New York Times (1960): A New Gospel Ascribed to Mark

When a major newspaper put the Mar Saba discovery on its front page in December 1960, it didn’t really introduce the controversial new stories about Jesus at all; it introduced a theology of secrecy. The article presented an Alexandrian church authority explaining that Mark had produced a special version of his gospel for initiates, keeping certain “mysteries” out of the public text, and warning against a libertine sect that had abused this teaching. The headline itself—“A New Gospel Ascribed to Mark: Copy of Greek Letter Says Saint Kept ‘Mysteries’ Out”—tells you what the public was meant to notice: a saint, a secret gospel, and withheld mysteries, not the details of any added pericopes.

In the actual letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria, Mark’s longer text is said to be “most carefully guarded, being read only to those who are being initiated into the great mysteries.” That one line became, effectively, the whole public hook in 1960. The Bethany youth episode and the brief Jericho notice were either not quoted or were blurred into vague paraphrase, and a follow-up news piece the next day leaned on a respondent’s broad skepticism without really unpacking the narrative content either. For more than a decade, the image of the find circulating outside specialist circles was therefore: Clement + secret Mark + initiation + a warning against heretical libertines, with almost no clear sense of what the “secret” text actually said.

Only in the 1970s, when the full text appeared in a critical edition and a trade-press monograph, did the narrative excerpts themselves become widely visible and start to drive the debate. Early major reviews tended to be more receptive to the letter’s authenticity than to the bolder ritual or erotic reconstructions built on it, reinforcing the split between “a plausible Clementine letter about secrecy” and “a highly contested reading of what the secret gospel implies.”

So the idea is that the 1960 media rollout functioned as a kind of soft launch of the concept—Clement attesting a guarded, mystic Mark—while postponing the hard questions that would inevitably follow from the concrete passages about Jesus and the young man. That staged disclosure shaped priors: readers and many scholars first got used to the notion of a Clementine letter about a secret Mark, and only later had to decide what to do with the specific scenes it quoted. Any account of Secret Mark today has to reckon with that sequencing, because the order in which secrecy, narrative, and controversy were revealed is now part of the evidence for how the text has been understood—and misunderstood—from the start.