1940. Philip Jenkins first made this connection in 2001, and I'm sure that if it had been made back in the 70s, a lot less people would have been duped. The novel is about a forgery at the Mar Saba library, exactly where Smith "discovered" Clement's letter. Furthermore, as Carlson notes, both Secret Mark and the novel's fictional discovery reinterpret a resurrection account from the gospels in naturalistic terms.

* The letter to Theodore sounds hyper-Clementine, as if someone went out of his way to mimic Clement (argued at length by Andrew Criddle in 1995).

* The letter conveniently goes out of its way to authenticate Secret Mark, identifying the author Clement, who in turn vouches for Secret Mark's authenticity; and his full citation of Secret Mark is unnecessary and gratuitous for the concerns he is supposedly addressing (pointed out by Robert Murgia back in 1976).

* Smith published a paper -- right before his discovery of Secret Mark -- in which he connected both Clement of Alexandria and "the mystery of the kingdom of God" (in Mk 4:11) to sexual immorality (in T. Hagigah 2:1), which, of course, is exactly what Secret Mark is all about. Amazingly, no one ever picked up on this before Carlson.

* Smith deliberately planted three confessions which reveal himself to be the author of Clement's letter:

(1) M. Madiotes -- the "bald swindler".
(2) Morton Salt -- the company which invented the kind of salt presupposed in Clement's letter.
(3) Jesus' gay affair -- with the young man later seen in Gethsemane, where Jesus was arrested, thus evoking the cultural milieu of America in the 1950s, where police were cracking down on gay men meeting in public parks and gardens.

Identifying these last signature-confessions constitutes the bulk of this book, and it's brilliant detective work on Carlson's part. When taken in conjunction with the rest of the damning evidence, forger's tremors, and convenient "coincidences", they suffocate Smith's hoax once and for all.

Carlson insists on distinguishing hoaxes from forgeries, and believes that associating Secret Mark with the latter has hindered a proper understanding of what Morton Smith was really up to. While I certainly think Secret Mark can be called a forgery, I appreciate Carlson's concern about motive. He's essentially right: Smith didn't fabricate Secret Mark to support his academic theories; he wanted to test his colleagues with an elaborate prank. Secret Mark belongs in a category of hoaxes which include the Ern Malley Poems, Alan Sokol's postmodern hoax, and the play by Sophocles really written by Dionysius the Renegade. In this sense, in terms of motive, it's quite different from forgeries like Macpherson's poetry, the Hitler Diaries, or Ireland's Shakespeare play.

I agreed with what Donald Akenson wrote in Saint Saul five years ago: it doesn't take a specialist to spot the fakery in Secret Mark. But it did take an expert like Carlson -- a legal expert, not surprisingly -- to prove it.

The Gospel Hoax is packed with analysis supporting its central conclusion - that the "discoverer" of the Secret Gospel of Mark (SGM), Morton Smith, actually forged the document as a hoax on the academic community. SGM stirred controversy because it purports to be an early, secret, version of the Gospel of Mark meant for advanced initiates that includes passages suggesting a more magic-oriented, homoerotic Jesus. Questions about its authenticity have been raised from the beginning, but could not be answered because the manuscript itself was - suspiciously to some - lost before any tests could be run. Only Smith's description and a set of photographs he took remain.

Carlson seeks to break the logjam on the question of authenticity by examining a number of aspects of SGM, Mr. Smith, and the circumstances of the discovery. In so doing, Carlson attempts to do more than simply settle the issue, he also offers guidance on how to detect other academic frauds. He is successful on both counts, though I have some reservations that I will mention below.

First, he convincingly demonstrates that the SGM manuscript (a supposed 17th century writing referring to the SGM) is a modern forgery and not an older writing recording an ancient letter. The most convincing argument raised by Carlson is the handwriting analysis, which reveals the SGM manuscript to be forged and raises further suspicions about Smith's role in the discovery. Other arguments raised by Carlson, which he takes to be hints from Smith about his role in the hoax, are interesting but apart from other evidence would not be necessarily persuasive.

Next, Carlson questions the authenticity of the supposed letter by Clement. Relying on linguistic comparisons between the letter and Clement's other writings, Carlson concludes it is too good to be true, i.e., it is too much in accord with Clement's style to be from Clement. He is openly indebted to the analysis of another and I would want to spend more time researching the issue to trust a determination about a writing being too much like an author's style to be by that author. Carlson also finds additional hints from Smith suggesting admissions of a hoax which are again intriguing, but are better evidence of the identity of the hoaxer once one is convinced of the case in chief. On firmer ground is the argument that Smith would have possessed sufficient knowledge of Clement's writings and linguistic ability to pull off the hoax himself -- which some defenders of SGM have denied.

The following chapter targets the fragments of the supposed SGM itself and concludes that they are products of the 20th century around the time of the late fifties. The focus on homoerotic portrayals, Carlson argues, would have been meaningless if written in the first or second centuries, but were particularly appropriate for the time period and circumstances in which Smith lived and worked. I did not find the 20th-century marks as "uncanny" as Carlson, but it is an interesting point. More discussion of attitudes in the first and second centuries would have helped. Additionally, I fear that such a criteria may be overly subjective and would require getting into not just the time period of the suspected hoaxer, but would require a deeper examination of that person's mind and personal circumstances than we are likely to be able to achieve in many cases.

Carlson's wrap-up is convincing in its conclusion that SGM is a modern hoax perpetrated by Morton Smith. It is also valuable in that it offers approaches and criteria for the uncovering of other academic hoaxes. Though I was not as persuaded as he as to the efficacy of some of those tools, the discussion itself is valuable and The Gospel Hoax effectively offers future debunkers much with which to work. Those are minor quibbles and go, as we lawyers sometimes say, to the weight of some of the evidence rather than its admissibility. Well-written, well-researched, and well-done.

Carlson did a bang up job on this topic and does a another superb job of expressing his opinions, still... Since I first read this book I've heard some pretty harsh comments from those who are more learned than I in this area who give Carlson's work a thumbs down, so for me the verdict is still out and I'm reading other books on the topic with differing views just to give the topic a fair shake.

THE GOSPEL HOAX is Stephen C. Carlson's stunning argument that the so-called Secret Mark apocryphal gospel is the forgery of the scholar who claimed to merely discover it, Morton Smith. It is a brief book, around a hundred pages, yet devastating in its arguments.

Carlson avoids any ad hominem investigation; he nicely avoids the too-easy strategy of claiming the work is fake because it's just the sort of thing that a man with Morton Smith's alternative lifestyle would want to find. Instead, all attacks are on the gospel, its manuscript, or the story of its finding, each chapter examining these from a different angle. The first critique is that of handwriting. The manuscript, judging from the few photographs available, shows the "forger's tremor" that is commonly used to convict writers of fake cheques. Linguistically, the work is also suspect. It is *too* reminiscent of Clementine style to be true; every author of antiquity shows some growth in style and variance in lexicon with each new work, but Secret Mark uses only what is attested in the authentic works of Clement.

Carlson even reveals two puns buried in the gospel and the story of its finding that serve as Morton Smith's own confession. In talking about the gospel, Smith claims the existing manuscript was penned by a monk named Madiotes. No such surname exists in Greece, but the word itself is build from a root meaning both "bald" and "swindler". Smith himself lost his hair at a very young age, and in passing off a fake gospel as a legitimate find, he would be swindling the academy. Another pun is that the gospel makes reference to free-flowing salt, yet this did not exist in antiquity. It was created in the 20th century by the Morton Salt Co. When one considers this, one can hardly deny that the gospel is Smith's practical joke.

The book is written in an admirably accessible tone. It presupposes no especial training in apocryphal gospel traditions or Greek, and any layman interested in the history of Christianity and the contraversy over apocrypha could enjoy the work.

In "The Gospel Hoax", Steven C. Carlson tries to subject the Mar Saba Letter, allegedly discovered by Professor Morton Smith in 1958, to as close to a forensic examination as one can get without physically possessing the letter, which has unfortunately gone missing. He concedes that the only way to establish the letter's authenticity beyond any doubt would be to physically examine it, but some interesting insights can be deduced from photographs, which Carlson believes are enough to reveal it as a hoax. Some of the evidence against authenticity that Carlson presents is circumstantial, and some arguments are strained, but the handwriting analysis is novel, and Carlson has discovered some surprising clues as to its author.

Carlson looked for the typical signs of a forger's work and found plenty of them in the handwriting of the letter, which should have been that of an 18th century monk if it were authentic: forger's tremor, hesitations that created ink blobs, multiple strokes to make a single letter, retouching of strokes, ink too easily absorbed into the much-older paper, handwriting in Western, not Eastern, style of 18th century Greek. "The Gospel Hoax" includes photographs, so the reader may observe these characteristics for himself. There are also inconsistencies with other manuscripts and books in the Mar Saba library, but that could be explained by the 1646 Voss edition of the Letters of Ignatius, into which the letter was copied, having been added to Mar Saba's collection more recently.

Carlson believes that Morton Smith planted clues as to the true author of the letter, Smith himself, in the text and in notes on another manuscript that he cataloged at the same time. Some of these clues are, indeed, convincing -not to mention funny. Carlson goes on to examine the letter's hyper-Clementine stylistic features, anachronistic references, supposed sexual innuendos, and its relationship to Smith's other work. I found some of this convincing and some less so. I sometimes felt that Carlson was reading to much into things or employing circular logic. And Smith's motive for engineering such a hoax is not at all clear, especially for returning to it 15 years later. I wish the handwriting analysis could be confirmed by handwriting experts with more experience, but "The Gospel Hoax" is articulate, dispassionate, and offers valuable insight into this controversial document.

Others summed up Carlson's points well enough. I won't reiterate here. In terms of readability, the book is quite easy to read. It is short and focused, and repeats the points it is trying to make in a very effective way. Which is good, because there is some technical stuff in here. So, having the point spelled out for you helps.

If you've had Greek, you'll have no problem with some of the writing analysis. But you don't need Greek to understand the main points, and the more salient "killer bullets" are in areas outside of the handwriting analysis, anyway.

Heartily recommended. It would seem that this would put the issue to rest, but with people like Scott Brown (see "Mark's Other Gospel") dependent on Secret Mark for their academic credentials, it won't go down without a fight.

It's also telling to see Elaine Pagels do the forward to Smith's "The Secret Gospel." She needs all the help she can get, but she's looking in the wrong place.

A taut well thought through investigation of a colossal hoax. I agree with
the author's take on a culture ready to be taken in...ready to buy
a theological brooklyn bridge. I was amused to read how Morton Smith left
a trail of clues through the labyrinth to expose his deception and his
obvious contempt for his colleagues. He certainly was a man with an agenda.
Carlson keeps a very even detatchment with an appraiser's eye for flaws
in the fabric. I appreciated reading this fascinating true crime saga.

I read the original 2005 paperback edition, which debunks another book, the 1973 The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark, which is about a document supposedly found by the latter's author (Morton Smith) in 1958 in a monastery in the Judean Desert. It was a handwritten copy into yet another historical book of a fraction of an original document (a letter) by the patriarch Clement of Alexandria, referring to sections of Mark's Gospel, which have disappeared from the canonical Bible later. The content has been interpreted as Jesus engaging in homoerotic initiation practices.

The author of the book at hand, Stephen C. Carlson, does an excellent job of unmasking Morton Smith' 50-year-capping hoax. Reading the reviews on this site about both books I initially thought, Carlson would have a religious agenda and use reasoning comprehendable only by religious fundamentalists who don't WANT the document to be genuine for obvious reasons. However, it will be far more difficult to debunk this debunker than it was to debunk the hoax. Carlson uses experts' knowledge used in court on handwriting fakes (of the photographs taken of the document, as it itself has been conveniently lost). He elaborates on the motive of Smith, unmasks that the content of the document matches Smith' previous little known publication, while quoting Smith that it can't be said that he fabricated the document to fit the content of the book describing the document. (Which became tediously obvious to me before reading this debunker.) Carlson goes on to look at the (un)likelihood that the book copied into would have been part of that library in which Smith had supposedly found it. Carlson uncovers anachronistic keys in the document and reasons that they had been implanted on purpose, because they refer linguistically to Smith himself, as it was a hoax, not a forgery to gain money or credibility for a theory. Smith wanted to challenge the scientific-historians' establishment who had snubbed him before. He puts all of that in an holistic picture of how hoaxes of this sort give themselves away and "The Secret Gospel" fulfills all criteria. Including that time will tell eventually, as hoaxes and other fakes are destined to be made to work in the specific times they were fabricated. From the historic perspective of the future (i.e. today/2005), it will/has become obvious.

Carlson's reasoning is very convincing. Of course, one could wonder, wether Carlson's book is the hoax, not the original. Or more likely another sort of fake, as it may have been constructed to appear convincing for theological reasons. It is said, the religious publisher has an anti-homosexual agenda. And how much do we trust the argumentation of lawyers who also go by a pun destination sounding similar? Therefore it is advisable for the science community to verify each and every claim by Carlson instead of blindly buying it.

I would even do that myself. If the original book would be all that important to me. Frankly, it isn't. I don't need it for my spirituality as it doesn't really matter, for I have overcome my indoctrinated homophobia a long time ago. I wouldn't use it in my reasoning to heal others from homophobia (because it doesn't, it's just an argument of someone-said-so [Jesus or "Mark"]). Even in the case, the content would really refer to homosexuality. On top of it, I don't think it does. Before I read Carlson's book, which feels similar, I was actually disappointed, because with my (limited) background information on some initiation procedures from the ancient Egyptians to modern Freemasons, I was aware that it has been very typical to dress in white linen only over a naked body during initiation. I have to agree with Carlson that the ancients most likely would not have thought this content to be describing some sort of sexuality at all. Carlson goes on to elaborate why Smith expertly insinuated sexuality for the (mid-)20th century mind, without providing a historic text that actually clearly states that.

There are many other ways of reasoning about the sin of downpressing minorities and the nature of "homosexuality" than clinging to these photos of a copy of a fraction of a letter referencing some content of a part of a Gospel that has been lost. Which is all beyond a reasonable doubt an obvious hoax to begin with. But by all means, please convince me of both: That it is genuine after all and that it is a workable tool to counter homophobia on top of it. It certainly hasn't worked the 47 years before Carlson debunked it. It is not enough to say that one oneself isn't satisfied with Carlson's proof, but I have to get convinced that he is wrong. It's not enough to mention some sources who supposedly debunk his book, sources I will most likely not be able to read. It is also not enough to use debate class rhetoric intended to influence those who have NOT read Carlson's book. Because I have, and I find it misleading to aver Carlson would depend solely on the description of the context, in which hoaxes are usually set. (Which by that would be merely circumstantial, even though overwhelmingly so.) It is also not enough to construct a defense for the hoax, by selling me that a Parkinson-inflicted 90-year-old copied the letter on his lap in a hurry in a sort of book that must have arrived in the library by completely unknown means, just to halfway sow doubt about the otherwise certainty of a handwriting fake.

On the other hand, I would appreciate a similar book on the unmasking of (ancient) fakes of holy text passages which are ANTI-homosexual. Or the unmasking of false interpretations of texts in the same vein. Curiously, Carlson doesn't mention existing references to those...

You may be interested in the classic Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (which does raise part of these issues, i.e. not exhaustively).

Other reviewers summarize Stephen Carlson's methodical and, it seems to me too, successful expose of "Secret Mark." (Which, as he concludes, should be added to "the bibliography of Morton Smith's published writings.")

A couple additional qualities of this book might be worth noting. First, Carlson writes with almost pure dispassion. His topic is the founding of Christianity, which for most is a highly consequential issue, but he never lets his own views on greater questions, such as who, after all, Jesus was, intrude on the discussion.

Second, if anything, Carlson seems to admire that old rascal, Morton Smith, for pulling a fast one. And though I am a Christian, don't care much for lies, and have had my fill of lies about Jesus, I do see his point. It was a clever ruse, Dr. Smith, with more humor and honest malice (in its way) than the average Jesus Seminar or Elaine Pagels tome, and more interesting in its way than the likes of Dan Brown! Having read Smith's Jesus the Magician, I rather enjoyed his straightforward "suffer no fools, take no prisoners" style of historical exposition. (Though I thought his conclusions there, too, were a lot of nonsense.)

Having said that, scholars who made much of "Secret Mark" have some serious explaining to do. Helmut Koester and John Crossan used it to reconstruct the origin of the Gospel tradition. John Meier said, "To use such a small fragment of dubious origins to rewrite the history of Jesus and the Gospel tradition is to lean on a reed." Now the reed has broken.

"Secret Mark" is not the only reed such scholars lean upon. Koester, Crossan, Pagels, and both Jesus Seminar and "Gnostic Gospel" crowds lean even more heavily on the "Gospel" of Thomas. But as I show in Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus, Thomas is just as shaky in its own way. Yet uncritical acceptance of the text is rife. (Pagels, it seems, has not even bothered to read refutations of the "early Thomas" hypothesis on which she build her own castles in the air.) The present uproar over the "Judas Gospel" ought also, in its way, to be more embarrassing to the scholarly community than a clever hoax by a loan wolf scholar who likes to howl at the moon. A fascinating piece of detective work.

I'm not commenting on the book itself, but on the Kindle version. It has none of the images that the author refers to and presumably are including the hard copy book. Had I known that, I would not have purchased the Kindle edition, and I'm upset to discover that it is not the complete work. I feel as if I've been ripped off.