Ariel Sabar and The ‘Secret’ Gospel and a Scandalous New Episode in the Life of Jesus

The ‘Secret’ Gospel and a Scandalous New Episode in the Life of Jesus

In the summer of 1958, Morton Smith, a newly hired Columbia University historian, traveled to an ancient monastery outside Jerusalem. According to Ariel Sabar, in its library, Smith found what he claimed was a lost gospel. His announcement made international headlines, and scholars of the Bible would spend years debating the discovery’s significance for the history of Christianity. But in 1975, one of Smith’s colleagues went public with an extraordinary suggestion: The gospel was a fake. The colleague believed that Smith himself was the forger.

Sabar explains that the manuscript, handwritten in Greek, spanned two and a half pages, but one passage drew outsize attention. It depicted Jesus spending the night with a young man he’d raised from the dead. “The youth, looking upon [Jesus], loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him,” it read. “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.”

To devout Christians, the homoerotic subtext was obvious blasphemy. But Sabar notes that Smith argued the opposite: His discovery, he believed, was part of an unknown, longer version of the Gospel of Mark, containing lost stories from about 50 C.E., making them the oldest known account of Jesus’s life—and, in Smith’s view, the truest.

Smith theorized that “Secret Mark,” as the text came to be called, portrayed a private baptism that Jesus reserved for his closest disciples. One by one and at night, he contended, Jesus hypnotized male followers into believing they’d risen to heaven and been freed from the laws of Moses. Sabar explains that Smith argued Jesus and his initiates may have concluded this liberation with a sexual act—a “completion of the spiritual union by physical union.”

Smith knew that orthodox believers would wholly reject his claims. To suggest that the central figure of Christianity—by tradition celibate—used gay sex as a path to God was an outrage. According to Sabar, his academic colleagues were only slightly less aghast, but they couldn’t fully dismiss him. By the time Smith published his find—in a 454-page volume from Harvard University Press, with deeply erudite footnotes and appendixes, and in a popular book called "The Secret Gospel"—he’d been tenured by Columbia, and Secret Mark had made the front page of The New York Times. Several major scholars had accepted the text as genuine.

None, however, bought Smith’s intimations of a gay Jesus, and almost none thought the text originated in the first century. Sabar says they called his exegesis “science fiction,” “awash in speculation,” and “simply absurd.”

The Grand Hoax?

A theologian named Quentin Quesnell went further, believing that Smith had fabricated Secret Mark as a “game” to expose his field’s enormous blind spots. Sabar explains that so little is known about the historical Jesus that one could paint “bizarre and scandalous” portraits of him, Quesnell wrote, without contradicting any of the established facts.

Peter Jeffery, a Princeton professor emeritus and MacArthur-genius-grant recipient, called Smith’s alleged forgery of Secret Mark “the most grandiose and reticulated ‘Fuck You’ ever perpetrated in the long and vituperative history of scholarship.”

Sabar highlights that the debate over whether the manuscript is a fake—and Smith its forger—remains unsettled and is one of the bitterest in biblical studies. Over the past 50 years, it has inspired at least two conferences, seven scholarly books, and dozens of academic articles. Experts have scrutinized the manuscript’s language and the handwriting. They’ve compared it with authentic variants of Mark. They’ve puzzled over why no one before Smith—not even the early bishops who made exhaustive lists of heretical texts—had ever mentioned Secret Mark.

Smith's Life Outside Academia

One subject, however, has gone almost completely unexamined: Smith’s life outside the university. In the summer of 1991, several weeks after turning 76, Smith received a call from his friend Lee Avdoyan, an academic librarian whose Ph.D. Smith had supervised. Avdoyan was planning a trip to New York and wanted Smith’s feedback on some new research ideas. He also wanted Smith to meet his partner, Jim.

But Smith, whose health was declining, said he wasn’t up for a visit. He urged Avdoyan to forget research and to go into the world, have fun, and live his life with Jim. “I have so many regrets,” Smith said.

Avdoyan, who had come out years earlier, had long suspected that Smith was gay too. Had Smith realized only now how much of life he’d missed? Sabar explains he didn’t say, and Avdoyan didn’t press.

A week later, on July 11, 1991, two Columbia colleagues entered Smith’s Upper West Side apartment and found him dead. Beside Smith’s body were a bottle of vodka and a glass flecked with the powdery residue of what appeared to be pills. A plastic bag covered his head, its opening cinched around his neck; the New York City medical examiner’s office ruled Smith’s death a suicide by asphyxiation. Smith’s will ordered his personal papers destroyed—“at once without being read.”

The Provocateur

Outwardly, Morton Smith had been a proper, almost Victorian gentleman. Trim and prematurely bald, he spoke with a patrician accent, had a stiff gait, and wore three-piece suits, a Phi Beta Kappa key glinting from his vest pocket. His politics were similarly conservative. Yet when it came to religion, Smith was, in a colleague’s description, like “a little boy whose goal in life is to write curse words all over the altar in church, and then get caught,” Sabar reports.

Smith had denied the forgery allegations but had relished—and stoked—the controversy. A provocateur who saw himself as an intellectual giant in a field of pious fools, he had for years sought opportunities to humiliate colleagues who promoted faith under the cover of scholarship. Sabar notes that his caustic takedowns of their work, in prestigious journals and in face-to-face bullying at conferences, made him especially intimidating. He was “the kind of critic,” the Princeton professor Anthony Grafton once noted, “who makes grown scholars tear off their own heads for fear of reading his reviews.”

Smith cast the forgery claims as one more symptom of his field’s parochialism. “One should not suppose a text spurious,” he wrote, “simply because one dislikes what it says.” But Smith’s zealotry for his own reading of Secret Mark made colleagues wonder whether his stakes might also be more than academic.

A Secretive Life

Sabar explains that Smith struck most people as a wry atheist. But before becoming a professor at age 35, he had spent four years as a parish priest. Before turning the full force of his intellect against the dupes who believed in God, Smith had, in a sense, been one of them.

Scholars who knew him well suspect that whatever triggered his break with the Church was the key to understanding his life and work, even if—perhaps especially if—Smith never spoke of it. The historian Albert Baumgarten, one of Smith’s first doctoral students at Columbia, believes that “something took place in Smith’s life that shook his certainty.”

Smith’s literary executor, the Harvard religion scholar Shaye Cohen, never ruled out the possibility of a “secret Morton,” a part of his past he’d hidden from even his closest colleagues.

The New Theory

Brent Landau and Geoffrey Smith, two Texas scholars, had a new theory about Secret Mark. According to Sabar, they believed the debate over the manuscript’s authenticity had become an emotional proxy for broader fights among historians of Christianity. On one side were conservatives who saw the Church-authorized collection of Christian books—the New Testament—as divinely inspired. On the other were generally liberal scholars, who gave equal—or greater—historical weight to early Christian texts outside the New Testament canon.

Liberals tended to deny the text’s sensuality, claiming it was nothing more than Morton Smith’s misreading. But to Landau and Geoffrey Smith, there was no escaping it: The text depicts Jesus spending the night with a desperate, lovestruck young man.

Smith’s discovery at the monastery wasn’t some first edition of Secret Mark on papyrus. Sabar explains that it was a copy of a letter that quotes Secret Mark. The letter’s author appeared to be the second-century Church father Clement of Alexandria. It had been transcribed, in an 18th-century Greek hand, onto the end pages of a printed 17th-century book. Smith had discovered those end pages while cataloging books in the monastery’s library.

Addressed to an unknown man named Theodore, the letter calls out Secret Mark’s sexual innuendo. Some early Christians may have seen the gospel as portraying “naked man with naked man,” Clement writes, but Clement condemns such views as false and “utterly shameless.”

Smith gave them more credit. In a baffling passage in the Christian Bible’s Gospel of Mark, a nameless young man drops his linen garment and “flees naked” when Jesus is arrested at night in Gethsemane. If you spliced Secret Mark into canonical Mark, Sabar says, Smith thought you had an explanation: Jesus and his young follower had been caught in the act.

A Monastic Debate

Landau and Geoffrey Smith immersed themselves in early Christian literature—looking at word choices, storylines, theological debates—to see where Secret Mark might fit. They concluded that it didn’t. It appeared, Landau told Sabar, “as if somebody had gone through the Gospels and found all these instances where Jesus seemed to be in some sort of intimate or erotic relationship,” then “meshed them all together.”

A possibly larger problem was that the letter of “Clement” appeared to crib distinctive language from a Church history composed a century after Clement’s death. “Anyone who has ever caught a clever student cheating on an essay or during an exam will find the pattern familiar,” Smith and Landau write.

But who was this clever student? The answer, they suspected, might lie in the Greek Orthodox monastery where Smith claimed to find the manuscript, the only place ever known to possess it.

Mar Saba and Same-Sex Unions

Mar Saba, founded in 483 C.E., was a place where the line between spiritual and erotic love could blur. Byzantine scholars had found evidence of same-sex couples: monks who shared a cell, traveled as a pair, and supported each other’s lifelong quest for spiritual perfection.

Hagiographies depict these relationships as a form of chaste, virtuous romance. Whether these unions had a physical dimension is hard to know. But scholars suspect that at least some did, given human nature and abbots’ efforts to separate and punish monks who might cross a line.

Landau and Geoffrey Smith theorize that the Clement letter was written by a Mar Saba monk during an in-house debate over the propriety of such unions. If Sabas or his successors enforced too hard a line on same-sex unions, some monks might have pushed back, perhaps faking a letter from Clement to present Jesus as a model for intimate but sacred unions between men.

Exonerating Morton Smith

Landau and Geoffrey Smith seem determined to exonerate Morton Smith. They argue that the letter was composed between the fifth and eighth centuries, a time when the Greek Orthodox Church adopted prayers for adelphopoiesis, or “brother making,” which blessed committed friendships between men.

Their eagerness to clear Smith conflicts with a giant evidentiary hole: No one has ever scientifically tested the physical manuscript. The manuscript is thought to remain in the archives of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, a notoriously cloistered institution that rarely admits scholars for any reason and did not respond to requests for comment.

The Secret Morton

Another source of potentially significant evidence is the part of Smith’s life he kept from the world. Over three months, Ariel Sabar visited the churches where Smith had once sought a home, piecing together the story of a priest whose crises of faith and identity prefigure his discovery of a secretly gay Jesus.

Robert Morton Smith was born in 1915 to a well-to-do couple in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. The town is the American headquarters of the conservative branch of the New Church, a Christian movement inspired by the 18th-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Smith’s mother was a fervent follower. His father manufactured stained glass for churches across the mid-Atlantic.

Smith eventually left his family’s Church, but he was not yet ready to abandon Christianity. In 1938, after graduating from Harvard College and entering Harvard Divinity School, he abruptly joined the Episcopal Church. The Christian leader who set Smith on a path to the Episcopal priesthood was a gay Marxist revolutionary named Frederic Hastings Smyth.

A Troubled Path to Ordination

Frederic Hastings Smyth was a successful chemist who became an Anglican priest and developed a theology that saw communism as a precondition for the kingdom of heaven on Earth. He opened a kind of monastery near Harvard, where Smith was baptized and began his journey toward ordination.

However, Smith’s path to the priesthood was troubled. Pennsylvania’s Episcopal bishop wanted Smith to enroll at the Episcopal Divinity School, but its dean found Smith “cynical, skeptical, lacking in convictions, highly cantankerous.” Despite his brilliant academic qualifications, Smith was seen as “not otherwise fitted to serve in the ministry.”

Struggles and Scandals

Smith was eventually ordained but faced scandals, including officiating a polygamous marriage and being associated with a priest involved in a murder case. These events, along with his publication of a controversial article criticizing Christianity’s compatibility with mental health, led to his departure from the priesthood.

Academia and the Search for Meaning

Smith’s academic career also faced setbacks. After failing to secure tenure at Brown University, he struggled until Columbia University hired him in 1958. That summer, he returned to Mar Saba and later announced his discovery of Secret Mark.

Smith’s personal life was marked by a close relationship with Atanas Todor Madjoucoff, a lifelong friend and possibly more. After retirement, Smith attempted to come out in a letter defending gay rights, but the letter was never published.

Conclusion

Morton Smith’s life and discovery of Secret Mark are intertwined with his personal struggles and disillusionment with the Church. The parallels between his life and the peculiar Jesus he found at Mar Saba are hard to miss. Smith’s Jesus is a manipulator whose baptisms foster the illusion of sexual freedom among psychologically fragile men. But Jesus is arrested at Gethsemane, and the young man who flees naked winds up exposed and alone.

Smith had motive and means to forge Secret Mark, and his career was marked by a desire to make the world of religion squirm. The evidence suggests that Secret Mark might have been Smith’s ultimate act of defiance.

This blog post is based on the article "The ‘Secret’ Gospel and a Scandalous New Episode in the Life of Jesus" by Ariel Sabar, published in The Atlantic. The original article can be found here.