Reception and the Secret Mark Question

The reception of Mark’s Gospel through history — long overshadowed by Matthew, then restored to centrality by the discovery of Markan priority — and the strangest episode in modern Markan scholarship: the “Secret Gospel of Mark,” a letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria, reporting a secret expanded version of Mark, which Morton Smith claimed to have discovered at the Mar Saba monastery and published in 1973, and which a large and growing body of scholarship now regards as a modern forgery. This file presents the reception of Mark and the Secret Mark affair, which is never treated here as an authentic witness.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Reception of Mark

For most of Christian history the Second Gospel was the least studied of the four. Augustine’s verdict that Mark was the “follower and abridger” of Matthew (On the Harmony of the Evangelists 1.2.4; see Markan Priority) reflected and reinforced a long neglect: since almost all of Mark’s content reappears in Matthew, and Matthew offered the Sermon on the Mount, the infancy narrative, and far more teaching, the Church’s lectionaries, commentaries, and catechesis leaned heavily on Matthew, and Mark was comparatively passed over. There are very few patristic commentaries on Mark from the first millennium; the Gospel was read, copied, and venerated, but it was rarely the focus of sustained exposition.

This changed decisively in the nineteenth century with the rise of Markan priority. Once Mark was recognized as probably the earliest Gospel and a source for Matthew and Luke, it moved from the margin to the center of Gospel study; the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced an enormous scholarly literature on Mark — its theology, its narrative artistry, its abrupt ending, its messianic secret. The Gospel once dismissed as an abridgment is now read as the foundational narrative of Jesus and a theological work of great subtlety (see The Gospel of Mark). In the Orthodox Church Mark’s Gospel is read in the liturgical cycle, his longer ending stands as the third Matins Resurrection Gospel (see The Endings of Mark), and the evangelist himself is venerated as apostle, founder, and martyr (see Veneration and the Lion).

The “Secret Gospel of Mark”: The Claim

In 1958, the American scholar Morton Smith, cataloguing manuscripts at the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judean desert, reported finding, copied onto the blank endpapers of a seventeenth-century printed book, a previously unknown Greek letter purporting to be from Clement of Alexandria to a certain Theodore. Smith published it in 1973 in two books, including the scholarly Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Harvard University Press, 1973). The letter, if genuine, would be a sensational find: it claims that Mark, in addition to his public Gospel, wrote at Alexandria a “more spiritual Gospel” for the use of the advanced, a secret expanded Mark, and it quotes two passages from this secret Gospel. The longer quotation describes Jesus raising a young man from a tomb in Bethany (a parallel to the raising of Lazarus in John), after which the young man, “wearing a linen cloth over his naked body,” comes to Jesus by night and Jesus teaches him “the mystery of the kingdom of God.” Smith, controversially, read the passage as evidence of a secret initiatory (and, he suggested, possibly libertine) rite in early Christianity.

The Case for Forgery

From the start the document was met with suspicion, and the suspicion has hardened. The central, intractable problem is that the physical manuscript has effectively vanished: it was never subjected to independent physical, ink, or handwriting analysis by qualified experts; the book was later moved and the endpapers reportedly separated, and the original is no longer available for testing. All scholarship therefore depends on Smith’s own photographs. This alone places the find in a uniquely vulnerable position (Carlson, The Gospel Hoax, 2005; Jeffery, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled, 2007).

A substantial and growing body of scholarship argues that the letter is a modern forgery, very possibly by Smith himself:

[Disputed: a large and influential body of scholarship judges the "Secret Gospel of Mark" letter a modern forgery. Stephen C. Carlson (*The Gospel Hoax*, 2005) argues from features of the handwriting (a "forger's tremor"), anachronisms, and apparent hidden clues that Smith fabricated it; Peter Jeffery (*The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled*, 2007) argues from liturgical and other anachronisms to the same conclusion; Francis Watson and others have pressed the case from internal evidence. A minority of scholars (e.g., Scott G. Brown) defend the letter's authenticity or at least its pre-modern origin. No consensus exists that the document is genuine, the manuscript is unavailable for testing, and the dominant scholarly judgment ranges from "probable forgery" to "unproven and unusable." The text is therefore not received as an authentic witness to Mark, to Clement, or to early Christianity.]

The arguments for forgery include: the convenient and untestable disappearance of the manuscript; features of the script consistent with a careful imitation rather than a free hand; apparent anachronisms in the letter’s language and in the “secret Gospel” passages; thematic resonance with Smith’s own scholarly interests and (some argue) personal preoccupations; and possible embedded “jokes” or signatures that a forger might leave. Defenders dispute each of these, but the burden of proof, given the missing manuscript and the suspicious circumstances, rests heavily on the document’s authenticity.

Why It Is Not Treated as Authentic

This guide follows the governing methodology (METHODOLOGY §4) in handling the “Secret Gospel of Mark” as a contested and widely suspected document, not as evidence. There are decisive reasons for this:

The manuscript cannot be examined. A purported ancient text known only from one scholar’s photographs, with the original unavailable for physical testing, cannot bear evidential weight in any responsible historical reconstruction.
The dominant scholarly judgment is skeptical. The serious case for forgery (Carlson, Jeffery, Watson) has not been refuted to the satisfaction of the field, and even scholars who stop short of “forgery” generally regard the document as too compromised to use.
It contradicts the Church’s reception. The canonical Gospel of Mark is the public, four-fold Gospel received by the whole Church; a “secret,” esoteric Gospel reserved for initiates is alien to the Orthodox understanding of the Gospel as the open proclamation of the kingdom (cf. Mark 4:21–22, “Is a candle brought to be put under a bushel?… there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested”). The very notion of a secret expanded Mark cuts against the grain of the Gospel and of the Church’s tradition.

The Orthodox reference reader should know the affair exists — it has generated headlines and a large literature — and should know why it is set aside: not from incuriosity but from the ordinary discipline of historical evidence and the Church’s reception of the one, public, four-fold Gospel. The “Secret Gospel of Mark” is a fascinating modern controversy; it is not a window into the Evangelist Mark or his Gospel.

The Enduring Mark

The Secret Mark affair, for all its notoriety, is finally a footnote to the reception of the real Mark — the evangelist whose short, urgent, cross-shaped Gospel the Church reads at the altar, whose see at Alexandria became a patriarchate and a fountain of theology, and whose relics and lion have honored him from Boukolou to Venice to Cairo. The honest handling of the contested questions — the endings, the synoptic problem, the authorship, and the Secret Mark forgery — does not diminish the apostle but clarifies what we securely know and how we know it. What endures is the Gospel itself and the Church’s veneration of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Mark.

References

Smith, Morton. Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973 (the publication of the Mar Saba letter).
Carlson, Stephen C. The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2005 (the case for forgery).
Jeffery, Peter. The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Watson, Francis. “Beyond Suspicion: On the Authorship of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark.” Journal of Theological Studies 61 (2010): 128–170.
Brown, Scott G. Mark’s Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith’s Controversial Discovery. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005 (a defense of authenticity).
Augustine. On the Harmony of the Evangelists 1.2.4. Trans. NPNF I/6 (on the reception of Mark).