Telling Tales

by Melissa Katsoulis

  When he did so, his suspicions were proved correct: he was in the presence of a never-before-seen report of something completely new that Jesus had said. And it seemed to fit exactly in to the known Gospel of St Matthew. Matthew 13:42 finds Jesus delivering a vivid warning to his disciples about all the people and things on earth which offend God and ‘do iniquity’. They will, he warns, find themselves thrown by angels ‘into a furnace of fire’ on judgement day, where ‘there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth’. The image of the gnashing of teeth has become famous thanks to its unusual evocation of the misery of hell as an emotional state as well as a physical one. In the canonical Gospel, that is the end of that. But in the agraphon discovered by Coleman-Norton, there is more . . .

  But Rabbi, said one of his disciples, with a look of concern, ‘how can this happen for those people who have no teeth?’ (It is safe to assume there were a quite a lot of toothless people in biblical times, so this would not necessarily have been as facetious a question as it sounds.) ‘Ah, ye of little faith,’ replied the Messiah, ‘do not be troubled. If some have no teeth, then teeth will be provided!’

  Jesus Christ promising false teeth to all on judgement day. Quite a coup. But as soon as it was published, those readers who knew the author smelled a rat. One such reader was the great Bible scholar Bruce Metzger, who had been a pupil of Coleman-Norton’s before the war. He recalled his old teacher telling a joke along exactly those lines to his theology students, and lent his voice to the chorus of academics who knew Coleman-Norton who all said that this was exactly the sort of prank the old fellow loved to play. Nobody much minded, of course (least of all the editors of the Harvard Theological Review, who had previously rejected the very article that the Catholic Biblical Quarterly published), because the author was, by all accounts, a harmless, eccentric professor of the old school. At Princeton he would often take seminars dressed in a dressing gown or cape and smoking a pipe. One old student of his even recalls a song sung by junior members of his faculty that went:

  Here’s to Norton PRC

  Of Oxford University

  With cape and cane and pipe and Sapphics

  And Greek and Latin pornographics.

  This reference to classical pornographics is testament to Coleman-Norton’s considerable powers of composition in the ancient languages he had mastered so well. Whenever the university needed something formal written in Latin it fell to him to do it, but in his spare time – much to the amusements of students and colleagues – he would relish translating and inventing less salubrious texts. Knowing this about him, it is clear not only that he had the ability to compose, in Greek, a convincing fragment of an imagined Latin text, but that the sensitive readers of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly were lucky to have been spared exposure to the grinding of something far less polite than teeth.

  MORTON SMITH

  ONE OF AMERICA’S most fascinating and gifted students of religion was the twentieth-century theologian Morton Smith. His lifelong absorption with the mystical early history of the Christian church began when, as a committed Christian and scholar, he moved to Israel to study Talmudic literature in 1940, becoming fluent in Hebrew, Latin and Greek, and became the first non-Jew to be awarded a doctorate by the Hebrew University. The war trapped him there and he lived for four years in Jerusalem, studying under the great Jewish scholar Gershon Scholem and conducting research on early rabbinical parallels to the Gospels. On moving back to America at the end of the war he briefly became an episcopalian minister but decided that that life was not for him – possibly because he was gay, probably because his intensely questing mind was more suited to academia – and returned to the classroom to become professor of ancient history at Columbia.

  It was in 1973 that he published two books that rocked the Christian and theological communities across the world. One was for scholars, published by Harvard University Press and called Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark and the other was a layman’s companion to the research in that book, The Secret Gospel (Harper & Row). The books explained that he had been going through the library of the Orthodox monastery of Mar Saba in Israel back in the 1950s when he chanced upon a seventeenth-century edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch which contained a transcription on the back fly-leaf of a letter from Clement of Alexandria. The contents of that letter were astounding. It described a secret set of magical rites which Jesus had passed on to a few enlightened followers, and linked this to the Carpocratians, a cult of early Gnostics who believed in the contrary-sounding ethic of redemption through sinning. Carnal sinning particularly.

  And herein lay the detail that rubbed Christian commentators up the wrong way. Clement’s letter spoke of a secret Gospel of St Mark which ought only be seen by those sophisticated enough to receive its unusual news. Here, according to that letter, is what it said on the subject of Jesus and boys:

  And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, ‘son of David, have mercy on me.’ But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do 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. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.

  The homosexual subtext might not be immediately obvious to all readers, but to scholars familiar with the secret initiation rites of the Carpocratians and the fact that in the standard Gospel of Mark there is a strange nonsequitur about a young man present at the time of Jesus’ arrest in a flimsy covering of a linen cloth which is torn off him, leaving him to run off naked. Speculation as to who this figure is and what he was doing, half-naked but for his scrap of linen, with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, has divided scholars for years.

  Now, it would seem, there was a whole aspect of the last days of Jesus’ life that had never been revealed and which spoke of him not only as a practitioner of pagan rites but one of a decidedly pederastic bent. Authenticity is lent to this claim when Clement, after revealing the story of the young man, assures the reader that although his is definitely true, the rumours of a further line in the secret text mentioning ‘naked man with naked man’ was a vicious lie put about by those naughty Carpocratians, who were trying to hijack the story of Jesus’ gentle love of men for their own extreme ends.

  On discovering this incendiary material, Morton Smith did not rush out into the scholastic community and tell everyone about it. He merely photographed and catalogued the book in which he found the transcript and quietly returned to America to sit on his discovery for several years, musing on it and discussing it only with his closest academic colleagues. But he knew that when he did finally release it, it would cause a major stir. After all, here were new details from Jesus’ life story, suggestion of a new, Lazarus-like miracle, and confirmation that Mark had indeed written a second, secret version of his Gospel.

  At a conference of the Society for Biblical Literature in 1960 he made mention of it, but it was not until his two books were published, giving the full story, that the theological world at large started to weigh in on the debate. Some critics flatly refused to believe that the Clementine letter ever existed. Many more felt that someone – either themselves or Smith himself – had been hoaxed. Both sides had convincing arguments: although Morton Smith was a highly respected scholar, who had corresponded with his close friend and teacher, Scholem, about the Clementine text (and surely he would have no reason to trick him, of all people?), there seemed to be clues – some deliberately planted by Smith, some accidentally left by him – that he had f
aked the letter all along.

  The evidence for the secret Mark being a hoax is compelling, and was collected as recently as 2005 with the highly detailed (and readable) Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark by the lawyer Stephen Carlson (Baylor University Press). First of all, there is the absence of the letter itself. It was photographed twice, once by Smith in 1958 and once by a librarian in the 1970s; but the fragment itself, which was removed to the Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem after Smith’s ‘discovery’ was subsequently lost when the librarians decided to cut it out of the seventeenth-century book in which it had been found and file it away separately.

  However, even from the extant photographs the handwriting of the transcript can be seen well, and specialist analysts have shown that it bears all the hallmarks of the hesitant calligrapher forging someone else’s hand: the archaic letters are constructed not of naturally flowing lines but broken up ones, studded with concentrations of ink where the scribe has stopped mid-letter and started again.

  Then there is the fact that just before the ‘discovery’ of the secret Gospel, Smith had published a paper on the exact subject which it claims to expose – the relationship between the ‘mystery of the kingdom of God’ mentioned in Mark 4 with sexuality. And another publication seems pertinent too: the novel published shortly before Smith went to Israel by James Hunter called The Mystery of Mar Saba which is about the scandal of a forged document in the very library in which Smith claimed to have found his Clementine letter. Coincidence? Perhaps. But there are several more concrete clues within the text that have left many critics convinced that there could have been no author other than Smith involved in its creation. One of the most compelling arguments is that the style of Clement’s supposed letter is utterly, perfectly Clementine. No words or phrases exist there that do not exist elsewhere in his known oeuvre. It is as if someone had an index of all the words he ever used (and such an index would have been readily available to Smith had he needed one) and was careful not to stray one bit from that lexicon. Surely the real Clement would have varied slightly when writing his letter and used a few novel constructions? That would be only human, after all.

  And now things get funny. In his books, Smith refers to another important textual fragment he ‘found’ and photographed while working in the library of Mar Saba. Like the secret Mark, it was written in a distinctive Greek hand and was signed by a scribe calling himself M. Madiotes. This is not a common Greek name at all. Rather, it is a noun made from the verb madao whose meaning is, literally, ‘to go bald’ (which the distinctive-looking Smith was) but which colloquially means ‘to swindle’. Could this be the signature-cypher of Smith himself?

  Then there is the matter of salt. Alongside the secret Mark passage in Clement’s letter was a reference to Jesus teaching his subjects a lesson about purity versus pollution and using, to illustrate this, the image of free-flowing salt being mixed with another substance and so altering the flavour of the salt. Homophobic critics of the main body of Clement’s letter passed over this at first, but then the ever-scrupulous Stephen Carlson pointed out that this is an image that a pre-twentieth-century mind could never had thought of. Because until very recently salt came in lumps or cakes, and was never seen in the pourable powdered form we know today. Indeed, the patented process of de-caking salt for the table was invented by a salt company only in 1910. And guess what the name of that company was? Morton.

  So convinced – or so keen to convince themselves – are disbelievers in the Clementine letter’s authenticity that they have placed Smith’s prank firmly in the context of mid-twentieth-century homosexual culture and classified it as, in the words of one critic, ‘a nice ironic gay joke . . . [an] amusing bit of post-modern scholarly theatre’. In this reading, Jesus in the garden with the nameless, naked young man is a reference to the infamous ‘cottaging’ scene of America at the time of Smith’s 1958 discovery.

  If all this is true, it might seem like Smith was an angry, bitter person, determined to humiliate churchmen and academics alike. But those who knew this clever, complex man suggest that this was not the case. Certainly, at the time of his ‘discovery’ he had recently been passed over for tenure at Harvard, and he had of course rejected the clergy as a tenable profession for himself. But his close ties with the theological community in Israel and America and his very high standing in both suggest a different answer. One thing that everyone agrees on is that Morton Smith was a funny guy. A laugher, a giggler, a wit, a storyteller and, most probably, a prankster. But because he was so clever – probably cleverer than everyone else he knew – he would never have been satisfied with a minor, throw-away hoax on his fellow academics. If a man of his intellectual stature was going to pull the wool over his fellows’ eyes he would do it with massive attention to detail and timing. Moreover, he would be quite happy to play the long game, watching his tall tale spin out over the decades and cause commentators to tie themselves in ever more Gordian knots. Did he hope to reveal the hoax before his sudden death from heart failure in 1991? Or did he always mean to take the secrets of the alternative Gospel according to St Mark to his grave? Or had he indeed found what he believed to be a genuine, inflammatory, Bible-changing piece of writing from Clement of Antioch? Either way, he must have had a stupendously big smile on his face that day in the library of Mar Saba.

  PIERRE PLANTARD

  IN PARIS IN 1920, in the humble household of a butler and a cook, a little boy was born who would go on to commit France’s greatest twentieth-century literary hoax. A little boy without whom the most obsessed-over novel of the twenty-first century would not have been The Da Vinci Code. The boy was Pierre Plantard and he was born at a time when his country was undergoing a period of great upheaval. Religious and political ideologies were fracturing in the tumult that so many European lands were experiencing in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, and by the time Plantard was twenty he had firmly allied himself with the Catholic right, which stood in violent opposition to the forces seen as dragging France to the dogs: Freemasons, Jews, socialists and Protestants.

  Anti-Masonic sentiments on the French right, fomented by an unease at the number of Masons in politics (and conflated with anti-Semitism, thanks in part to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) had reached fever pitch by the time Plantard wrote to Marshal Pétain pledging his support to the collaborationist government and asking what he might do to help. That was in 1940 but for several years previously this apparently devout young Catholic had been taking an interest in another questionable school of thought that was sweeping Europe at the time, that of esoteric religious mysticism.

  There was no shortage of senior Catholics willing to engage in arcane practices and explore imaginative avenues of belief in the inter-war period, and Plantard was not the first to see political mileage in combining this passion for pseudo-medieval Christianity with a nationalist agenda. He formed pseudo-political groups called things like French National Renewal and the French Union, which failed to garner much interest, but he was already working with Catholic youth groups and lecturing them on the importance of creating a pure France when, in 1939, he had the idea of forming the Alpha Galates sect.

  Alpha Galates, with its far-right publication Vaincre (Conquer) came at the right time to attract a number of members anxious about goings-on in Europe, and although it would not last long, and never did much apart from publish inflammatory articles and rub Masons up the wrong way, it did result in a well-publicized four-month prison sentence for a delighted, martyred Plantard when the German authorities refused permission for it to be registered as an official group but it carried on publishing his magazine regardless. It also gave Plantard the support and confidence to establish the Priory of Sion a few years later, capitalizing on the support of his vulnerable war-damaged followers to concoct a pack of lies so audacious as to result in his eventual arrest.

  The Priory of Sion came about when Plantard, now married to a woman called Anne Hisler, moved his operation
to a town near the Swiss border called Annemasse. The war had ended six years previously, but the right-wing movement in post-Vichy France continued undimmed, allowing Plantard to make quick alliances with other Catholics of his persuasion in his new area. His first project was to ally himself with a local church and to start campaigning for low-cost housing for French nationals, but his interest in mysticism was growing too. He began to talk to his cohorts about the medieval origins of Catholic France, pointing out that the nearby hill known as Mount Sion would be a perfect place for a religious retreat, sharing as it did a name with the famous Priory of Zion – a crusaderera order picked up by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century.