From Wikipedia

In the Mar Saba letter, the Secret Gospel of Mark is described as a second "more spiritual" version of the Gospel of Mark composed by the evangelist himself. Its purpose was supposedly to encourage knowledge (gnosis) among more advanced Christians, and it was said to be in use in liturgies in Alexandria.[1]

The letter includes two excerpts from the Secret Gospel. The first is to be inserted, Clement states, between what are verses 34 and 35 of Mark 10:

"And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, 'Son of David, have mercy on me.' But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan."

The second excerpt is very brief and is to be inserted, according to Clement, in Mark 10:46:

And the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them.

While Clement endorses these two passages as authentic to the Secret Gospel of Mark, he rejects as a Carpocratian corruption the words "naked man with naked man".

Very shortly after the second excerpt, as Clement begins to explain the passages, the letter breaks off. Just before that, Clement says, "But the many other things about which you wrote both seem to be and are falsifications."[2]

These two excerpts comprise the entirety of the Secret Gospel material. No separate text of the secret gospel is known to survive.

Lacunae and continuity

The two excerpts suggest resolutions to some puzzling passages in the canonical Mark.

The young man in the linen cloth

In Mark 14:51-52, a young man in a linen cloth is seized during Jesus' arrest, but he escapes at the cost of his clothing. This passage seems to have little to do with the rest of the narrative, and it has given cause to various interpretations. Often it is suggested that the young man is Mark himself. Some commentators believe that the boy was a stranger, who lived near the garden and, after being awakened, ran out, half-dressed, to see what all the noise was about (vv. 46-49). W.L. Lane thinks that Mark mentioned this episode in order to make it clear that "all (not only the disciples) fled, leaving Jesus alone in the custody of the police." However these explanations are not entirely satisfactory.

The same Greek word neaniskos (young man) is used both in Secret Mark and in Mark 14:51. If we accept Helmut Koester's theory that the canonical Mark is a revision of Secret Mark, another explanation is possible, namely, that the ancient editor who deleted an earlier encounter of Jesus with such a young man in a cloth, then added this incident also involving a young man during Jesus' arrest.

There's also one more occurrence of neaniskos in Mark, this time as a youth dressed in white at the tomb of Jesus (Mk 16:5). For this particular passage, there are also parallel passages in both Matthew and Luke, but they don't use "neaniskos". (In Mt 28:2, it is "an angel of the Lord" dressed in white that appears and, in Lk 24:4, there are two "men" [the Greek word is "andres"]). Thus, it is also possible that all three of these occurrences of "neaniskos" in Mark and in Secret Mark are related somehow; perhaps the same editor was at work on all three. The proponents of Secret Mark as a forgery, on the other hand, suggest that Secret Mark was created based on Mark 14:51 and 16:5.

The lacuna in the trip to Jericho

The second excerpt fills in an apparent lacuna in Mark 10:46: "They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside."

The lack of any action in Jericho is interpreted by some as meaning that something has been lost from the text, and the second excerpt gives a brief encounter at this point.

Helmut Koester and Ron Cameron have argued that Secret Mark preceded the canonical Mark, and that the canonical Mark is in fact an abbreviation of Secret Mark. This would explain the narrative discontinuity above. John Dominic Crossan has also been supportive of these views of Koester: "I consider that canonical Mark is a very deliberate revision of Secret Mark."

Issues of authenticity

The Secret Gospel is known only from the Mar Saba letter, which is itself only known from the copy discovered by Morton Smith. Therefore, logically, at least three important questions arise:

1. whether or not Mar Saba MS really contains a genuine letter of Clement

2. whether Clement's quotations from Secret Mark are accurate

3. whether these quotations reflect a genuine Marcan tradition

In 1982 Morton Smith summarized the state of the question as follows:

1. Attribution to Clement was accepted.

2. Clement's attribution of the excerpts to "Mark" was rejected.

3. The source of the excerpts was variously ascribed to a separate apocryphal gospel, a pastiche of canonical material, or an expansion of the canonical text using early material of unknown provenance.

The authenticity of the Mar Saba letter itself has long been the subject of controversy. The manuscript and the book where it was found have disappeared; all that remains are black and white photographs made by Professor Smith in 1958, and color photographs by a librarian ca 1976-1977. Early on, some scholars tended to discount Smith's claims because, as it was believed, the copy of the letter had been seen by no scholar other than Smith. Yet, in 1976, Guy G. Stroumsa and three other scholars relocated the document. The book was subsequently taken from Mar Saba to the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem in 1977, where the letter (i.e. the manuscript) was cut out of the book (on the back pages of which it was inscribed) as part of the library's scheme to house such material separately. It was then photographed, by librarian Kallistos Dourvas.

The manuscript cannot now be relocated; the second photo series were only published in 2000. As of January 2009, the letter is only documented in the two sets of photographs. The ink and fiber were never subjected to examination.

The view of Secret Mark and the Mar Saba manuscript as modern forgeries was promoted after Morton Smith's death by Prof. Jacob Neusner, a specialist in ancient Judaism, who is believed to be the world's most published scholar in the humanities, with more than 900 books to his name. Neusner was Morton Smith's student and admirer but, later, in 1984, there was a very public falling out between them after Smith publicly denounced his former student's academic competence. Neusner subsequently described Secret Mark as the "forgery of the century". Yet Neusner never wrote any detailed analysis of Secret Mark, or explanation of why he thought it was a forgery.

In 2005, Stephen Carlson came out with the book The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark, where he spells out his case that Morton Smith, himself, was both the author and the scribe of Mar Saba manuscript. When Carlson examined the photographs supplied by Smith, he claimed to observe a "forger's tremor." Thus, according to Carlson, the letters had not actually been written at all, but drawn with shaky pen lines and with lifts of the pen in the middle of strokes. Carlson also claims that his comparisons with Morton Smith's typical rendering of Greek letters (such as in his own correspondence and notes) reveal that the unusual formation of the letters theta and lambda in Mar Saba MS matched Smith's own peculiar formation of those letters. Yet these claims by Carlson have been, in their own turn, challenged by subsequent scholarly research, especially by Scott Brown in numerous articles.

In 2001, scholar Philip Jenkins drew attention to a popular novel by James Hunter entitled The Mystery of Mar Saba, that first appeared in 1940. This novel presents some unusual parallels to the events associated with Mar Saba MS, that have unfolded in real life after 1958.[21] Later, RM Price also drew attention to this novel. In 2007, musicologist Peter Jeffery also published a book accusing Morton Smith of forgery, arguing that Smith wrote the Mar Saba document with the purpose of "creat(ing) the impression that Jesus practised homosexuality".

Nevertheless, a number of academics and theologians have dismissed the allegations that Smith forged the letter, and several have tentatively concluded that the Secret Gospel is a legitimate proto-Christian or Christian text.

Interpretation of Secret Mark

According to N. T. Wright most scholars who accept the text as genuine see in the Secret Gospel of Mark a considerably later gnostic adaptation of Mark in a gnostic direction. F. F. Bruce sees the story of the young man of Bethany clumsily based on the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John and evidently no independent parallel or even source to this story.

Baptismal significance

Until recently, the opinion has been very common that the raising of the young man, portrayed in Secret Mark, has primarily a baptismal significance, as a sort of a 'baptism of initiation.' This was the opinion that Smith himself originally proposed. Along these lines, the statement "Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God" was typically read as a reference to the rites of baptism.

But recently, there has been some debate about this matter. For example, Scott G. Brown (while defending the authenticity of Secret Mark) disagrees with Smith that the scene is a reference to baptism. Thus, he says, "[T]here is no mention of water or depiction of a baptism." He adds that "...the young man’s linen sheet has baptismal connotations, but the text discourages every attempt to perceive Jesus literally baptizing him." S. Carlson seems to agree with Brown. The idea that Jesus practiced baptism is absent from the synoptic gospels, though it is introduced in the Gospel of John.

According to Brown, for Clement, "the mystery of the kingdom of God" meant primarily "advanced theological instruction." These matters have a bearing on the debates about the authenticity of Secret Mark, because Brown clearly implies that Smith, himself, did not quite understand his own discovery. Still, it may be pointed out that the placement of this incident within the chronology of the Gospel of Mark, i.e., just before the Passover celebrations, can imply some baptismal significance; the week before Easter/Passover is the preferred time for Christian baptism ceremonies.

Other interpretations

Scholar John Dart has proposed a complex theory of 'chiasms' (or 'chiasmus') running through the Gospel of Mark -- a type of literary devices he finds in the text. "He recovers a formal structure to original Mark containing five major chiastic spans framed by a prologue and a conclusion." According to Dart, his analysis supports the authenticity of Secret Mark.

In 2008, extensive correspondence between Smith and his teacher and lifelong friend Gershom Scholem was published, where they discuss Mar Saba MS over many years. The book's editor, Guy Stroumsa, argues that Smith could not have forged the MS, because these letters "show him discussing the material with Scholem, over time, in ways that clearly reflect a process of discovery and reflection." Those letters can be interpreted differently. Smith wrote in 1948 that he was working on the early Fathers, "especially Clement of Alexandria" (p.28). In 1955 Smith wrote that he was at work on a chapter "for a book on Mark" (p.81). Later in 1955 Smith writes of "my book on Mark." (p.85)

Nov/Dec 2009 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR 35:06) features a selection of articles dedicated to the Secret Gospel of Mark. It includes articles by Charles W. Hedrick, Hershel Shanks, and Helmut Koester. Generally, they are supportive of the authenticity of Mar Saba Ms.

The placement of the story within canonical Mark

If what is portrayed in Secret Mark is indeed a baptism, then the placement of this story within the canonical Mark is highly significant. What precedes the story is the third prediction of the Passion/Crucifixion (Mark 10:32-34). And what follows next is the story of the Sons of Zebedee (Mark 10:35-45), where baptism is mentioned explicitly. James and John ask Christ for positions of higher honor once Jesus is an earthly ruler. Jesus responds,

"You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?" (Mark 10:38)

Here baptism is clearly seen as a symbol of Jesus' coming crucifixion, and this is widely accepted by Christian commentators. This understanding of baptism seems to be based on the teachings of Paul, according to whom, those who "were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death" (Romans 6:3). Among the Synoptic gospels, only Mark mentions baptism in this passage; thus the interests of the author of Secret Mark parallel those of the author of Mark, which also parallel the teachings of Paul.

[edit] Smith's theories about the historical Jesus