For Smith, Jesus really was a magician. In fact, Smith wrote another book devoted to the subject, called, appropriately enough, Jesus the Magician. And this identification of Jesus has a lot to do with this text. Smith is struck, quite understandably, by the fact that the young man comes to Jesus wearing nothing but a linen cloth over his nakedness. That sounds like someone coming forward for baptism, since in the early church, people were baptized, as adults, in the nude (after taking off a simple robe worn to the ceremony). Now the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke do not indicate that Jesus baptized people. But the Gospel of John indicates that he may have done so (John 3:22; 4:l-2). Moreover, the apostle Paul talks about baptism and indicates that at baptism a person is somehow "united" with Christ (Rom. 6:1-6). Did Paul, after Jesus' death, make up such a view himself? No, argues Smith, it was a view known to Jesus' followers before his death, because it was Jesus' own view. Jesus himself baptized people, and in that baptism they came to be united with him.
This being united with Jesus is somehow connected with the Kingdom of God because the text from the Secret Gospel indicates that this young man spent the entire night with Jesus being taught about the Kingdom. Smith thinks this conveys a historical datum about Jesus: Whomever Jesus baptized experienced a spiritual unity with him that involved a magical, visionary journey with him into the Kingdom of God. Moreover, this was not simply some kind of spiritual ecstasy. No, this mystical experience of the kingdom allowed the person, says Smith, to be "set free from the laws ordained for and in the lower world." Indeed, "freedom from the law may have resulted in completion of the spiritual union by physical union." In other words, when Jesus baptized a man, their spiritual union culminated in a physical coupling. Smith expresses some uncertainty concerning the ceremonies involved in this unification of Jesus and the man he was baptizing, but he does indicate in one of his footnotes that physical "manipulation, too, was probably involved; the stories of Jesus' miracles give a very large place to the use of his hands."
The hands of a healer here take on a whole new meaning. In this fragment from Clement, Smith discovered that Jesus was a magician who engaged in sex with the men that he baptized.
I do not want to go into a prolonged discussion of every aspect of Morton Smith's interpretation of the Secret Gospel. Most scholars found his explication unconvincing at best; some were predictably outraged. Smith appeared to love it.
It has been pointed out, with some justice, that the text says nothing about Jesus using magic. It does not mention baptism. There is no word about an ecstatic vision or a spiritual unity with Jesus, let alone about anyone having sex with the Son of God. Some reviewers concluded that Smith found in the text what he brought to the text, and noted that he had been interested in ecstatic visions, heavenly journeys, law-free morality, and Jesus the magician years before he published his books on the Secret Gospel. And, predictably, other scholars have interpreted the text in other ways. Some, for example, have seen it as a simple pastiche from other Gospel accounts, for example, borrowing phrases from the Gospels of Mark and John (rich young man; raising of Lazarus) and interpreted it as a later story wrongly thought to belong to Mark, a story that simply gave another account of Jesus raising someone from the dead and then giving him instructions in the mysteries of the Kingdom (cf. Mark4:10-12).
And yet one does need to take into account some of the peculiar details. Why would the text stress that this fellow was completely naked under his linen garment and that Jesus spent the night with him?
The Question of Forgery
Rather than pursue that question, I want to deal with the prior one. Is this an authentic letter of Clement, or was it forged? And if it was forged, forged by whom?
I am sorry to say that I will not be able to give a definitive answer, for reasons that will soon be apparent. At the outset, however, I should emphasize that the majority of scholars Smith consulted while doing his research were convinced that the letter was authentic, and probably a somewhat smaller majority agreed that the quotations of Secret Mark actually derived from a version of Mark. Even today, these are the majority opinions. But they have never been the full consensus. Some scholars have thought the letter was forged, either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages or in the modern period. Some have suspected from the beginning that Smith forged it. Those who think so appear to be increasing in numberor at least they are speaking out more, now that Smith is not around to respond.
Among the earliest doubters was one of the greatest scholars of Christian antiquity of the twentieth century, Smith's own teacher at Harvard, Arthur Darby Nock, one of the few people in the field who could probably claim intellectual superiority to Smith in several of his own areas of expertise. Nock was one of the first scholars to whom Smith showed the photographs. And Nock was suitably impressed, even amazed by what he read. But to the end of his life his instinctshe was famous for his instinctstold him no, this was not genuinely Clementine. In his view, it was a "mystification for the sake of mystification," that is to say, a forgery by someone to see if she or he could get away with it. But Nock evidently did not think that it would have been a modern forger, let alone Smith. Others have thought otherwise.
There are a number of factors to consider. The first is nearly as amazing as the discovery itself, and it has been the source of heated contention ever since its announcement. From the moment Smith took his photographs, no other scholar has been able to subject the book to a careful and controlled examination.
There is no doubt that the book existed. There is no doubt that Smith photographed the relevant pages. There is no doubt that the letter is written is an eighteenth-century style of Greek hand. There is no doubt that the writing style of the letter is like Clement's. And there is no doubt that the quotations of Secret Mark are very much like Mark. But no one has carefully examined the book.
Why does that matter? After all, we have the photographs! It matters because the only way to see if a modern person has forged the text is to have the manuscript available for analysis. On the most basic level, until there is a chemical analysis of the ink, we cannot really know if the scribe was writing in the late 1750sor the late 1950s.
It is true that a modern forgery would be an amazing feat. For this to be forged, someone would have had to imitate an eighteenth-century Greek style of handwriting and to produce a document that is so much like Clement that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Clement, which quotes a previously lost passage from Mark that is so much like Mark that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Mark. If this is forged, it is one of the greatest works of scholarship of the twentieth century, by someone who put an uncanny amount of work into it.
But it would not have been impossible. What seems most incredible to most of us is that someone could imitate an eighteenth-century style of handwriting in Greek! In fact, this is not at all impossible. We know of numerous forgers since the Renaissance who taught themselves different Greek and Latin writing styles and produced documents that fooled experts for years. Some documents are still probably unsuspected. In the 1850s and 1860s, a Greek scholar named Constantine Simonides passed off dozens of forgeries of ancient texts (including some in hieroglyphics) and made a small fortune doing it. For a long while, he managed to convince a good number of people that he in fact had forged the famous manuscript of the Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, discovered by the great manuscript hunter Constantine Tischendorf in the Monastery of St. Catherine's at Mount Sinai. This was the most significant New Testament manuscript discovered in the nineteenth century, and Simonides claimed that he himself had fabricated it. And he was so good at his craft, as everyone knew, that learned societies throughout England debated the merits of his claims for months.
Someone with skill and patience can learn how to imitate a style of writing. Moreover, it should be pointed out that in the case of the letter of Clement, there was not a particular scribe's hand that had to be imitated, simply a hand that looked like other hands of th
e eighteenth century. We cannot know if this eighteenth-century hand was actually writing in the eighteenth century until we can examine the ink. And the manuscript is unavailable.
I do not mean to say that it has always been unavailable, even though that is what scholars in the field invariably claim. Whether in serious publications or in popular accounts on the internet, nearly everyone who discusses the authenticity of this letter of Clement points out that no western scholar except Smith has ever laid eyes on the book. As it turns out, that is not true. In one of those quirky coincidences of history, the very evening I completed my first draft of this chapter, I met the last western scholar on earth to see the book.
I was at my colleague Elizabeth Clark's house for a social event. Also there was a scholar named Guy Stroumsa, a professor of comparative religions at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a respected expert in early Christianity. Stroumsa happened to be in town to visit his daughter, who was just starting her Ph.D. program in classics at Duke University. The event was organized around Stroumsa's visit. He gave a brief talkabout Clement of Alexandria, as it turned outand then we had a light dinner and social, academic conversation. He and I had never met before, but we knew each other's work. I told him I was writing a book on lost Christianities, and told him I had just completed a draft of my chapter on the Secret Gospel of Mark. To my astonishmentand everyone else'sStroumsa told me that years ago he had tracked down the book and seen it with his own eyes. He could confirm that the letter was in the final pages (which, of course, no one doubted). But he suspects that no one will ever see the letter again.
I immediately stopped drinking and started listening. As a graduate student in 1976, Stroumsa found himself discussing the Secret Gospel with his teacher in Jerusalem, David Flusser, a highly erudite scholar of the New Testament and early Judaism. Flusser had claimed that the letter was probably forged. Stroumsa suggested they try to find it. It was, after all, only a forty-five-minute drive to the monastery. And so they called up another scholar at the university and a Greek Orthodox monk connected with the monastery, who happened to be doing a Ph.D. there at the time (and who could open the doors for them once they were there, so to speak). They all piled into Stroumsa's car and drove out to the monastery.
The dust was heavy over the library in the upper room of the tower, where Smith had done his work of cataloging nearly eighteen years earlier. Stroumsa suspected that no one had been in the library since. The monks were not taken to reading the complicated tomes stored in this out-of-the-way place. The foursome began their hunt, opening one book after the other, looking for an edition of Ignatius with a handwritten text on the final pages. After about fifteen minutes, one of the monks found it. It was right there on a shelf, where Smith had left it.
The scholars persuaded the monks to allow them to take the book back to the library of the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem, where they could find someone to do a chemical analysis of the ink. But once they had conveyed the book back with them, things turned out to be more complicated than they had expected. No one at the National Library was able to perform the necessary testing; Stroumsa was told that the only agency that could do it was the police department. When he informed the librarian who was keeping the book, he was told, "No thanks." The Greek Orthodox Christians were not eager to hand over one of their prized possessionswhether they read the book or not, it was still one of the sacred tomes of their libraryto the Israeli (Jewish) authorities. That brought the matter to a close.
Some years later, someone told Stroumsa of a rumor that the letter of Clement had been cut out of the book for "safe-keeping." Stroumsa called the librarian at the Greek Patriarchate and was told that it was true. He himself had done just that. And he now did not know where the pages were.
And that's the end of the story. Did the librarian hide the pages, to keep scholars from rifling through the monks' treasured possessions looking for lost Gospels? Did he burn the pages simply to get them off his hands? Where are they now? Do they still exist? I'm afraid that as of this moment, no one appears to know. Maybe that will change. What is certain is that no one has carefully examined the book itself, and it may be that no one ever will.
Issues to Be Addressed
There are several matters to consider when reflecting on the question of whether the letter of Clement could be a modern forgery. When Smith was first maligned for not preserving the book, he quite rightly pointed out that it was not his to preserve. He assumed that it was still in the library, where he had found it. Fair enough. But one still must wonder. Smith was a brilliant scholar who spent fifteen years verifying the Clementine style of the writing. He knew full well about forgeries. And he knew that the only way to certify the authenticity of a document was to examine the document itself. Even if one is not allowed to apply chemical tests, one can look carefully at what cannot show up on photographs, especially those taken by a handheld camera of 1950s vintage tiny marks on the page, indentations that indicate where the pen started and stopped, tiny flows of ink over lines, and the like. Many a forgery has been uncovered by a careful analysis of the actual physical specimen. But no one can verify this particular document. And one wonders why Smith himself did not go back to take a look. He was an expert in manuscripts. He knew what he would have to look for. He knew that he had not actually examined the pages themselves, say, under a magnifying glass, but had simply photographed them and moved on. Why spend so many years of one's life verifying a text without making the most important step?
In order to say for certain whether the text was actually written in the eighteenth century, we would need to examine the manuscript. Given the fact that we don't have it, I should point out several important questions raised by scholars who are skeptical of Smith's claims (not just his interpretation), and add a few of my own.
If this is a genuine letter of Clement, why does no other ancient source refer to it? To be sure, numerous ancient writings are never referred to. But one might think that such an important document would be known to someone among all the Christian heresy hunters of antiquity.
Why is it that Clement himself never mentions the letter, or the Secret Gospel, or the Carpocratians' corruption of it, in all his other writings? He certainly discussed the Carpocratians a good deal, attacking their views and detailing their heinous activities. Why does he not mention the Secret Gospel they have falsified?
Why does this text take a different stand on the spiritually elite than Clement does elsewhere in his writings? Elsewhere he maintains that those who are advanced in "knowledge," that is, those who are above the run-of-the-mill Christian, have more spiritual interpretations of the texts read in the church. Nowhere does he indicate that they actually have different versions of the same text. But here it turns out, as he says quite openly, they actually have a spiritual gospel written just for them. To some prominent scholars of Clement, this does not sound like Clement.
And why does Clement here contradict what he says elsewhere about taking oaths? In his other writings, he is quite explicit that one must not swear falsely.In this text, he advises that when confronting the Carpocratians about the existence of a Secret Gospel of Mark, one should "even deny it on oath," that is, tell a bald-faced lie under oath in order to win the argument. As Clement elsewhere is quite clear that one does not need to lie in order to uncover the truth, doesn't this letter contradict what he taught otherwise?
Moreover, if the contents of the letter seem somewhat unlike Clement in a couple of places, why is it that, on the other hand, the vocabulary and writing style of this document are so much like Clement? One impressive study, in fact, has shown that this letter of Clement is more like Clement than Clement ever is. That may sound odd at first, so I should explain how it works. Suppose you have a friend who uses the word awesome a lot, and you want to impersonate her. It may turn out that if you were actually to count, she uses the term awesome, say, once every three hundred words. But when you imitate her, you use it once every fifty words so th
at anyone accustomed to hearing her speak will recognize this as one of her characteristic words and think, "Yes, sounds just like her." What we have here is a similar phenomenon: There is too much that is like Clement in this short letter, more than could be expected in any passage of comparable length elsewhere in Clement.
But how could someone imitate Clement so closely, using rare words that he uses, for example, but more frequently than he himself does? One should not forget the modern scholarship on Clement, especially the volumes by Stahlin that provided indexes to all of Clement's vocabulary. As others have pointed out, if Smith could check to see if this vocabulary is like Clement's by using Stahlin, then someone just as easily could have used Stahlin to make this vocabulary like Clement's.
Another intriguing issue involves the way the fragment of the letter ends. After discussing the nefarious ways of the heretical Carpocratioans, the author indicates, "Now the true explanation and that which accords with the true philosophy" And that's where the text breaks off. Some readers have considered this a perfect place to end a forged piece right as the reader's hopes are raised but before they can be met.
On a different matter: What is one to make of the dedication of Smith's two books? The learned volume is dedicated to Arthur Darby Nock, the brilliant scholar who thought that the letter was a "mystification for the sake of mystification." The other volume, strikingly enough, is dedicated to "The One Who Knows." As one reviewer has asked, "Who is 'the one who knows' ? And what does he know?"
The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew Page 12