"Dear
reader, do not be alarmed at the parallels between... magic and ancient
Christianity. Christianity never claimed to be original. It claimed . . .
to be true!" With these words in the New York Times Book Review, Pierson
Parker reassured the faithful American public that it need not be
concerned with the latest news from the obscure and bookish world of New
Testament scholarship.[1] It was 1973, and the Biblical studies
community, as well as the popular press, was in a stir over a small
manuscript discovery that--to judge from the reactions of some--seemingly
threatened to call down the apocalypse. A newly-released book by Columbia
University's Morton Smith, presenting a translation and interpretation of
a fragment of a newly-recovered Secret Gospel of Mark, was at the center
of the controversy.
The
Discovery:1958-1960
In the
spring of 1958 Smith, then a graduate student in Theology at Columbia
University, was invited to catalogue the manuscript holdings in the
library of the Mar Saba monastery, located twelve miles south of
Jerusalem. Smith had been a guest of the same hermitage years earlier,
when he was stranded in Palestine by the conflagrations of the second
World War.
What Smith
found during his task in the tower library surprised him. He discovered
some new scholia of Sophocles, for instance, and dozens of other
manuscripts.[2] Despite these finds, however, the beleaguered scholar
soon resigned himself to what looked like a reasonable conclusion: he
would find nothing of major importance at Mar Saba. His malaise
evaporated one day as he first deciphered the manuscript that would
always thereafter be identified with him:
[. . .
O]ne afternoon near the end of my stay, I found myself in my cell,
staring incredulously at a text written in a tiny scrawl. [. . . I]f
this writing was what it claimed to be, I had a hitherto unknown text
by a writer of major significance for early church history.[3]
What Smith
then began photographing was a three-page handwritten addition penned
into the endpapers of a printed book, Isaac Voss' 1646 edition of the
Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris.[4] It identified itself as a
letter by Clement of the Stromateis, i.e., Clement of Alexandria, the
second-century church father well-known for his neo-platonic applications
of Christian belief. Clement writes "to Theodore," congratulating him for
success in his disputes with the Carpocratians, an heterodoxical sect
about which little is known. Apparently in their conflict with Theodore,
the Carpocratians appealed to Mark's gospel.
Clement
responds by recounting a new story about the Gospel. After Peter's death,
Mark brought his original gospel to Alexandria and wrote a "more
spiritual gospel for the use of those who were being perfected." Clement
says this text is kept by the Alexandrian church for use only in the
initiation into "the great mysteries."
However,
Carpocrates the heretic, by means of magical stealth, obtained a copy and
adapted it to his own ends. Because this version of the "secret" or
"mystery" gospel had been polluted with "shameless lies," Clement urges
Theodore to deny its Markan authorship even under oath. "Not all true
things are to be said to all men," he advises.
Theodore
has asked questions about particular passages of the special Carpocratian
Gospel of Mark, and by way of reply Clement transcribes two sections
which he claims have been distorted by the heretics. The first fragment
of the Secret Gospel of Mark, meant to be inserted between Mark 10.34 and
35, reads:
They
came to Bethany. There was one woman there whose brother had died. She
came and prostrated herself before Jesus and spoke to him. "Son of
David, pity me!" But the disciples rebuked her. Jesus was angry and
went with her into the garden where the tomb was. Immediately a great
cry was heard from the tomb. And going up to it, Jesus rolled the stone
away from the door of the tomb, and immediately went in where the young
man was. Stretching out his hand, he lifted him up, taking hold his
hand. And the youth, looking intently at him, loved him and started
begging him to let him remain with him. And going out of the tomb, they
went into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days
Jesus gave him an order and, at evening, the young man came to him
wearing nothing but a linen cloth. And he stayed with him for the
night, because Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And
then when he left he went back to the other side of the Jordan.
Then a
second fragment of Secret Mark is given, this time to be inserted into
Mark 10.46. This has long been recognized as a narrative snag in Mark's
Gospel, as it awkwardly reads, "Then they come to Jericho. As he was
leaving Jericho with his disciples..." This strange construction is not
present in Secret Mark, which reads:
Then he
came into Jericho. And the sister of the young man whom Jesus loved was
there with his mother and Salome, but Jesus would not receive them.
Just as
Clement prepares to reveal the "real interpretation" of these verses to
Theodore, the copyist discontinues and Smith's discovery is, sadly,
complete.
Smith
stopped briefly in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to share his
discovery with Gerschom Scholem.[5] He then returned to America where he
sought the opinions of his mentors Erwin Goodenough and Arthur Darby
Nock. "God knows what you've got hold of," Goodenough said.[6] "They made
up all sorts of stuff in the fifth century," said Nock. "But, I say, it
is exciting."[7]
At the
1960 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Morton Smith
announced his discovery to the scholarly community, openly presenting a
translation and discussion of the Clementine letter. A well-written
account of his presentation, with a photograph of the Mar Saba monastery,
appeared the next morning on the front page of The New York Times.[8]
A list of the seventy-five manuscripts Smith catalogued appeared the same
year in the journal Archaeology[9] as well as the Greek Orthodox
Patriarchate journal, Nea Sion.[10] And Morton Smith embarked on a
decade of meticulous investigation into the nature of his find.
The
Reaction (1973--1982)
While
there may seem nothing particularly scandalous about the apocryphal
episodes of Secret Mark in and of themselves, the release of the material
to the general public aroused a great deal of popular and scholarly
derision. Smith wrote two books on the subject: first, the voluminous and
intricate scholarly analysis Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel
of Mark, and then The Secret Gospel, a thin and conversational
popular account of the discovery and its interpretation. The first book
was delivered to the Harvard University Press in 1966, but was very slow
at going through the press.[11] Smith's popular treatment, however, was
released by Harper and Row in the summer of 1973. This is the version
that most scholars had in their hands first. What did it say that was so
shocking?
Smith's
analysis of the Secret Mark text--and consequently the wider body of
literature bearing on the history of early Christianity--brought him to
consider unusual possibilities. Because Secret Mark presents a miracle
story, this meant a particular concentration upon material of a like
type. Smith was working outside of the traditional school of Biblical
criticism which automatically regarded all miracle accounts as
mythological inventions of the early Christian communities.[12] Instead
of taking as his goal the theological deconstruction of the miracle
traditions, Smith asked to what degree the miracle stories of the gospels
might in fact be based upon actions of Jesus, much in the same way
scholars examine the sayings traditions.
It has
been typical for critical scholars of the Bible to reject any historical
foundation for the "miracle-worker" stories about Jesus. Because such
tales would tend to rely on the supernatural, and scholars seek to
understand the origins of the Bible in realistic terms, it is more
plausible for the modern critic to propose reasons for which an early
Christian community might have come to understand Jesus as a
miracle-worker and subsequently engage in the production of mythologies
depicting him in that mold. Smith's understanding of the kingdom language
in the Christian writings, with its well-known ambivalent eschatological
and yet emphatically present or "realized" tendencies, evolved to the
conclusion that:
[Jesus]
could admit his followers to the kingdom of God, and he could do it in
some special way, so that they were not there merely by anticipation,
nor by virtue of belief and obedience, nor by some other figure of
speech, but were really, actually, in.[13]
Smith held
that the best explanation for the literary and historical evidence
surrounding the mircles of Jesus was that Jesus himself actually
performed--or meant to and was understood to have performed--magical
feats. Among these was a baptismal initiation rite through which he was
able to "give" his disciples a vision of the heavenly spheres. This was
in the form of an altered state of consciousness induced by "the
recitation of repetitive, hypnotic prayers and hymns," a technique common
in Jewish mystical texts, Qumran material, Greek magical papyri and later
Christian practices such as the Byzantine liturgy.[14] This is a radical
departure from the mainstream scholarship which seeks to minimize or
eliminate altogether any possible "supernatural" elements attached to the
Historical Jesus, who is most often understood as a speaker on social
issues and applied ethics . . . an Elijahform social worker, if you will.
Morton
Smith did not begin with that assumption, nor did his reinterpretation of
Christian history arrive at it. Thus, the new theory summarized in his
1973 book for general readership displeased practically everyone:
[. . .
F]rom the scattered indications in the canonical Gospels and the secret
Gospel of Mark, we can put together a picture of Jesus' baptism, "the
mystery of the kingdom of God." It was a water baptism administered by
Jesus to chosen disciples, singly and by night. The costume, for the
disciple, was a linen cloth worn over the naked body. This cloth was
probably removed for the baptism proper, the immersion in water, which
was now reduced to a preparatory purification. After that, by unknown
ceremonies, the disciple was possessed by Jesus' spirit and so united
with Jesus. One with him, he participated by hallucination in Jesus'
ascent into the heavens, he entered the kingdom of God, and was thereby
set free from the laws ordained for and in the lower world. Freedom
from the law may have resulted in completion of the spiritual union by
physical union. This certainly occurred in many forms of gnostic
Christianity; how early it began there is no telling.[15]
In an
interview with The New York Times just before his books were
released onto the market, Smith noted with appreciation, "Thank God I
have tenure."[16]
The
Inquisition: Let's Begin
Not a
moment was lost in the ensuing backlash. Smith had laid aside the canon
of unwritten rules that most Biblical scholars worked by. He took the
Gospels as more firmly rooted in history than in the imagination of the
early church. He refused to operate with an artificially thick barrier
between pagan and Christian, magic and mythology. And he not only
promulgated his theories from his office in Columbia University via
obscure scholarly periodicals: he had given them to the world in plain,
understandable and all-too-clear language. Thus there was no time for the
typical scholarly method of thorough, researched, logical refutation. The
public attention span was short. It was imperative that Smith be
discredited before too many Biblical scholars told the press that there
might be something to his theories. Some of the high-pitched remarks of
well-known scholars are amusing to us in retrospect:
Patrick
Skehan: "...a morbid concatenation of fancies..."[17]
Joseph Fitzmyer: "...venal popularization..."[18] "...replete with
innuendos and eisegesis..."[19]
Paul J. Achtemeier: "Characteristically, his arguments are awash in
speculation."[20] "...an a priori principle of selective
credulity..."[21]
William Beardslee: "...ill-founded..."[22]
Pierson Parker: "...the alleged parallels are far-fetched..."[23]
Hans Conzelmann: "...science fiction..."[24] "...does not belong to
scholarly, nor even...discussable, literature..."[25]
Raymond Brown: "...debunking attitude towards Christianity..."[26]
Frederick Danker: "...in the same niche with Allegro's mushroom
fantasies and Eisler's salmagundi."[27]
Helmut Merkel: "Once again total warfare has been declared on New
Testament scholarship."[28]
The
possibility that the initiation could have included elements of eroticism
was unthinkable to many scholars, whose reaction was to project onto
Smith's entire interpretive work an imaginary emphasis on Jesus being a
homosexual:
[. . .
T]he fact that the young man comes to Jesus "wearing a linen cloth over
his naked body" naturally suggests implications which Smith does not
fail to infer.[29]
Hostility
has marked some of the initial reactions to Smith's publication because
of his debunking attitude towards Christianity and his unpleasant
suggestion that Jesus engaged in homosexual practices with his
disciples.[30]
Many
others cited rather prominently the homoerotic overtures of Smith's
thesis in their objections to his overall work.[31] Another criticism,
which holds more weight from a scholar's standpoint, was Smith's
rejection of the form and redaction critical techniques preferred by the
reviewer.[32]
Two
scholars, embarassingly, found a flaw in Smith's use of what they
considered too much documentation, as a ploy to confuse the reader.[33]
Many
scholars felt that the Secret Mark fragments were a pastiche from the
four gospels, some even suggesting that Mark's style is so simple to
imitate the fragment must be a useless pseudepigraphon.[34]
In
reaction to Clement's claim to perform initiation rites, some scholars
simply dogmatized that Alexandrian Christians only used words like
"initiation" and "mystery" in a figurative sense, therefore the letter
must not be authentic.[35]
Finally,
some reactions truly border on the petty. Two scholars held that Morton
Smith didn't really "discover" the Secret Gospel of Mark at all. Because
the letter only contains two fragments of it, Smith is described as
dishonest in his subtitle "The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret
Gospel of Mark."[36] Worst of all is Danker, who complains that the
Smith's first, non-technical book does not include the Greek text. "The
designer of the jacket, as though fond of palimpsests, has obscured with
the book title and the editor's name even the partial reproduction of
Clement's letter," and that while there is another photo inside the book,
"the publishers do not supply a magnifying glass with which to read
it."[37] All this just to tell us that, after he and a companion had
painstakingly transcribed the Greek text, Smith's transcription and
translation are "substantially correct."[38] He deceptively omits that
Smith's Harvard edition includes large, easily legible photographic
plates of the original manuscript, alleging that Smith was
"reluctant...to share the Greek text"[39] he had discovered.
Only one
reviewer, Fitzmeyer, saw it worthwhile to point out that Morton Smith was
bald. Whatever importance we may attach to the thickness of a scholar's
hair, it seems that detached scholarly criticism fails when certain
tenets of faith--even "enlightened" liberal faith--are called into
question.
Is the
Ink Still Wet? The Question of a Forgery
Inevitably
a document which is so controvertial as Secret Mark will be accused of
being a forgery. This is precisely what happened in 1975 when Quentin
Quesnell published his lengthy paper "The Mar Saba Clementine: A Question
of Evidence" in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly. In this article he
brings to bear a host of objections to Smith's treatment of the document.
Foremost
is the lack of the physical manuscript. Smith left the manuscript in the
tower at Mar Saba in 1958 and had been working with his set of
photographs ever since. Quesnell regards this as a neglect of Smith's
scholarly duties.[40] Perhaps those duties might be assumed to include
the theft of the volume a la Sinaiticus or the Jung Codex. In fact, even
Smith's publication of photographic plates of the ms. are considered
sub-standard by Quesnell. They "do not include the margins and edges of
the pages," they "are only black and white," and are in Quesnell's eyes
marred by "numerous discrepancies in shading, in wrinkles and dips in the
paper."[41]
Quesnell
calls into question all of Smith's efforts to date the manuscript to the
eighteenth century. Although Smith consulted many paleographic experts,
Quesnell feels this information to be useless as compared to a chemical
analysis of the ink, and a "microscopic examination of the writing."[42]
Then he
asks the "unavoidable next question"[43]: was the letter of Clement a
modern forgery? He remarks that Smith "tells a story on himself that
could make clear the kind of motivation that might stir a serious scholar
even apart from any long-concealed spirit of fun."[44] Pointing out
Smith's interest in how scholars tend to fit newly-discovered evidence
into their previously-held sacrosanct interpretive paradigms,[45] and how
Smith requested scholars in his longer treatise to keep him abreast of
their research,[46] Quesnell asks if it might not be that a certain
modern forger who shall not be named might have "found himself moved to
concoct some 'evidence' in order to set up a controlled experiment?"[47]
Quesnell
raises still more objections, and representative of them is his claim
that the mass of documentation Smith brought to bear in Clement of
Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark is really a ploy to distract the
reader. "[. . . I]t is hard to believe that this material is included as
a serious contribution to scholarly investigation," Quesnell
suggests.[48] In fact, he insinuates that its function is really to
"deepen the darkness."[49]
Quesnell
did not feel that scholarly discussion could "reasonably continue" until
all these issues--and more--were resolved.[50]
Smith's
answer to the accusation of forgery was published in the next volume of
the Catholic Biblical Quarterly. Humorously he advised his detractor that
"one should not suppose a text spurious simply because one dislikes what
it says."[51]
"Not at
all," was Quesnell's reply. "I find it quite harmless."[52]
Quesnell's
arguments were still echoed in 1983 by Per Beskow, who wrote that Smith
"can only present some mediocre photographs, which do not even cover the
entire margins of the manuscript."[53] While the photographic plates in
the Harvard volume do not extend to the margins due to the cropping of
the publishers,[54] Smith's photographs are printed elsewhere and do
include the margins of the pages. Furthermore, they are quite in-focus
and cannot be described as mediocre.
The
Popular Response
The
religious right was particularly displeased with the new Secret Gospel of
Mark. Even without the magical interpretation of earliest Christianity
Smith promulgated in his two books, the discovery of another apocryphal
gospel only spells trouble for conservative theologians and apologists.
What information about Secret Mark made it past the blockade into the
evangelical press? There was Ronald J. Sider's quick review in
Christianity Today:
Unfounded . . . wildly speculative...pockmarked with irresponsible
inferences . . . highly speculative . . .operates with the
presupposition that Jesus could not have been the incarnate Son of God
filled with the Holy Spirit . . . simply absurd! . . . unacceptable . .
. highly speculative . . . numerous other fundamental weaknesses . . .
highly speculative . . . irresponsible . . . will not fool the careful
reader.[55]
Evangelical scholarship has since treated Secret Mark as it traditionally
has any other non-canonical text: as a peculiar but ultimately
unimportant document which would be spiritually dangerous to take
seriously.
Secret
Mark and Da Avabhasa's Initiation to Ecstasy
Perhaps
the strangest chapter in Secret Mark's long history was its appropriation
by the Free Daist Communion, a California-based Eastern religious group
led by American-born guru Da Avabhasa (formerly known as Franklin Jones,
Da Free John, and Da Kalki). In 1982, The Dawn Horse Press, the voice of
this interesting sect, re-published Smith's Harper and Row volume, with a
new forword by Elaine Pagels and an added postscript by Smith himself.
In 1991 I
made contact with this publisher in order to ascertain why they were
interested in Secret Mark. I was answered by Saniel Bonder, Da Avabhasa's
official biographer and a main spokesman for the Commununion.
Heart-Master Da Avabhasa is Himself a great Spiritual "Transmitter" or
"Baptizer" of the highest type. And this is the key to understanding
both His interest in, and The Dawn Horse Press's publication of,
Smith's Secret Gospel. What Smith discovered, in the fragment of the
letter by Clement of Alexandria, is--to Heart-Master Da--an apparent
ancient confirmation that Jesus too was a Spirit-Baptizer who initiated
disciples into the authentic Spiritual and Yogic process, by night and
in circumstances of sacred privacy. This is the single reason why
Heart-Master Da was so interested in the story. As it happened, Morton
Smith's contract with a previous publisher had expired, and so he was
happy to arrange for us to publish the book.[56]
Because of
the general compatibility of Smith's interpretation of the historical
Jesus and the practices of the Da Free John community, the group's leader
was inclined to promulgate Smith's theory. It is difficult to judge the
precise degree of ritual identity which exists between Master Da and
Jesus the magician. Some identity, however, is explicit, as revealed in
Bonder's official biography of Master Da:
Over the
course of Heart-Master Da's Teaching years, His devotees explored all
manner of emotional-sexual possibilities, including celibacy,
promiscuity, heterosexuality, homosexuality, monogamy, polygamy,
polyandy, and many different kinds of living arrangements between
intimate partners and among groups of devotees in our various
communities.[57]
The
parallel between the Daist community during this time and the libertine
Christian rituals described by Smith is made stronger by the spiritual
leader's intimate involvement with this thorough exploration of the
group's erogeny. "Heart-Master Da never withheld Himself from
participation in the play of our experiments with us . . ."[58] Georg
Feuerstein has published an interview with an anonymous devotee of Master
Da who describes a party during which the Master borrowed his wife in
order to free him of egotistical jealousy.[59] Like the Carpocratians of
eighteen-hundred years ago, and the Corinthian Christians of a century
earlier still, the devotees of the Daist Communion sought to come to
terms with and conquer their sexual obstacles to ultimate liberation not
by merely denying the natural urges, but by immersing themselves in them.
For many
years Da Avabhasa himself was surrounded by an "innermost circle" of nine
female devotees, which was dismantled in 1986 after the Community and the
Master himself had been through trying experiences.[60] In 1988 Da
Avabhasa formally declared four of these original nine longtime female
devotees his "Kanyas," the significance of which is described well by
Saniel Bonder:
Kanyadana is an ancient traditional practice in India, wherein a chaste
young woman...is given...to a Sat-Guru either in formal marriage, or as
a consort, or simply as a serving initimate. Each kanya thus becomes
devoted...in a manner that in unique among all His devotees. She serves
the Sat-Guru Personally at all times and, in that unique context, at
all times is the recipient of His very Personal Instructions,
Blessings, and Regard.[61]
As a
kanyadana "kumari", a young woman is necessarily "pure"--that is, chaste
and self-transcending in her practice, but also Spiritually Awakened by
her Guru, whether she is celibate or Yogically sexually active.[62]
The
formation of the Da Avabhasa Gurukala Kanyadana Kumari Order should be
seen against the background of sexual experimentation and confrontation
through which the Master's community had passed in the decade before, and
in light of the sexuality-affirming stance of the Daist Communion in
general. The Secret Gospel presented a picture of Jesus as an initiator
into ecstasy and a libertine bearing more than a little resemblance to
the radical and challenging lessons of Master Da Avabhasa, in place long
before 1982 when The Dawn Horse Press re-issued the book.[63]
The
Cultural Fringe and Secret Mark
Occasionally one still encounters brief references to Secret Mark in
marginal or sensational literature. A simple but accurate account of its
discovery was related in the 1982 British best-seller The Holy Blood and
the Holy Grail. Written by three television documentary reporters, the
book describes an actual French society called the Priory of Sion which
seeks to restore the French monarchy to a particular family which, it
seems, traces its blood-line back to Jesus himself. In the course of
arguing that this could actually be the truth, the authors find it
convenient to cite Secret Mark as an example of how the early church
edited unwanted elements from its scriptures. "This missing fragment had
not been lost. On the contrary, it had apparently been deliberately
suppressed."[64]
A quick
reference to Secret Mark is made in Elizabeth Clare Prophet's book on the
supposed "lost years" of Jesus. She writes that discoveries such as
Secret Mark "strongly suggest that early Christians possessed a larger,
markedly more diverse body of writings and traditions on the life of
Jesus that appears in what has been handed down to us in the New
Testament."[65] However, the remainder of the book speculates about
whether Jesus might have studied yoga in India, and has little to do with
Secret Mark or Jesus the magician.
Where Are
We Now? (Scholarly Interest from 1982 to the present)
For
scholars the problem remains unsettled. While even the most acid of
reviews often ended with a statement to wit that a real conclusion would
require an in-depth treatment of Smith's books, none came. In 1982 Smith
commented wryly on the rhetoric of the reviews which made work on the
Secret Mark problem almost impossible in the 1970s:
For
example, Achtemeier's review, of which the predendedly factual
statements are often grossly inaccurate. Though worthless as criticism,
it cannot confidently be described as "useless." It probably pleased
Fitzmyer, who was then editor of The Journal of Biblical Literature,
and thus may have helped Achtemeier get the secretaryship of the
Society of Biblical Literature. That both names rhyme with "liar" is a
curious coincidence.[66]
Some
important Catholic scholars, including Achtemeier, Fitzmyer, Quesnell,
Skehan and Brown, have tended to ignore Secret Mark or dismiss it as
worthless. C.S. Mann's Anchor Bible commentary on Mark, published in
1986, represents the whole controversy as finished, a matter of "mere
curiosity."[67] With the blessing of the Imprimatur behind him, John P.
Meier advised in 1991 that Secret Mark, the Gospels of Thomas and Peter,
the Egerton Gospel and all other non-canonical Jesus material were
worthless and might simply be thrown "back into the sea."[68]
At the
same time, there has been an increase in the number of scholars producing
Secret Mark studies since 1982. That "Morton Smith seems quite alone in
his view that the fragment is a piece of genuine Gospel material," as
claimed in 1983 by Beskow is manifestly false.[69] Smith's work in the
early 70s was greeted with more-or-less positive reviews by a small
number of important scholars including Helmut Koester, Cyril Richardson,
George MacRae, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Some scholars did not write reviews
but openly expressed the notion that Smith's work was meritorious. When
asked by the New York Times about Smith's interpretation of Jesus as a
magician, Krister Stendhal tactfully replied, "I have much sympathy for
that way of placing Jesus in the social setting of his time."[70]
While that
sympathy does not remain particularly widespread, accepting Smith's
magical Jesus has nothing to do with taking Secret Mark seriously. The
two issues may be discussed seperately: the argument for magical
practises in early Christianity may certainly be made without reference
to Secret Mark, and Secret Mark may be discussed as a text with no more
magical implications than we find in canonical Mark.
In Thomas
Talley's 1982 article on ancient liturgy, he describes his own attempt to
physically examine the Secret Mark manuscript. As his is the last word on
the physical artifact in question, it is fortuitous to quote him at
length:
Given
the late date of the manuscript itself and the fact that Prof. Smith
published photographs of it, it seemed rather beside the point that
some scholars wished to dispute the very existence of a manuscript
which no one but the editor had seen. My own attempts to see the
manuscript in January of 19080 were frustrated, but as witnesses to its
existence I can cite the Archimandrite Meliton of the Jerusalem Greek
Patriarchate who, after the publication of Smith's work, found the
volume at Mar Saba and removed it to the patriarchal library, and the
patriarchal librarian, Father Kallistos, who told me that the
manuscript (two folios) has been removed from the printed volume and is
being repaired.[71]
Although
one wishes this document were available for the examination of Western
scholars, it is no longer reasonable to doubt the existence of the
manuscript itself. That it represents an authentic tradition from Clement
of Alexandria is disputed only by a handful of scholars and, as Talley
also points out, the letter has itself been included in the standard
edition of the Alexandrian father's writings since 1980.[72]
Taking on
the pressing question of Secret Mark's textual relationship with the
version of Mark in our New Testament, Helmut Koester has published two
intriguing studies arguing that the development of Mark was an
evolutionary process. First came the version of Mark known by Matthew and
Luke, the proto-Mark or Urkarkus long known to scholars of the synoptic
problem. After this original version of Mark was published, the expanded
version used by the Alexandrian church in Christian mysteries was made
(and from that, its gnosticized Carpocration version). Soon afterward or
simulaneously, a mostly expurgated version of Secret Mark was published
widely and became canonical Mark.[73] The original Urmarkus, lacking
anything not found in Matthew or Luke, went the way of the sayings source
and was not preserved.
Koester's
view has made some inroads. Hans-Martin Schenke adopts it with the
modification that Carpocratian Mark predates the Secret Mark of the
Alexandrian Church.[74] John Dominic Crossan developed a theory like
Koester's in his 1985 Four Other Gospels. Secret Mark has been included
in the texts being translated as part of the Scholars Version project,
and is described as an early gospel fragment in material that the Jesus
Seminar has been making available to popular audiences. None of these
treatments is significantly affected by one's assessment of the magical
Jesus suggested by Smith.
Still,
Jesus as magician is not a dead issue. John Dominic Crossan's very
intriguing book on The Historical Jesus has an extended discussion of the
topic. He argues that Jesus may indeed be understood as a magician. He
rejects an artificial dichotomy between magic and religion, saying, "the
prescriptive distinction that states that we practice religion but they
practice magic should be seen for what it is, a political validation of
the approved and the official against the unapproved and unofficial."[75]
Conclusion: Where No Secret Gospel Has Gone Before
Secret
Mark's plight constitutes a warning to all scholars as to the dangers of
allowing sentiments of faith to cloud or prevent critical examination of
evidence. When seen in light of the massive literature which has been
produced by the other major manuscript finds of our century, the Dead Sea
Scrolls, Nag Hammadi codices, the comparative dearth of good studies on
this piece in particular cannot be explained in any other way that a
stubborn refusal to deal with information which might challenge
deeply-held personal convictions. It is good to keep in mind an
unofficial directive of the Jesus Seminar: "Beware of finding a Jesus
entirely congenial to you."[76]
"It is my
opinion," writes Hans Dieter Betz, "that Smith's book and the texts he
discovered should be carefully and seriously studied. Criticizing Smith
is not enough."[77] Certainly it is reasonable to concur. After twenty
years of confusion, it must be time to set aside emotionalism and
approach both this fragment and Morton Smith's assessment of the role of
magic in early Christianity with objective and critical eyes. However
that question is ultimately to be resolved, Secret Mark provides yet
another fascinating window into the remarkable ritual diversity we may
identify in the first phases of the development of Christianity.
Footnotes
1 Parker,
"An Early Christian Cover-up?", 5.
2 Smith, "Monasteries and their Manuscripts."
3 Smith, The Secret Gospel, 12.
4 Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel according to Mark, 1.
5 Smith, The Secret Gospel, 13-14.
6 ibid., 24.
7 ibid., 25.
8 Knox, "A New Gospel Ascribed to Mark."
9 Smith, "Monasteries and their Manuscripts."
10 Smith, "Hellenika Cheirographa en tei Monei tou Hagiou Sabba."
11 Smith, The Secret Gospel, 76.
12 Smith, Jesus the Magician, 3-4.
13 Smith, The Secret Gospel, 94.
14 ibid., 113n1.
15 ibid., 113-114.
16 Shenker, "A Scholar Infers Jesus Practiced Magic."
17 Skehan, review of Smith's work in Catholic Historical Review, 452.
18 Fitzmyer, "How to Exploit a Secret Gospel," 572.
19 Fitzmyer, "Mark's 'Secret Gospel?'", 65.
20 Achtemeier, review of Smith in Journal of Biblical Literature, 626.
21 ibid.
22 Beardslee, review of Smith in Interpretation, 234.
23 Parker, "An Early Christian Cover-Up?", 5.
24 Conzelmann, "Literaturbericht zu den Synoptischen Evangelien (Fortsetzung).",
321. (Translation from Schenke, "The Mystery of the Gospel of Mark,"
70-71.)
25 ibid., 23. (Translation from Schenke, "The Mystery of the Gospel of
Mark," 70-71.)
26 Brown, "The Relation of 'The Secret Gospel of Mark' to the Fourth
Gospel," 466n1.
27 Danker, review of Smith in Dialog, 316.
28 Merkel, "Auf den Spuren des Urmarkus?", 123. (Translation from Schenke,
"The Mystery of the Gospel of Mark," 69.)
29 Musurillo, "Morton Smith's Secret Gospel," 328.
30 Brown, "The Relation of 'The Secret Gospel of Mark' to the Fourth
Gospel," 466n1.
31 Including Fitzmeyer, "How to Exploit a Secret Gospel"; Parker, "An
Early Christian Cover-Up?"; Skehan, review of Smith in Catholic
Historical Review 60(1974); Gibbs, review of Smith in Theology Today
30(1974); Grant, "Morton Smith's Two Books"; Merkel, "Auf den Spuren des
Urmarkus?"; Kummel, "Ein Jahrzehnt Jesusforchung"; and Beskow, Strange
Tales about Jesus. Anitra Kolenkow's comments on this bias are salient:
"We know that the gospel of John long has been known as possibly
containing both gnostic and homosexual motifs. John may have been written
at approximately the same time as Mark. What difference does it make to
us if Jesus is not separated from a homosexual situation?" (Quoted from
Kolenkow's response to Reginald Fuller, Longer Mark, 33.)
32 Examples are Achtemeier, review of Smith in the Journal of Biblical
Literature 93(1974); MacRae, "Yet Another Jesus"; Gibbs, review of Smith
in Theology Today 30(1974); and Fuller, Longer Mark: Forgery,
Interpolation, or Old Tradition?
33 See the statements to this effect in Quesnell, "The Mar Saba
Clementine," and Hobbs (response in Fuller, Longer Mark: Forgery,
Interpolation, or Old Tradition?).
34 Such scholars included Pierson Parker, Edward Hobbs and Per Beskow.
35 See Bruce, The 'Secret' Gospel of Mark; Musurillo, "Morton Smith's
Secret Gospel"; and Kummel, "Ein Jahrzehnt Jesusforschung."
36 Fitzmyer, "How to Exploit a Secret Gospel"; Gibbs, review of Smith in
Theology Today 30(1974).
37 Danker, review of Smith in Dialog, 316.
38 ibid.
39 ibid.
40 Quesnell, "The Mar Saba Clementine," 49.
41 ibid., 50.
42 ibid., 52.
43 ibid., 53.
44 ibid., 57.
45 Smith, The Secret Gospel, 25.
46 Smith, Clement of Alexandria, ix.
47 Quesnell, "The Mar Saba Clementine," 58.
48 ibid., 61.
49 ibid., 60n30.
50 ibid., 48.
51 Smith, "On the Authenticity of the Mar Saba Letter of Clement," 196.
52 Quesnell, "A Reply to Morton Smith," 201.
53 Beskow, Strange Tales about Jesus, 101.
54 Smith, "On the Authenticity of the Mar Saba Letter of Clement," 196.
55 Sider, "Unfounded 'Secret'," 160.
56 Private correspondence with Saniel Bonder.
57 Bonder, The Divine Emergence of the World-Teacher, 234.
58 ibid., 235.
59 Feuerstein, Holy Madness, 90-92.
60 ibid., 94.
61 Bonder, The Divine Emergence of the World-Teacher, 287.
62 ibid., 288.
63 It is neccessary to stipulate that nothing in the above discussion of
the Free Daist Communion should be read as derogatory. The purpose is
simple description. Despite the controversy which has sometimes
surrounded this movement, the author does not feel that its practices are
in any way fraudulent or abusive. Scholars should consider the
possibility that examination of modern new religious movements such as
the Da Avabhasa sect might be extraordinarily helpful in our
understanding of the community dynamics of early libertine Christians
such as the Carpocratians.
64 Baigent et al, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, 290.
65 Prophet, The Lost Years of Jesus, 9. Most interestingly, in her notes
Prophet quotes a 1984 telephone interview with scholar Birger A. Pearson,
in which he says that "many scholars, maybe even most, would now accept
the authenticity of the Clement fragment, including what it said about
the Secret Gospel of Mark." (434n16)
66 Smith, The Secret Gospel (1982 Dawn Horse edition), 150n7.
67 Mann, Mark (The Anchor Bible), 423.
68 Meier, A Marginal Jew, 140.
69 Beskow, Strange Tales about Jesus, 99. One wonders what a "genuine
piece of gospel material" might be. Are gospel additions such as the
second ending of Mark (16.9-20) and the famous story of the adulterous
woman (John 8.53-9.11) "genuine gospel material," even if we know they
were not originally part of the gospels in which they are found?
70 Shenker, "Jesus: New Ideas about his Powers."
71 Talley, "Liturgical Time in the Ancient Church," 45.
72 ibid.
73 See Koester, "History and Development of Mark's Gospel," and Ancient
Christian Gospels.
74 Schenke, "The Mystery of the Gospel of Mark," 76.
75 Crossan, The Historical Jesus, 310.
76 Funk et al., The Five Gospels, 5.
77 Fuller, Longer Mark: Forgery, Interpolation, or Old Tradition?, 18.
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Author's
note:
The author
would like to offer thanks to Saniel Bonder of the Mountain of Attention
Sanctuary for his kind assistance in providing research materials and his
willingness to share with me information pertaining to The Dawn Horse
Press and The Secret Gospel. Further thanks are due to Dr. Jon Daniels of
The Defiance College for his helpful insights into the subject matter of
this study.