The Secret Gospel of Mark or the Mystic Gospel of Mark (), also the Longer Gospel of Mark, is a putative longer and secret or mystic version of the Gospel of Mark. The gospel is mentioned exclusively in the Mar Saba letter, a document of disputed authenticity, which is said to have been written by Clement of Alexandria (). This letter, in turn, is preserved only in photographs of a Greek handwritten copy seemingly transcribed in the 18th century into the endpapers of a 17th-century printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch.
After having spent two years comparing the style, vocabulary, and ideas of Clement's letter to Theodore with the undisputed writings of Clement of Alexandria and having consulted a number of paleographic experts who dated the handwriting to the eighteenth century, Smith felt confident enough about its authenticity and so announced his discovery at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in December 1960. In the following years, he made a thorough study of Mark, Clement and the letter's background and relationship to early Christianity, during which time he consulted many experts in the relevant fields. In 1966 he had basically completed his study, but the result in the form of the scholarly book Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark was not published until 1973 due to seven years of delay "in the production stage". In the book, Smith published a set of black-and-white photographs of the text. Earlier the same year he also published a second book for the popular audience. However, in 2003 Guy Stroumsa reported that he and a group of other scholars saw it in 1976. Stroumsa, along with the late Hebrew University professors David Flusser and Shlomo Pines and Greek Orthodox Archimandrite Meliton, went to Mar Saba to look for the book. With the help of a Mar Saba monk, they relocated it where Smith presumably had left it 18 years earlier, and with "Clement's letter written on the blank pages at the end of the book". Stroumsa, Meliton, and company determined that the manuscript might be safer in Jerusalem than in Mar Saba. They took the book back with them, and Meliton subsequently brought it to the Patriarchate library. The group looked into having the ink tested but the only entity in the area with such technology was the Jerusalem police. Meliton did not want to leave the manuscript with the police, so no test was taken.
Subsequent research has uncovered more about the manuscript. Around 1977, librarian Father Kallistos Dourvas removed the two pages containing the text from the book for the purpose of photographing and re-cataloguing them. However, the re-cataloguing obviously never happened. Sometime after that, however, the pages went missing, and various attempts to locate them since that time have been unsuccessful. Olympiou suggests that individuals at the Patriarchate Library may be withholding the pages due to Morton Smith's homoerotic interpretation of the text, or the pages could have been destroyed or misplaced.
These color photographs were made in 1983 by Dourvas at a photo studio. But this was arranged and paid for by Quentin Quesnell. In June 1983, Quesnell was given permission to study the manuscript at the library for several days during a three-week period under the supervision of Dourvas. Quesnell was "the first scholar to make a formal case that the Mar Saba document might be a forgery" and he was "extremely critical" of Smith, especially for not making the document available to his peers and for providing such low-quality photographs. Yet, Quesnell did not tell his peers that he had also examined the manuscript and did not reveal that he already had these high-quality color photographs of the letter at home in 1983. Hedrick and Olympiou were not aware of this when they published, in 2000, copies of the same photographs that Dourvas had kept himself. The scholarly community was unaware of Quesnell's visit until 2007 when Adela Yarbro Collins briefly mentioned that he was allowed to look at the manuscript in the early 1980s. They show that Quesnell at first was confident that he would be able to establish that the document was a forgery. would present other 18th-century handwriting with similar characteristics. Quesnell admitted that since "they're not all forgeries" it would not be as easy to prove that the text is a forgery as he had expected. Eventually, he gave up his attempts and wrote that experts had to be consulted.
, the manuscript's whereabouts are unknown, and it is documented only in the two sets of photographs: Smith's black-and-white set from 1958 and the color set from 1983. 7.8 x 5.8 in.]]
The Mar Saba letter is addressed to one Theodore (), and to show that these words were absent in the true Secret Gospel of Mark, Clement quoted two passages from it.
There were accordingly three versions of Mark known to Clement, Original Mark, Secret Mark, and Carpocratian Mark. The Secret Gospel of Mark is described as a second "more spiritual" version of the Gospel of Mark composed by the evangelist himself. The name derives from Smith's translation of the phrase "mystikon euangelion". However, Clement simply refers to the gospel as written by Mark. To distinguish between the longer and shorter versions of Mark's gospel, he twice refers to the non-canonical gospel as a (either a secret gospel whose existence was concealed or a mystic gospel "pertaining to the mysteries" which gives the impression that the gospel was concealed. Scott Brown translates it to "mystic", i.e. a gospel that has concealed meanings. in the same way as he refers to it as "a more spiritual gospel". The purpose of the gospel was supposedly to encourage knowledge (gnosis) among more advanced Christians, and it is said to have been in use in liturgies in Alexandria. It shows many similarities with the story in John 11:1–44 where Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. According to Clement, the passage reads word for word ():
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
The second excerpt is very brief and was inserted in Mark 10:46. Clement says that "after the words, 'And he comes into Jericho' [and before 'and as he went out of Jericho'] the secret Gospel adds only": Some scholars have found it suspicious that an authentic ancient Christian text would be preserved only in a single, late manuscript. However, this is not unprecedented.
Charles E. Murgia followed Quesnell's allegations of forgery with further arguments, such as calling attention to the fact that the manuscript has no serious scribal errors, as one would expect of an ancient text copied many times, and by suggesting that the text of Clement had been designed as a sphragis, a "seal of authenticity", to answer questions from the readers why Secret Mark was never heard of before. Murgia found Clement's exhortation to Theodore, that he should not concede to the Carpocratians "that the secret Gospel is by Mark, but should even deny it on oath", Later Jonathan Klawans, who thinks the letter is suspect but possibly authentic, bolstered Murgia's argument by saying that if Clement had urged Theodore to lie to the Carpocratians, it would have been easier for him to follow "his own advice" and lie to Theodore instead. Scott Brown, however, finds this argument to be flawed since there is no point in denying the existence of a gospel that the Carpocratians have in their possession. Brown advocates that Theodore instead is told to assure that the adulterated or forged Carpocratian gospel was not written by Mark, which, according to Brown, would be at least a half-truth and also something Clement could have said for the benefit of the church.
Smith gave some thought to Murgia's arguments but later dismissed them as being based on a misreading, Although forgers use the technique of "explaining the appearance and vouching for the authenticity", the same form is also often used to present material hitherto unheard of. there also seems to have been a collection of at least 21 of his letters at Mar Saba in the 8th century when John of Damascus, who worked there for more than 30 years (), quoted from that collection. In the early 18th century, a great fire at Mar Saba also burned out a cave in which many of the oldest manuscripts were stored. Smith speculated that a letter of Clement could partly have survived the fire, and a monk could have copied it into the endpapers of the monastery's edition of the letters of Ignatius in order to preserve it. Smith argued that the simplest explanation would be that the text was "copied from a manuscript that had lain for a millennium or more in Mar Saba and had never been heard of because it had never been outside the monastery."
Murgia anyway ruled out the possibility that Smith could have forged the letter as, according to him, Smith's knowledge of Greek was insufficient and nothing in his book indicated a fraud. Murgia seemingly thought the letter was created in the 18th century.
Morton Smith objected to insinuations that he would have forged the letter by, for example, calling Quesnell's 1975 article an attack. And when the Swedish historian Per Beskow in Strange Tales about Jesus from 1983, the first English edition of his 1979 Swedish book, wrote that there were reasons to be skeptical about the genuineness of the letter, Smith got upset and responded by threatening to sue the English language publisher, Fortress Press of Philadelphia, for $1million dollars. and with Beskow emphasizing that he did not accuse Smith of forging it.
Secret Markan priority
thumb|[[John Dominic Crossan, who considers Secret Mark to be not only authentic but also the model of the canonical Gospel of Mark]]
Morton Smith summarized the situation in a 1982 article. He argued that "most scholars would attribute the letter to Clement" and that no strong argument against it had been presented. The attribution of the gospel to Mark was though "universally rejected", with the most common opinion being that the gospel is "a pastiche composed from the canonical gospels" in the second century.
After Smith's summary of the situation, other scholars did support Secret Markan priority. Ron Cameron (1982) and Helmut Koester (1990) argued that Secret Mark preceded canonical Mark, which in fact would be an abbreviation of Secret Mark. With a few modifications, Hans-Martin Schenke supported Koester's theory, and also John Dominic Crossan has presented a to some extent similar "working hypothesis" to that of Koester: "I consider that canonical Mark is a very deliberate revision of Secret Mark." Marvin Meyer included Secret Mark in his reconstruction of the origin of the Gospel of Mark.
1991 (Smith's death) to 2005
Intensified accusations against Smith
The allegations against Smith for having forged the Mar Saba manuscript became even more pronounced after his death in 1991. Neusner subsequently described Secret Mark as "the forgery of the century". Yet Neusner never wrote any detailed analysis of Secret Mark or an explanation of why he thought it was a forgery.
The language and style of the Clement letter
Most scholars who have studied the letter and written about it assume the letter was written by Clement. Most patristic scholars think the language is typical of Clement and that in manner and matter the letter seems to have been written by him. In "the first epistolary analysis of Clement's letter to Theodore", Jeff Jay demonstrates that the letter "comports in form, content, and function with other ancient letters that addressed similar circumstances", and "is plausible in light of letter writing in the late second or early third century". He claims that it would require a forger with a breadth of knowledge that is "superhuman" to have forged the letter. In the main, the Clementine scholars have accepted the authenticity of the letter, and in 1980 it was also included in the concordance of the acknowledged genuine writings of Clement,
thumb|The Northern Tower with the library where Smith found the Clement letter
In 1995, Andrew H. Criddle made a statistical study of Clement's letter to Theodore with the help of Otto Stählin's concordance of the writings of Clement. According to Criddle, the letter had too many hapax legomena, words used only once before by Clement, in comparison to words never before used by Clement, and Criddle argued that this indicates that a forger had "brought together more rare words and phrases" found in the authentic writings of Clement than Clement would have used. The study has been criticized for, among other things, focusing on "Clement's least favourite words" and for the methodology itself, which turns out to be "unreliable in determining authorship". When tested on Shakespeare's writings only three out of seven poems were correctly identified.