Stephen C. Carlson

Critical discussion of the Secret Gospel of Mark is a bit like a pair of rabbits: once it established its territory, it multiplied.

The Secret Gospel was a fragment found in a letter claiming to be from Clement of Alexandria, found not in an ancient manuscript but in an eighteenth century hand copied into a book in the monastery at Mar Saba near Jerusalem. This fragment was first noted and photographed by Morton Smith; it was later photographed again, but now has been lost.

From the start, the item was controversial. Some authors immediately felt it was a modern forgery, but other authors took it seriously -- Willis Barnstone's The Other Bible, for instance, not only accepted the find as authentic (in the sense that the letter was really a work of Clement of Alexandria) but regarded Secret Mark as a primitive writing based on a tradition similar to that in the Gospel of John.

But Barnstone, and many other scholars who accepted the work, seem to have accepted it more for its shock value than because there was good evidence of its authenticity. The controversy simmered from the time Morton Smith described the fragment, in 1958, until this book was published.

Disclaimer: I have exchanged e-mail with Dr. Carlson, and he and I have corresponded on other topics. In fact, he and I think very much alike on textual matters. I will inherently be inclined to accept what he writes. But this book was written before I knew him, and you'll note that I am not entirely complimentary about his writing style. :-)

Carlson, who at the time this book was written was a practicing lawyer, set out to try to determine the truth using legal tools which were part of his ordinary life. These included both physical evidence and logical analysis of known facts.

Unfortunately, the physical evidence can only go so far, since the book which contains the purported letter of Clement has been misplaced -- it may still exist, but no one knows where. So all we can do is examine the photographs. These certainly give strong indications of a forgery: the writing looks like typical eighteenth century Greek handwriting, but it shows clear signs of halts and hesitations, as if it is not the way the scribe normally wrote; and the way the ink soaked into the paper is more typical of modern ink on old, worn paper than of ink written on old paper when said paper was relatively new. This is not absolute proof of forgery, but it's very indicative.

The text itself also contains interesting clues -- the language looks like Clement of Alexandria's, but it looks even more like the language of someone who was deliberately trying to imitate Clement based on the (fragmentary) surviving copies of his works.

All in all, the evidence that Secret Mark is a fraud (not a forgery for money, but a hoax to deceive scholars) is strong.

And who perpetrated the hoax? That is, of course, a different question. But the obvious suspect is that the deceiver is Morton Smith, who first "discovered" the fragment. Yes, someone else could have written the thing and hoped someone would find it -- but that's rather risky; what if no one ever noticed it? Although scholars regularly search old monasteries for manuscripts, they are much less likely to bother looking at old printed books with eighteenth century text in them. Who cares about eighteenth century text? We want the old stuff!

So, if Secret Mark is a fake, Morton Smith is the obvious faker -- and Carlson finds a number of hints in the text where Smith seemingly gave a clue as to his identity.

This is probably the weakest part of the case. Several of Carlson's finds are extraordinarily ingenious -- but they're so ingenious that even Morton Smith might not have thought of them. (Because I know him, I can assure you that Carlson is a really smart guy -- he's managed to be a lawyer, a professor of New Testament, and an accomplished mathematician, and he isn't even especially old.) Still, the clues are quite interesting, and I consider them extremely convincing although not convincing beyond a reasonable doubt. I'm not sure Carlson could win a criminal case based on his evidence, but he would certainly win a civil case, where the criterion is the "preponderance of evidence."

The writing of this book is good although perhaps not entirely perfect -- a few things are repeated too often, or pounded home too hard, as if Carlson were trying to make a point to a jury (which likely will have forgotten his exact words of an hour ago) rather than describing it in a book, where we can process the information at our own speed. I don't think that will bother readers too much, though.

It's interesting to note that this triumph led Carlson to an even bigger discovery: that a famous copy of the Gospel of Mark, now in Chicago and known to New Testament scholars as 2427, is a fake as well. This had been suspected on other grounds, because it contained a painting that used a modern chemical. But the painting might have been newer than the text. Carlson proved it was not; he showed the exact source used in faking the text.

Bottom line: if you're a forger, you don't want Stephen Carlson to come after you. And, in this book, he shows you some of the methods he used to solve his first case.

[Correction to the original draft: removed a redundant "with him" from the Disclaimer.]… (meer)

An analysis (orthographic, linguistic, historical) of "Secret Mark," making the case that the text was very likely the creation of scholar Morton Smith rather than a genuine text. While I'm not sure I buy all the arguments Carlson makes, I agree with his overall conclusion that the "secret Mark" text is a forgery and that Smith was almost certainly its creator.

Just as important as the specific case is Carlson's general argument, that any forgery bears within it the marks of the time at which it was created, and that these signs often are overlooked at first but become much more obvious over time.

An interesting example of the hoax exposé.… (meer)

The Gospel Hoax is packed with analysis supporting its central conclusion - that the "discoverer" of the Secret Gospel of Mark (SGM), Morton Smith, actually forged the document as a hoax on the academic community. SGM stirred controversy because it purports to be an early, secret, version of the Gospel of Mark meant for advanced initiates that includes passages suggesting a more magic-oriented, homoerotic Jesus. Questions about its authenticity have been raised from the beginning, but could not be answered because the manuscript itself was - suspiciously to some - lost before any tests could be run. Only Smith's description and a set of photographs he took remain.

Carlson seeks to break the logjam on the question of authenticity by examining a number of aspects of SGM, Mr. Smith, and the circumstances of the discovery. In so doing, Carlson attempts to do more than simply settle the issue, he also offers guidance on how to detect other academic frauds. He is successful on both counts, though I have some reservations that I will mention below.

First, he convincingly demonstrates that the SGM manuscript (a supposed 17th century writing referring to the SGM) is a modern forgery and not an older writing recording an ancient letter. The most convincing argument raised by Carlson is the handwriting analysis, which reveals the SGM manuscript to be forged and raises further suspicions about Smith's role in the discovery. Other arguments raised by Carlson, which he takes to be hints from Smith about his role in the hoax, are interesting but apart from other evidence would not be necessarily persuasive.

Next, Carlson questions the authenticity of the supposed letter by Clement. Relying on linguistic comparisons between the letter and Clement's other writings, Carlson concludes it is too good to be true, i.e., it is too much in accord with Clement's style to be from Clement. He is openly indebted to the analysis of another and I would want to spend more time researching the issue to trust a determination about a writing being too much like an author's style to be by that author. Carlson also finds additional hints from Smith suggesting admissions of a hoax which are again intriguing, but are better evidence of the identity of the hoaxer once one is convinced of the case in chief. On firmer ground is the argument that Smith would have possessed sufficient knowledge of Clement's writings and linguistic ability to pull off the hoax himself -- which some defenders of SGM have denied.

The following chapter targets the fragments of the supposed SGM itself and concludes that they are products of the 20th century around the time of the late fifties. The focus on homoerotic portrayals, Carlson argues, would have been meaningless if written in the first or second centuries, but were particularly appropriate for the time period and circumstances in which Smith lived and worked. I did not find the 20th-century marks as "uncanny" as Carlson, but it is an interesting point. More discussion of attitudes in the first and second centuries would have helped. Additionally, I fear that such a criteria may be overly subjective and would require getting into not just the time period of the suspected hoaxer, but would require a deeper examination of that person's mind and personal circumstances than we are likely to be able to achieve in many cases.

Carlson's wrap-up is convincing in its conclusion that SGM is a modern hoax perpetrated by Morton Smith. It is also valuable in that it offers approaches and criteria for the uncovering of other academic hoaxes. Though I was not as persuaded as he as to the efficacy of some of those tools, the discussion itself is valuable and The Gospel Hoax effectively offers future debunkers much with which to work. Those are minor quibbles and go, as we lawyers sometimes say, to the weight of some of the evidence rather than its admissibility. Well-written, well-researched, and well-done.… (meer)