Craig Evans on Secret Mark

The controversy around “Secret Mark” keeps getting dragged back to Morton Smith’s personality, and this particular cluster of arguments is a good case study in why that approach mostly misfires. The starting claim is simple enough: because Smith supposedly hardly used Secret Mark in Jesus the Magician, he must have doubted it himself. That sounds plausible until you open the book. He does cite his own edition of the letter and the longer Markan passages; he just doesn’t make them the main pillars of his thesis. The magician argument is built out of hostile patristic testimony and Greco-Egyptian magical sources, with Secret Mark supplying a few confirmatory details rather than carrying the load. That’s exactly what Smith said in his published rejoinder to Kermode decades ago, and it completely undercuts the “conspicuous silence” trope. You can’t accuse him of building his house on Secret Mark and, in the next breath, of conspicuously refusing to use it because he secretly knew it was fake.

The “prediction” line fares no better. Long before 1958, Smith did notice Mark–John convergences in a 1955 piece. But the claim that he effectively “prefigured” a Lazarus-style episode in Mark evaporates when you read what he actually wrote: there’s no Lazarus, no second Markan raising narrative, nothing that would count as a blueprint for the Mar Saba scene. Seeing Johannine resonances in Mark is a commonplace of critical exegesis, not evidence that someone had already imagined the precise kind of story he would later “discover.” On the Clement side, the assertion that Clement could never give the sort of advice found in the letter—that an elder may swear and deny knowledge of “mystic” texts under pressure—is also too absolute. Clement explicitly allows forms of strategic concealment and edged deception for pastoral or beneficent reasons. You can still argue about whether the tone of To Theodore matches those passages, but you can’t honestly say Clement’s ethics rule such counsel out a priori.

The more baroque hypothesis—that Smith obtained a dodgy text in the 1940s and then physically smuggled and planted it at Mar Saba in 1958 to “launder” its pedigree—is a story in search of evidence. It asks you to imagine a multi-decade forgery plan involving a monastery, a bound volume, and later third-party sightings, without supplying dates, documents, or concrete mechanisms. It’s not impossible in the abstract; it’s just untethered. More grounded is the observation that some of Smith’s intellectual interests—rabbinic and early Christian esotericism, the limits on teaching sensitive subjects in texts like m. Ḥagigah 2:1, and later on, sexualized readings of Christian sources—clearly color how he reads the Mar Saba letter. But when you drill down into his earlier work, the “forbidden unions” material is part of a broader fascination with secrecy and graded teaching, not a smoking gun of prior obsession with hidden sex cults that then “had” to surface in Secret Mark.

What this all exposes is a pattern of argument that wants psychology to do work that belongs to philology and paleography. If Smith had leaned heavily on Secret Mark, that would be proof of his bias. Because he used it lightly, that too is supposed to be proof of his bias. If he saw esotericism in tannaitic sources, that’s evidence he was primed to invent a Christian esoteric text; if he hadn’t, that absence would be read as convenient camouflage. It’s a classic “heads I win, tails you lose” setup, and it’s not a reliable way to adjudicate authenticity. The more the discussion focuses on what Smith “must have” felt or planned, the less it has to say about what the Greek actually looks like, how the hand fits into eighteenth-century monastic practice, or how the letter’s prose relates to Clement’s known epistolary voice.

For the Secret Mark debate, the useful takeaway is methodological rather than substantive. Whether Smith used the material a lot or a little in Jesus the Magician tells you almost nothing about the age of a text copied into a seventeenth-century book. The claim that he “predicted” it doesn’t survive a close reading of his earlier publications. Invoking Clement’s supposed incapacity for strategic dissimulation ignores passages where he does exactly that. Exotic provenance-laundering narratives may be entertaining, but without concrete support they don’t add real weight to the scales. If this cluster of arguments accomplishes anything, it’s to push the discussion back toward the things that can actually be tested: the style and connective tissue of the Clementine prose, the palaeographical profile of the hand, and the text’s intertextual footprints. In other words, away from the man and back to the manuscript.