The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over its Authenticity by Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau (review)

Reviewed by: The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over its Authenticity by Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau M. David Litwa 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 New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023 Pp. 240. 35. 00. In their book, Smith and Landau (hereafter GS and BL) argue that the Letter to Theodore (hereafter the Letter) putatively discovered by Morton Smith at the monastery of Mar Saba in 1958 was not Smith's forgery but was "created by a monk in late antiquity embroiled in an ecclesiastical controversy" (185). According to the authors, this ancient monk forged the Letter to create a precedent for the End Page 309 custom of "brother-making" (179, 183) (or "same-sex monastic partnerships, " 181). It is important to note their language: "It is therefore possible to understand the Secret Gospel—and the Letter to Theodore as a whole—as a document composed by a monk of the fifth, sixth, or seventh century" (181, emphasis mine). This possibility is just that—possible, not necessarily probable—and GS and BL invite other scholars to try to discover a more plausible context for the Letter (192). In one sense, this book is premature. The authors should not have published it before seeing the manuscript, ensuring that appropriate tests were done on the paper and ink. But since they were not able to gain access to it (192) —taking it to be either hidden or lost in the Patriarchal library at Jerusalem—it is understandable that they did not wait to publish their study. In large part, this book serves to undermine the charge that Smith forged the Letter by defending Smith's academic integrity. The defense is needed, though some aspects of it are more convincing than others. The fact that Smith made his apartment into a library is not proof of his academic integrity (187). One can take historical scholarship very seriously but still actively try to create elements of the past (190). The fact that Smith spoke of Secret Mark in his private notes and correspondence (191) is also not proof of his innocence. After a vivid dramatization of Smith's finding and his initial presentation of it in 1960 (Chapters One to Three), GS and BL turn to criticize Smith's critics, mainly Quentin Quesnell (Chapter Four), Bart Ehrman (Chapter Five), Stephen Carlson, and Peter Jeffrey (both in Chapter Six). The deconstruction of Carlson's and Jeffrey's often excessive arguments is fairly easily done and already has been done (often more thoroughly) by scholars like Scott Brown and Timo S. Paananen. GS and BL's criticisms of Quesnell and Ehrman—and I should add Charles Murgia—are less convincing, in my view, because they do not address legitimate concerns about Smith's discovery and the indications of forgery (e. g. , Murgia's point that a forger might recommend perjury to preserve the secrecy of a writing even as he reveals it). On the issue of the manuscript's handwriting (Chapter Seven), I find myself mystified by GS and BL's language: "we must conclude that the weight of expert opinion favors authenticity" (145). Two out of four of their cited experts (eventually) opted for forgery, and a third was open to the idea, proposing a nineteenth-century forgery. It is true that most of the paleographers assumed that only a native Greek could pull off such a forgery. But what if Smith had an accomplice (who was the dedicatee of his book The Secret Gospel—"the one who knows"—as Quesnell supposed)? (GS and BL's theory that "the one who knows" is Clement of Alexandria 96 is intriguing but not compelling. ) It seems to me that paleographers working with photographs will not solve the forgery debate. It will not be solved until we have the manuscript itself. GS and BL conclude what I did (Carpocrates, Marcellina, and Epiphanes London, Routledge, 2022, 187–88): that the Letter depends on Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History (148). Only in Eusebius is it first. . .