Morton Smith: Secret Mark Timeline

I am grateful to Stephen Goranson for this guest post, and I must apologise that it has taken me so long to post it. I get so busy during term time that I end up neglecting the blog.

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1915, May, 28: Robert Morton Smith born. Died July 11, 1991. His father was Rupert Morton Smith.

1936: His Harvard senior honors paper, "[John] Arbuthnot's Influence upon [Jonathan] Swift," showcases his lifelong appreciation of mordant humor.

1941: Mar Saba visit, including participation in the liturgy.

1944: A sketchbook depicting Mar Saba demonstrates his graphic artistic ability.

1945ff: In letters to Gershom Scholem (edited by Guy G. Stroumsa, 2008), Smith makes clear that, before 1958, he intensely studied both Mark and Clement of Alexandria.

1949: In Journal of Pastoral Care 3, "Psychiatric Practice and Christian Dogma," 12-20 (here 16-17), Smith wrote, "He must be told that homosexuality is a sin far worse than fornication, and that unwillingness to repent of it automatically debars the sinner from the sacraments." Though Smith nominally retained his Episcopal priest status, he had lost his faith, and mocked Christian faith, before and after 1958. Whether denial of tenure at Brown (1955) was a factor is speculative. (Harvard U president Nathan Pusey vetoed hiring Smith, despite having two PhDs, in 1963.)

1958: He said he found the text at Mar Saba -- or he brought the 1646 Voss ed. Ignatius letters book with him, pre-inscribed. It was missing the front cover and spine and title page, where ownership marks usually appear. There is no record of that book being at Mar Saba before 1958.

1958: He showed Scholem the text and presented it as a parallel to Sabbatai Sevi's antinomianism. Scholem was not persuaded.

1958: In neat handwriting, neater than his book annotation marginal notes, Smith copied it as "Manuscript Material from the Monastery of Mar Saba, discovered, transcribed and translated by Morton Smith, copyright 1958, All rights Reserved, Manufactured in the United States."

1958-1959?: He showed Arthur Darby Nock the text, who, on sight reading, declared it not by Clement, but an imitation.

1960 December: SBL conference presentation. New York Times was invited, and reported, twice, Dec. 30 & 31, the second time with doubts by Pierson Parker.

1960: Nea Sion 52, 110-125, 245-256. Greek translation of St. Saba catalog. Not fully forthcoming about the text, number 65.

1973: Published The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark (Harper & Row). It is curious in tone, suggesting memory may be unreliable.

1973: Published Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Harvard UP). In Score, 1982, 456, he called it "a dreadfully complex book." Dedicated to Arthur Darby Nock, perhaps the first person who told Smith the Letter was not by Clement!

1975: Quentin Quesnell, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 37, 48-67, "The Mar Saba Clementine: A Question of Evidence," and following exchange in CBQ, 1976. Noted that Tübingen Prof. Johann Christoph Pfaff in 1715 wrote a 647 page defense of his Irenaeus forgeries, showing that such a case is not unprecedented.

1979: Published Jesus the Magician (Harper & Row), with scant scant mention of Secret Mark, so the book's arguments could stand on their own without any link. A review and exchange with Frank Kermode in New York Review of Books followed.

1982: HTR 75, 449-61, "Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark: The Score at the End of the First Decade." "Score" sounds like a sporting term. Contra Murgia, Musurillo, Munck and others.

c.1984f: Jewish Theological Seminary archive has another defense of the Letter, typed, corrected and, marked up for publishing but unpublished: "The Letter of Clement and Secret Mark: Evidence and Arguments."

1985: Eric Osborn, "Clement of Alexandria: A Review of Research, 1958-1982," Second Century 3, 219-244. Argues that Clement would not have written the letter.

1985: Postscript to the British republication of the Harper 1973 ed. of Secret Mark, Wellingborough: Aquarius, pages 149-54. Mentions a favorable review by Hugh Trevor-Roper in the Sunday Times (London), June 30, 1974; Trevor-Roper was later (in April, 1983) fooled by the Hitler Diaries fraud.

1991, July 13: Obituary by Glenn Fowler, New York Times, section 1, p. 9.

1991, Oct.: Obituary by Levon Avdoyan pages 4-5 in https://associationofancienthistorians. ... _2Fall.pdf

1992: Obituary by William M. Calder III, Gnomon 64, 383-384.

2000: Charles W. Hedrick, with Nicolaos Olympiou, "Secret Mark: New Photographs, New Witnesses," The Fourth R., vol. 13, no. 5 (2000), 3-16.

2005: Stephen C. Carlson, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark (Baylor UP), makes a quite strong case for Smith having the means, motive, and opportunity. Before the Mar Saba sketchbook became available, underestimates the artistic copying ability of Smith. A self-identification as "Madiotēs" is doubtful according to Allan Pantuck and Scott Brown.

2005: Scott G. Brown, Mark's Other Gospel (Wilfrid Laurier UP). A defense of ancientness.

2007: Peter Jeffery, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery. Strong on matters of misleading humor and history of liturgy. Recommended by the editor of the Hermeneia Commentary on Mark, Adela Yarbro Collins: "Peter Jeffery's book proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Morton Smith forged the discovered text."

2009, October: Biblical Archaeology Review. Agamemnon Tselikas, expert historical paleographer, presents the handwriting as an attempt to copy 18th-century handwriting in the 20th century: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/dai ... is-report/

2010: Albert I. Baumgarten, Columbia PhD under Smith, 1972, in Elias Bickerman as a Historian of the Jews, has a section on Smith, 205-210. On 209 he quotes Columbia colleague, Theodor Gaster, "Morton Smith is like a little boy whose goal in life is to write curse words all over the altar in church, and then get caught."

2013: Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate: Proceedings from the 2011 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium. Edited by Tony Burke (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books).

2022: Grant Adamson, "What Are the Odds? Serapion, Eusebius and Secret Mark." Novum Testamentum 64.3, 364-384. Argues that the Letter to Theodore was not by Clement of Alexandria, but by someone later than Eusebius.

2022: Jonathan Klawans, "Nastiness, Nonsense, Antinomianism, and Abuse: Morton Smith versus Morton Smith on Jesus, Secret Mark, and the Letter to Theodore," Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting 9 (2022): 43-71; http://www.jjmjs.org/issues.html.

2023: Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over its Authenticity (Yale UP). Makes a good case that the Letter to Theodore was not by Clement of Alexandria, but by someone later than Eusebius. But it dismisses with disdain the possibility of Morton Smith, rather than engaging the possibility; used the dismissive word "breadcrumbs" thirty times.

2024 April: The Atlantic, Ariel Sabar on a case more skilled than Gospel of Jesus' Wife, "The 'Secret' Gospel and a Scandalous New Episode in the Life of Jesus." Well researched and well written.

2024: Roy D. Kotansky. "Back to the Garden (of Gethsemane). Restoring the Text and Meaning of Secret Mark." Early Christianity 15.4, 478-513. One of the examples of the argument that Smith found a genuine text, but that he misunderstood it.

2025: Clare K. Rothschild, "Secret Mark in the Circle of Dutch Humanists." Journal of Religion [Chicago] 105/2, 176-201.

This is a selective, incomplete list. For additional bibliography, see, especially:

Shaye J. D. Cohen ed., "Writings of Morton Smith, including PhD dissertations as main advisor, and In Memoriam Morton Smith," pages 257-285 in vol. 2, 1996, of The Cult of Yahweh (Brill).

and

Michael J. Kok, Secret Gospel of Mark bibliography, https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christ ... l-of-mark/

and

Jewish Theological Seminary Archive, Morton Smith Papers, https://archives.jtsa.edu/repositories/2/resources/118 

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Lots More NT Pod Shorts

Since my last post here, on July 30, I have posted nine more NT Pod Shorts on my YouTube Channel. I have realized that posting every link here is going to be a bit too time-consuming, not least given that I will be posting three or four each week. 

And to be frank, I forgot to post them here, and now they are mounting up. 

So if you'd like to watch my NT Pod Shorts, please subscribe to my YouTube channel (@podacre). 

I am also uploading them to other social media -- Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, TikTok, Instagram -- all easy to find.

I am also continuing to record the longer format NT Pod episodes, and I'll release them really soon. 

Thanks so much for your support!

More NT Pod Shorts: Triple Tradition; Double Tradition; Marcan Priority

I've uploaded three more NT Pod Shorts on the Synoptic Problem:

What is the "triple tradition"? 

What is the "double tradition"?

Was Mark the First Gospel? 

These are all on my Youtube Channel. If you like it, please subscribe and "like" so that I can grow the channel, i.e. produce more videos. 

I am also uploading them to TikTok and to other social media. 

NT Pod Shorts: What is the Synoptic Problem?

 My next NT Pod Short goes back to the beginning and asks "What is the Synoptic Problem?"

NT Pod Shorts: Why is Q so Appealing?

I'm trying something new: NT Pod Shorts. These are short (less than three minute) videos about topics connected with the podcast, and the first few are going to be focused on the Synoptic Problem. Here is the first:

 The topic is: Why is Q so appealing? 

Luke's Arrangements and Luke's Special Material

One of the challenges of studying the Synoptic Problem is also one of its joys. The more you stare at the Synopsis, and the more you think about the issues, the more you realize that there are important things that you have missed. This post is about one of those things. Why had I not noticed before that it would have been impossible for Luke to have retained Matthew's order of the double tradition ("Q") material given the huge amount of special Lucan material ("L") that the author wanted to add? 

Let me put the question in context, and then I'll try to explain it as clearly as I can. I tried this out in an online discussion group and had some good feedback, so I'd like to try it out here too, in the hope of getting some good feedback. And if the point still seems like a good one, I'll add it to the revised edition of The Case Against Q. 

Here's the story so far. One of the two primary arguments for the existence of Q is that some scholars cannot imagine why Luke would have rearranged the order of Matthew's non-Marcan material, so he must have found this material not in Matthew but in Q. The most influential version of this argument was made just over a century ago by B. H. Streeter who in The Four Gospels argued that Luke would have been a "crank" to have taken the double tradition material from its excellent Matthean contexts only to reinsert it into different, less appropriate contexts in his own Gospel. Q sceptics like me pointed out in response that Luke's behaviour is not only explicable but expected. His rearrangement of the material makes excellent sense in his Gospel, especially when we observe the way he treats Mark. Moreover, Streeter's argument is any case simply a value judgement, a statement of aesthetic preference for Matthew's order over Luke's. 

That's a quick summary of many pages of argumentation by me and others. But I realized recently that I had missed something really important. The way the argument is always framed by two-source theorists is in terms of Luke taking double tradition material from its Matthean locations and placing it somewhere new. So Streeter talks about where Luke "inserts matter also found in Matthew". He talks about how Luke would have had to "re-insert" sayings the Matthean sayings into a different context. 

Even if we work with this kind of model, where source material is simply slotted into specific contexts, new or old, the framing forgets something we know for certain about Luke: he has a huge amount of Special Lucan (L) material to incorporate into his Gospel. So on the Two-Source Theory, Luke combines the Q material with this new L material. On the Farrer theory, he does the same thing, but instead of getting the double tradition from Q, he gets it from Matthew. But here's the thing. Given that Luke has so much L material, how could he have integrated this L material into the Matthean contexts where he finds the double tradition? It's just not possible.

Let me illustrate. Matthew has the Lost Sheep parable in Matt. 18.10-14, in a teaching complex that is partially derived from Mark 9. Luke could have placed the Lost Sheep parable here, in his own chapter 9, just before the Central Section begins in Luke 9.51, but he does not.

He has it instead in Luke 15.3-7, nested in a fresh literary complex, with a themed opening about Pharisees and Sinners (15.1-2), pairing the Lost Sheep with the very Lucan Lost Coin (15.8-10), leading into the legendary Lucan Prodigal Son (15.11-37). 

Aside from the fact that it would be ludicrous to find Luke's new context for the Lost Sheep as having what Streeter described as "no special appropriateness", let's remember that as soon as you have double tradition material alongside L material, it makes using the Matthean location practically impossible. 

If Luke had used the Matthean location, he would have had to integrate his "Lost" parable context into his Luke 9, creating a massive discourse at just the point where Jesus is about to set off on the road to Jerusalem (Luke 9.51). 

In other words, it is not simply a question of where Luke "inserts" double tradition material. It is a question of what new Lucan material lies alongside it, and those decisions surely impact Luke's decisions about the placing of the material. The special Lucan material really matters when we are looking at Luke's location of double tradition material. It's key in seeing how Luke adopts and adapts the material he takes over from Matthew.

To illustrate further: the big criticism of Farrer's Luke is that he does not retain Matthew's marvellous Sermon on the Mount all in one piece. I and others have argued that this is a really problematic argument (e.g. The Case Against Q, Chapters 4, 5, and 6), but let us for a moment imagine that Luke had wanted to retain all 138 verses of Matthew's masterpiece in one place. Does this Luke not want to add his Friend at Midnight parable (Luke 11.5-8) to Matthew's "Ask, Seek, Knock" (Matt. 7.7-11 // Luke 11.9-13)? Does he not want to add the Rich Fool parable (Luke 12.13-21) to the "Consider the Lilies" (Matt. 6.25-34 // Luke 12.22-31) material? And so we could go on. Luke's Sermon would now have to be over 200 verses, and for an author who even cuts Mark's Parables discourse (Mark 4.1-34, a mere 34 verses) almost in half (Luke 8.1-18, 18 verses), I can't see that as viable. 

To be fair, I made a related point in The Case Against Q, Chapters 4 and 6, arguing that Luke's new locations for the double tradition material made good narrative sense, but what I had not seen so clearly was that this is not simply a question of the locations for the material. It is also a question of the impossibility of retaining the Matthean locations given that Luke has related special material that he wants to place adjacent to it, material that would expand the Matthean discourses, which are already massive, into monster discourses. 

A two-source theorist might say that this is a circular argument. Am I not just surmising that Luke wanted to place special Lucan material alongside the double tradition material because that is what he did? I don't think so. The point is that even on the two-source theory, Luke made the decision to place Q material alongside contextually relevant, narratively interesting L material. Farrer's Luke wants to do the same thing, but in his case, it necessitates recontextualizing Matthew's material, the very thing that Q theorists find so problematic.

I am surprised that I have only just realized this. I suppose it's in part because I was seduced by the two-source theorists' own rhetoric, which causes us to focus on where Luke "relocates" or "reinserts" material, without noticing the impact that retaining as well as adding would cause. 

Favourite Jesus Films 2025

It was great to be back in the classroom this spring after a sabbatical that itself followed several years as department chair, when classroom time is drastically reduced. As well as a graduate class on the Synoptics, one of my regular offerings, I taught my undergraduate course on Jesus in Film for the fourth time. It's a real joy to teach, but a huge challenge too, especially given the sheer volume of films that we could cover.

Each time I teach the course, I ask the students to vote on their favourite and least favourite Jesus films. There were fifteen students, and I asked them to vote for their three favourite Jesus films, not in ranked order (to make it easier). I also asked them for their least favourite film. Here are the results:

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Favourite Jesus film: 

(1) Jesus of Montreal (dir. Denys Arcand, 1989): 10 votes

(2) Son of Man (dir. Mark Dornford-May, 2006): 6 votes

     Last Temptation of Christ (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1988): 6 votes

(4) Journey to Bethlehem (dir. Adam Anders, 2023): 5 votes

(5) The Chosen (dir. Dallas Jenkins, 2020-present): 4 votes

(6) The Gospel According to St Matthew (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964): 3 votes

(7) Greatest Story Ever Told (dir. George Stevens, 1965): 2 votes

    Passion of the Christ (dir. Mel Gibson, 2004): 2 votes

    Life of Brian (dir. Terry Jones, 1979): 2 votes

    Jesus of Nazareth (dir. Franco Zeffirelli): 2 votes

One vote: 

Mary Magdalene (dir. Garth Davis, 2018); The Nativity (dir. Coky Giedroyc, 2010); Jesus Christ Superstar (dir. Norman Jewison, 1973), Mary (dir. D. J. Caruso, 2024)

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Least favourites film:

(1) Godspell (dir. David Greene, 1973): 5 votes

(2) Karunamayudu (dir. A. Bhimsingh, 1978): 3 votes

(3) Shanti Sandeshem (dir. P. Chandrasekhar Reddy, 2004): 2 votes 

   Gospel According to St Matthew (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964): 2 votes

   Passion of the Christ (dir. Mel Gibson, 2004): 2 votes

One vote: Greatest Story Ever Told (dir. George Stevens, 1965) and Journey to Bethlehem (dir. Adam Anders, 2023)

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I found the students' votes fascinating. Jesus of Montreal was a runaway winner, with two-thirds of the class voting for it. One of the biggest surprises was seeing how well Journey to Bethlehem faired. I have to admit that I absolutely love this film too, and I have been meaning to blog and podcast about it for some time. Other new films like Mary Magdalene and Mary also make the cut.

The Chosen is also in there, but it has the disadvantage of being the only film that the class did not watch in total. That was impossible! There's so much of it. Nevertheless, it's interesting that several people still voted for it. 

Films that we watched but that did not chart included King of Kings (1961), The Passion (BBC, 2008), The Nativity Story (2006), Young Messiah (2016) and all the documentaries we watched. 

As usual, Godspell got the bottom spot! I'm a little sad that Karunamayudu and Shanti Sandeshem were unpopular too, but we were so hampered by the lack of English subtitles for both. 

It's also striking that several films appear in both lists -- favourites and least favourites -- Gospel According to Matthew, Greatest Story, Passion of the Christ, and Journey to Bethlehem. It just shows how personal and emotional reactions to these films can be, and it made class discussions fascinating.

I hope to blog a little more about the course soon, and to think out loud about how to change it.