Chapter One To the One Who Knows “To the One Who Knows.” It is a strange way to begin a book. These words stand at the threshold of Morton Smith’s 1973 Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark , and from them grew what may be the most important academic conspiracy theory in the history of New Testament scholarship. Smith had completed the draft of his study of the Mar Saba discovery in 1963. The text he had found in 1958 claimed to be an ancient letter of Clement of Alexandria referring to a “secret” Gospel of Mark. When Smith decided to begin his book with the dedication “To the One Who Knows,” he was almost certainly honoring Arthur Darby Nock, the brilliant Harvard classicist with whom he had spent years trying to understand the document. Nock had died in 1963. When he first read the text, his famous reaction to Smith was: “God knows what you’ve got hold of.” Smith’s dedication seems to echo that moment. Where Nock had said “God,” Smith wrote “the One Who Knows.” It w...