New "Deep Dive" Podcast Episode 25: Smith and Landau's The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity (Part Seven)

Podcast 25

Summary

This source excerpt details the controversy surrounding the discovery of a manuscript by the scholar Morton Smith. Smith claimed the manuscript was a letter from the early Christian writer Clement of Alexandria and contained an account of Jesus performing a private ritual with a young man, which some interpreted as homoerotic. However, scholar Quentin Quesnell suspected the document was a forgery and accused Smith of planting it in a monastery library. Quesnell presented evidence based on Smith's own writings and suggested Smith's motive was to test how scholars would respond to a sensational new discovery. The article then discusses the different hypotheses put forward by other scholars regarding the authenticity of the manuscript, some of which point to its potential creation in the 17th or 18th centuries, not the 20th century. It also describes the harsh criticism leveled at Smith by his former student, Jacob Neusner, who accused Smith of forging the manuscript to justify his identity as a gay man or to outrage conservative scholars. This excerpt provides an account of a long-running debate over the validity of a historical document and explores the various motives that scholars attributed to its potential author. 

Here is a list of the evidence that supports Quentin Quesnell's claim that Morton Smith forged the Mar Saba Clementine:

● Suspicious Features of the Manuscript: Quesnell points to features of the manuscript and text, and remarks from Smith's writings, that he believes indicate forgery. For instance, the manuscript was copied into Isaac Voss's edition of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch. Voss is significant because he was the first to recognize that some of the letters attributed to Ignatius were medieval forgeries. 

● Ease of Forgery: Quesnell believed that forging the manuscript wouldn't have been difficult, as the handwriting seemed to be an 18th-century cursive Greek hand, which could be imitated. 

● Stählin’s Concordance: Quesnell argues that the manuscript must have been forged between 1936 and 1958, the period between the publication of Stählin's concordance (a list of all Greek terms Clement used) and Smith's visit to Mar Saba. Quesnell believes that the forger would have used the concordance to create the forged letter. 

● Smith’s Dedication to Arthur Darby Nock: Quesnell highlights Smith's dedication of the Harvard volume to Arthur Darby Nock as a potential clue. Quesnell believes this is significant because Nock was one of the few scholars who doubted the authenticity of the document. 

● The Dedication in Secret Gospel: Quesnell finds the cryptic dedication "FOR THE ONE WHO KNOWS" in Secret Gospel suspicious. 

● Smith’s Description of the Manuscript’s Location: Quesnell closely examines Smith’s statements about the manuscript’s location, suggesting that Smith was deliberately vague in his wording to conceal a nefarious purpose. 

● Smith’s Account of Scholarly Reactions: Quesnell points to a passage in Secret Gospel where Smith describes the differing reactions of two scholars to the manuscript. He interprets this as Smith “telling on himself” and suggests that Smith might have created the forgery as a controlled experiment to test how scholars would react to a new discovery. 

It is important to note that, despite these suspicions, Quesnell never directly accused Smith of forgery. However, some scholars, including Tom Derr, believed that Quesnell privately held stronger convictions about Smith's guilt, suggesting that Smith may have forged the document to harm Christianity. Furthermore, in his review of Secret Gospel for the National Catholic Reporter, Quesnell seemed particularly concerned about the text's suggestion of homosexual activity, accusing Smith of sensationalizing the discovery. This suggests that Quesnell's true concerns about the Mar Saba Clementine might have been related to its potentially scandalous content. Overall, while Quesnell presents a number of arguments in support of the forgery hypothesis, his evidence is largely circumstantial and relies heavily on his interpretations of Smith’s writings and actions.