"The Secret Gospel of Mark" falls into the latter category. In 1973 the American Morton Smith published "Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark", in which he claimed to have discovered a letter from Clement of Alexandria, while undertaking research at the Great Lavra of St. Sabbas the Sanctified, known in Arabic as Mar Saba, a Greek Orthodox monastery that overlooks the Kidron Valley on the West Bank of the Jordan River, in Israel.
The letter, addressed to a colleague named Theodore, discusses a secret gospel written by Mark for those initiates who were on course for "perfection", and then moves on to a discussion about the sect known as the Carpocratians, a heretical sect whom Theodore has told Clement possessed a copy of "The Gospel of Mark".
What might have been the text of this secret gospel? Possibly a very antique version of the 1940 novel "The Mystery of Mar Saba" by James Hunter, in which a long-lost document is discovered at the Mar Saba monastery that is potentially embarrassing to Christianity; the document is later exposed as a hoax by a British policeman (this was the era of the British mandate in Palestine) and his born-again American assistant; the villain of the story is a close-shaven German archaeologist who leads a band of Arab "Hooded Ones," including the cowardly "Abid of the Scar," who stabs a girl in the back. Apparently Morton Smith liked the book, and decided to turn it into reality, creating the document himself, and using his academic credentials to give it credibility. Allegations that it was a hoax took little time to appear, with Smith threatening to sue the publisher of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly for a million dollars when it published the allegation that he had forged the documents himself. Is it a hoax? Is the entire Jesus legend a hoax? Who can say? The argument continues.
Copyright © 2020 David Prashker
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