HOMOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON:

Unmasking a False Gospel (BRUCE CHILTON, October 25, 2006, NY Sun)

For more than four decades, New Testament scholars have been discussing the "Secret Gospel of Mark." In 1960 Morton Smith, a professor at Columbia University, announced the existence of this document at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, a year and a half after he said he found it in a monastic library near Jerusalem. Press coverage proved wide and instantaneous, because "Secret Mark" climaxes with an evocative image: A young man who wore only "a linen cloth over his naked body" spends the night with Jesus, who "taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God." That proved too good a lure to pass up: What reader of the Gospels could fail to wonder whether Jesus engaged in the sexually charged initiation that "Secret Mark" describes? Smith himself, a homosexual at a time when homophobia ran high, had little doubt.

That controversy got in the way of resolving complications that should have been sorted out from the beginning, because this text is not an ancient manuscript at all. [...]

Since Smith's alleged discovery and its endorsement by neo-Gnostics, "Secret Mark" has influenced a generation of scholars and found a big popular audience. Within the "Jesus Seminar," which claims to be searching for the historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan championed "Secret Mark" as authentic, making it a cornerstone in his portrait of Jesus as a deliberately anti-conventional philosopher in the style of the Greek Cynics. Helmut Koester at Harvard has even claimed that "Secret Mark" is an earlier version of the Gospel according to Mark in the New Testament. Elaine Pagels wrote a glowing foreword for a reprint of Smith's book for Dawn Horse Press, the publishing wing of a movement guided by the self-designated Avatar Adi Da Samraj, who claimed to continue Jesus's sexually liberating practices.

To untangle the claims about "Secret Mark," scholars need to ask themselves whether Clement of Alexandria wrote the letter, then whether Clement got Carpocrates's teaching straight, and then — and only then — whether "Secret Mark" tells us anything about Jesus and the formation of the Gospels. But reactions to the image of a homoerotic Jesus shortcircuited common sense as well as sound professional judgment four decades ago, and continue to do so today.

Partisan scholars opposed to "Secret Mark," for the most part conservative evangelicals, have dismissed the document and those who support its picture as "radical fringe." Because they often do so before dealing with any evidence, they inevitably seem uncritically defensive of orthodox Christianity. Proponents of "Secret Mark," on the other hand, have contended that Carpocrates's teaching represents an early version of Mark, prior to what is in the New Testament, and that Jesus and his followers engaged in esoteric — and sexual — practices.

A recent book by Stephen C. Carlson shows us how the basics of scholarship were eclipsed by sensationalism on the left, compounded by willful dismissal on the right, and why "Secret Mark" needs to be seen as a fraud. In "The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark" (Baylor University Press, 151 pages, $24.95), Mr. Carlson, a lawyer, argues his case as if in a civil proceeding, meeting the test of proof by preponderance of evidence, rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. He has mastered his brief impressively, and although in my view he does not quite prove that Smith was a forger, he does demonstrate — within the limits of certainty that incomplete evidence involves — that "Secret Mark" is someone's forgery, and that Smith, who died in 1991, was the likely culprit.

When the facts don't fit your whims you have to glue the moth to the tree.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 25, 2006 10:02 AM