The “Inside Story” Genre and the Secret Gospel Controversy

 From an idea by Peter Kirby. One of the most unhelpful things that has happened to the Secret Gospel controversy is that it keeps getting sucked into the “inside story” genre. The core insight of this batch of arguments is that a lot of the popular anti-authenticity case doesn’t read like historical work; it reads like a Procopius-style Secret History of Morton Smith. Books like Carlson’s and Jeffery’s are structured as revelations. They promise to take you behind the scenes, to unveil hidden motives, to show that the discoverer was really a trickster, a sensualist, a wounded ego acting out a long, elaborate prank. The narrative spine isn’t “what can we prove about this manuscript and its text?” but “who was this man really, and what dark joke was he playing on us?” That’s gripping storytelling, but it is a very different thing from source-critical analysis.

Once you step back and look at the techniques involved, the problem becomes obvious. The hoax narratives are built out of speculative psychology and clever coincidences: salt puns that only “pop” if you already assume bad faith, supposed “forger’s tremor” in a hand that other experts find fluent and period-appropriate, suggestive parallels in Smith’s private life or broader culture that are presented as clues rather than as what they are—context. This is exactly how pseudo-history often works: you select a handful of striking details, align them with a pre-chosen storyline, and then invite the reader to feel that the story must be true because it would be so satisfying if it were. What largely drops out are the boring but necessary controls: comparative handwriting samples, clear criteria for what counts as evidence of forgery, independent checks on alleged literary dependence, a willingness to say “we don’t know” where the record is silent.

By contrast, the more cautious responses—Scott Brown on the language and internal logic of the letter, Venetia Anastasopoulou on the handwriting—try to anchor the debate in things that can actually be tested. Anastasopoulou’s point is not that the hand must be ancient, but that it is a natural, well-trained eighteenth-century Greek book hand and not Morton Smith’s; that’s a falsifiable claim about shapes, ductus, and habits. Brown’s work is similar in spirit: whatever you decide about provenance, the Greek Clementine prose in the letter has to be read against Clement’s own texts, not against biographical ideas about what sort of document Smith “would have wanted” to find. None of this proves authenticity, but it shifts the center of gravity from personality to primary evidence.

The leaves are gone; no amount of genre critique will conjure them back or let us carbon-date them. So the argument here isn’t “because the hoax books are written like secret histories, the letter is genuine.” It’s much stricter: the kind of narrative that sells a hoax thesis—inner motives, long-nursed grudges, veiled jokes—simply is not a reliable instrument for deciding whether a copied Greek text in a seventeenth-century binding is ancient, medieval, or modern. If we want to make progress, we have to put those narrative temptations on a leash. The only things that should count are claims that can survive cross-examination: specific, reproducible paleographical judgments; clearly defined linguistic tests validated on similar corpora; concrete demonstrations of literary dependence on datable sources; and whatever can still be reconstructed of the volume’s chain of custody.

For the Secret Mark debate, that’s the real payoff. It doesn’t hand victory to either camp, but it does redraw the playing field. You don’t get to win because you’ve written the most compelling psychological portrait of Morton Smith, or because you’ve crafted the most scandalous “inside story” of how a prank might have been pulled off. You only get to win if you can show, in the text and the hand and the history, that your account is better supported than the alternatives. Everything else—whether we find Smith likable, creepy, brilliant, or infuriating—belongs to the realm of hypothesis and historical fiction, not to the verdict on whether an Alexandrian “mystic” Mark ever existed.