Conversation with an 82 Year Old Research Assistant (Stanley Isser) on Morton Smith's Clement of Alexandria Secret Gospel of Mark

 One of the most-quoted sentences in Irenaeus has quietly done more work in modern introductions than it ever did in his own argument. We all know the formula: Matthew wrote “among the Hebrews in their own dialect” while Peter and Paul preached in Rome; after their “departure,” Mark, Peter’s disciple and interpreter, “handed down in writing what had been preached by Peter.” It’s usually treated as a simple map pin: Matthew in Palestine, Mark in Rome, case closed. But if you stop treating it as a neutral data point and read it as part of Irenaeus’ larger project, the emphasis starts to look different.

The first thing to notice is that the stress falls not on where Mark wrote, but on when and from what kind of authority. Matthew is cast as a Hebrew-rooted witness, writing “among the Hebrews in their own dialect.” That isn’t just travelogue; it’s theological branding. The “first” gospel is anchored in Israel’s language and people. Mark, by contrast, is defined not by place but by dependency and timing: he is the “disciple and interpreter of Peter,” and he only writes “after their departure.” That phrasing makes Mark a memorialization of apostolic preaching rather than a gospel created in Peter’s living orbit. It’s a way of honoring Mark while simultaneously putting clear boundaries around what he is and isn’t: not a free-standing, independent visionary; not a rival voice; but the written echo of a prior oral authority.

When you set this alongside other Irenaean moves, a pattern emerges. This is the same author who likes to privilege a “Hebrew” understanding of the Savior’s name and who pushes back against slick Greek numerological games with Jesus’ name and age. Again and again he recenters orthodoxy in the soil of Israel’s Scriptures and language, while casting Greek speculative treatments as the playground of heretics. In that light, the famous notice starts to read less like a neutral chronicle and more like choreography. Matthew “among the Hebrews” comes first; Mark comes after, tethered to Peter’s proclamation and temporally delayed until “after their departure.” The point is to secure multiple apostolic witnesses that are independent of one another, yet all safely inside a Hebrew-scriptural, catholic frame.

What do we actually gain when someone who was “in the room” remembers how the Secret Mark project was put together?

Here the key witness is an 82-year-old former undergraduate assistant who, in 1962–63, sat over the typescript of the Clement of Alexandria volume, checking Greek citations and proofreading the apparatus. His memories don’t tell us who wrote on the endpapers at Mar Saba. They do, however, sharpen the picture of what the scholarly workflow around the edition looked like and what the discoverer thought he was doing.

The first point is methodological. The assistant describes a work environment saturated in concordances and reference tools. His job was to verify that the professor’s alleged parallels really existed in Clement and Mark, that the Greek phrasing matched, that the citations were accurate. The impression is of a project built up from dense cross-checking: patristic echoes on one side, Markan diction on the other, all run through the mill of published concordances. From a distance, that’s exactly what the book looks like: an edifice of parallels designed to show that the new text speaks Clement’s language and plays with Mark the way Alexandrians played with Scripture in general.

That workflow cuts both ways. On the one hand, if you are fabricating a text for a prank, recruiting undergraduates to spend hours verifying your fake’s patristic parallels would be an odd use of time. The assistant’s sense that a forgery is “crazy” comes from that intuition: nothing about the day-to-day work felt like a hoax being staged. On the other hand, critics who see the text as a concordance-driven pastiche will only nod: of course it conforms to Clement and Mark, because it was engineered with those very tools. The assistant’s comment that the language “conformed” to Clement and Mark as far as he could see thus doesn’t break the stalemate; it simply confirms that intensive concordance use left its fingerprints.

The second point is thematic. In his recollection, the conversations in 1962–63 were about magic, mysticism, nocturnal initiation, secrecy—about esoteric practice, not about erotic scandal. The professor was fascinated by amulets and magical bowls, spent long stretches in the British Museum studying them, and read the new text mainly through that ritual lens. The assistant insists he never heard the claim that “Jesus was gay,” nor did he register the longer passage as primarily a sexual provocation. That portrait fits the trajectory of Jesus the Magician and the broader interest in esotericism more than it does the later popular caricature of Secret Mark as a “gay Jesus” fantasy. If you want to assign a motive for why someone would be excited by a Markan passage about a nocturnal encounter with a linen-clad youth, “secret initiation in a magical context” is the more historically grounded candidate.

Again, this doesn’t prove authenticity; a forger with that intellectual profile might be trying to plant exactly the sort of ritual-esoteric text he wished existed. But it does undercut one of the lazier psychological stories—that the whole thing is a coded sexual prank—and shifts the center of gravity back onto ritual, secrecy, and initiation, where the discoverer’s published work actually lives.

Finally there is the matter of personality. The assistant remembers his professor as abrasive, anti-orthodox, openly non-religious, combative at conferences. None of that is surprising, and none of it, by itself, tells you whether he forged a manuscript. What it does show is how quickly debates about the text slide into debates about the man. For people predisposed to distrust him, those traits are read as “he’d pull something like this.” For those convinced by the workflow and the apparatus, they become “he was a difficult but serious scholar.” The same biographical facts feed opposite narratives.

The value of this kind of recollection is not that it settles authorship. It’s that it forces the discussion back toward concrete questions. We learn that the edition was assembled under heavy concordance use; that its parallels were, at least, checked by other eyes; that the interpretive horizon at the time was magic and initiation rather than sex; and that the assistant himself cannot imagine his old professor staging a hoax. All of these are data points that can inform how we model the project’s aims and methods. None of them answer the core questions about the Greek hand at Mar Saba, the dependence patterns inside the letter’s Clementine prose, or the missing leaves.

In that sense, the old assistant’s memories are a useful corrective but not a verdict. They make it harder to sustain certain cartoon motives and strengthen the case that the published Clement volume was the product of ordinary, if intense, philological labor. But the real work for the Secret Mark debate still lies where it always has: in handwriting forensics, lemmatized source mapping, external attestation, and the stubbornly thin provenance of three photographed pages in a lost book.