Chapter One

Nothing better exemplifies the collapse of Western civilization than the debate over “authenticity” surrounding Morton Smith’s 1958 discovery. If I am being honest, that is precisely what has drawn me to the controversy. I was born in 1967, a year of unusual importance in the history of my native Canada. I was not always a historian, at least not by profession, but I always felt a deep connection with history. To have been born in 1967 as a Canadian meant something different than it would have meant had I been born, say, an American. It was not merely the year of the “Summer of Love.” For Canadians of my generation, 1967 was something like a second birth of the nation: a year of promise, a year in which we were told—retrospectively, in my case—that the future was bright and belonged to us.

Looking back, I can see that this optimism had been building since the end of the Second World War. There was still anxiety, of course, especially during the Cold War. But in retrospect, I was born into a generation in which the “little guy”—working-class families like mine, typically apolitical, humble, and unaccustomed to power—began to believe that ordinary people might actually have some say in how the world, and their government, was run.

What does this have to do with Morton Smith’s second journey to the library of the Mar Saba monastery, where he examined the blank pages of printed books in search of manuscripts? Canada was certainly part of the alliance of nations that emerged victorious after the war. The United States, of course, played a much larger role. In the immediate aftermath of Germany’s surrender in 1945, America grew into its future role as guardian of a portion of the world that eventually included Israel and the West Bank. Almost a decade before Smith arrived at Mar Saba, American-sponsored teams of scholars had been sent to photograph hidden manuscripts in monastic libraries throughout what was still often called “the Levant.”

Morton Smith knew this world well. During the Second World War, he had been stranded in Palestine while studying at the Hebrew University, work that eventually contributed to his PhD in classical philology in 1948. As fate would have it, Smith’s landlord during that period would later become one of the most powerful men in the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem.

Vasileios Papadopoulos became Benedict, Patriarch of Jerusalem, in 1957. Highly educated, he spoke French, English, Arabic, and Greek. At some point, Benedict arranged for Smith to visit Mar Saba. It was during this visit that the future Columbia professor first realized that the earlier teams of scholars might have missed something. The most valuable manuscripts—the ones everyone knew had once belonged to Mar Saba—had long since been moved to the main library in Jerusalem. Yet many written materials remained at the monastery, most of them more recent, overlooked, or deemed unimportant.

Could something valuable still be hidden among these neglected books?

Smith had largely forgotten many of the details of his earlier Middle Eastern years, including the Jewish girlfriend he had left behind, but he had kept in touch with Papadopoulos. In 1957, the same year Smith received his second doctorate, a Doctor of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, Benedict ascended the throne of Jerusalem. During the 1950s, Smith also took priestly vows, becoming an Anglican minister, while continuing to cultivate an interest in Greek manuscripts preserved in the monasteries of the Mediterranean.

The two men were reunited when Benedict permitted Smith to live at Mar Saba while cataloguing and photographing whatever manuscripts remained there. When Smith left New York for Jerusalem, there was also a new Jewish woman in his life, the mother of one of his students. Was part of his interest in returning to Jerusalem connected with some desire to rekindle the unconsummated romance of his youth? We cannot know. What is clear is that one day, while enduring the rigors of monastic life in the desert, Smith came upon a letter claiming to be from the hand of Clement of Alexandria, the late second-century Church Father. Before returning home, Smith catalogued and photographed many more manuscripts from Mar Saba. His catalogue was translated into Greek and published in a prominent academic journal. It remains useful to the librarians in Jerusalem to this day.

Back in his Manhattan apartment, the Columbia professor devoted himself to translating his great discovery. Smith was acutely aware of its importance. He organized a press conference with the New York Times and others, announcing to the world what he had found. He copyrighted his English translation of the text and later revised it for his long-awaited 1973 study of the Letter to Theodore. Smith consulted an extraordinary number of experts as he tried to understand what he had uncovered. One expert he did not consult was a forty-year-old Jesuit scholar who had published a PhD thesis on a subject closely related to the Clementine letter: the Gospel of Mark.

The Letter to Theodore was written, allegedly by Clement, in response to an inquiry from a certain Theodore concerning the existence of a “mystery gospel” attributed to the evangelist Mark among the faithful in Alexandria. Why this recension was called the “mystery gospel” is unclear. No known ancient source uses precisely this phrase. Nevertheless, Greek works translated into Latin in the early third century refer to heretics who used a “hidden gospel,” understood as the embodiment of a secret deposit left by the Apostle Paul to his disciples. Clement uses similar language in his surviving writings.

In Book Five of his enigmatic Stromateis—a title that likens the work to the curtains concealing the divine tabernacle from outsiders—Clement writes:

For he who is still blind and dumb, not having understanding, or the undazzled and keen vision of the contemplative soul, which the Saviour confers, like the uninitiated at the mysteries, or the unmusical at dances, not being yet pure and worthy of the pure truth, but still discordant and disordered and material, must stand outside of the divine choir. “For we compare spiritual things with spiritual.” Wherefore, in accordance with the method of concealment, the truly sacred Word truly divine and most necessary for us, deposited in the shrine of truth, was by the Egyptians indicated by what were called among them adyta, and by the Hebrews by the veil. Only the consecrated—that is, those devoted to God, circumcised in the desire of the passions for the sake of love to that which is alone divine—were allowed access to them. For Plato also thought it not lawful for “the impure to touch the pure.”

There is no extended word-for-word quotation shared between this passage from the Stromata and the Letter to Theodore. Yet there are unmistakable shared formulae and conceptual habits. We need only consider the purity language, the mystery-initiation imagery, the language of concealment and veiling, the idea of restricted access, and the distinction between the spiritually prepared and the unworthy. The closest verbal bridge is the purity maxim itself: Clement’s “the impure must not touch the pure” in the Stromata and “to the pure all things are pure” in To Theodore. Both sayings perform the same argumentative task. They explain how sacred material can be genuine and still dangerous in the hands of the wrong people. In To Theodore, this logic is applied to the existence of a “mystery” version of Mark’s Gospel, preserved in the church founded by St. Mark on the shores of the region called the Bucolia, or “cow-pasture,” just outside the eastern walls of Alexandria—if, that is, the letter was really written by Clement.

The Jesuit who had published the ignored PhD on the Gospel of Mark was Quentin Quesnell. He would become an extraordinary thorn in Morton Smith’s side for the rest of Smith’s academic career. The two men knew one another reasonably well. Quesnell refers to having shared academic lunches with Smith in the period leading up to the publication of his papers, in which he accused the Columbia professor—however carefully and indirectly—of forging his discovery.

The strange twist is that Quesnell admired Morton Smith. More than that, he loved Morton Smith the scholar. In his preserved notes, Quesnell repeatedly confesses his admiration for Smith. He recognized in Smith one of the great scholars of his generation. He says more than once how much he “loved” Smith’s work, and he cites Smith’s “Comments on Taylor’s Commentary on Mark” no fewer than seven times in his own work, later published in 1969 as The Mind of Mark by the Pontifical Biblical Institute.

To understand the conflict between Quesnell and Smith as a struggle between a conservative Catholic and a liberal university professor would be a complete misrepresentation. Quesnell was the liberal; Smith was closer to the arch-conservative. Quesnell championed civil rights, feminism, and a host of left-leaning causes, while Smith often took the opposite side. If anything, Smith could more easily be seen by Quesnell as an embodiment of the patriarchal academic and clerical establishment—an establishment Quesnell may have felt was conspiring to destroy his career in the months surrounding his marriage to one of his graduate students, Jean, on January 29, 1973.

His brother John remembered Quentin wrestling with what to do after he had fallen in love with Jean. John told him that if he loved her, he should leave his vows behind. Around this time, Quesnell formally left the Jesuit order. In the midst of a prolonged struggle to keep his position at Marquette University—a struggle he would ultimately lose—Quentin suffered another personal blow when his mother died of pancreatic cancer at the end of 1974.

With his personal life in free fall, Jean became the one shining beacon. Shortly after their marriage, she obtained an associate professorship at Smith College in Massachusetts. She could not immediately bring her husband there to head the Department of Religion, but she became active in the administration and helped establish Jill Ker Conway as the college’s first female president. Jean was described as Conway’s “right hand woman,” giving her significant latitude to shape the institution’s liberal agenda over the next decade. One of the most consequential appointments of that period was, eventually, Quesnell’s appointment as head of the religion department. But first they had to wait for the AAUP to censure Marquette, finding that Quesnell’s tenure and due-process rights had been violated because he had not been granted a hearing before an appropriate faculty committee.

It was during this three-year period, while Quesnell’s career was in free fall, that he and Smith had their much-publicized academic rupture. It began on November 6, 1973, with a seemingly innocent request for the catalogue Smith had published in the Greek academic journal after discovering the letter. Quesnell said that he could ask UC Berkeley to xerox the relevant pages, but that obtaining the whole article might “run me beyond my budget.” He made clear that his specific interest was the Letter to Theodore.

A few days later, Smith sent the requested material, along with a scribbled handwritten note. On the reverse, he wrote: “Are you Fr. Quesnell, S.J.? If so I’m glad you’re working on the problem and hope that you will let me see what you write about it. What I’ve seen of your earlier work has been interesting and I’d be glad to see more of it.”

On November 15, Quesnell replied: “Thank you for the xeroxes ... and thanks for the kind reference to some of my own work. The S.J. had to be dropped when I married last year. Your note makes me able to confess without blushing the admiration I have felt for you since I discovered ‘Comments on Taylor’s Commentary’ about twelve years ago. I consider it a major contribution to the understanding of sound method in exegesis and history and have urged the most careful study of it on my graduate students year after year.”

There were a few more letters in their private correspondence that year. Soon, however, they would battle openly in the pages of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly.

To argue that Quesnell’s academic and personal implosion had nothing to do with his veiled accusation against Morton Smith is to misunderstand the psychological drama of the moment. This does not mean that his arguments can be dismissed as merely personal. Quesnell did have a methodological point. He insisted that a sensational manuscript discovery should be subjected to physical examination, not merely defended by literary and historical analysis. But the intensity of his suspicion, and the direction it took, cannot be separated from the crisis in which he found himself.

By the time Quesnell saw the actual manuscript in June 1983, it was already clear that his doubts had not begun with a concrete palaeographical objection. He was not, in any serious sense, a specialist in eighteenth-century Greek handwriting. His original case was not built on ink, paper, ductus, pressure, or the minute habits of a Greek scribe. It was built on the feeling that something was wrong with Smith’s presentation. Smith had behaved, in Quesnell’s eyes, strangely. A great critic had suddenly become credulous. A scholar whom Quesnell revered for exposing apologetic special pleading now seemed to have produced a book filled with hypotheses, conjectures, and elaborate reconstructions—something that looked to Quesnell like a parody of the very method Smith had once taught him to admire.

This is why the correspondence from November 1973 is so revealing. The exchange begins almost innocently. Quesnell asks Smith for pages from the 1960 catalogue of the Mar Saba manuscripts, explaining that he is interested in the Clement manuscript and that obtaining the whole article through xeroxing might exceed his budget. Smith replies cordially, even warmly, asking whether he is “Fr. Quesnell, S.J.” and saying that he is glad Quesnell is working on the problem. Quesnell’s answer is extraordinary. He explains that the “S.J.” had to be dropped when he married the previous year, and then confesses, almost bashfully, the admiration he had felt for Smith since discovering “Comments on Taylor’s Commentary” twelve years earlier. He calls it a major contribution to sound method in exegesis and history and says that he had urged his graduate students, year after year, to study it carefully.

That is the key. Quesnell did not come to Morton Smith as a conservative Catholic confronting a liberal provocateur. He came as a former Jesuit, newly married, professionally endangered, and still in the process of breaking with the institutional world that had formed him. Smith was not simply an opponent. Smith had been an intellectual idol. He had represented fearless criticism, anti-apologetic rigor, and the courage to expose bad method wherever it appeared. But now, in Quesnell’s eyes, the idol had failed. The man who had taught him suspicion became the object of suspicion.

This makes the Marquette crisis indispensable to the story. Quesnell’s break with the Jesuits was not an abstract theological adjustment. It was a rupture of identity. He had left the celibate religious order that had defined his adult life. He had married Jean. He was fighting for his position at Marquette. He was facing the institutional consequences of choosing ordinary human love over the clerical structure that had trained and authorized him. Then, in the middle of this rupture, Morton Smith’s Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark appeared: a book about secrecy, initiation, forbidden knowledge, sexuality, religious authority, and hidden texts. It is hard to imagine a book more perfectly designed to strike the exposed nerves of a former Jesuit in rebellion against the system that had made him.

Smith’s own explanation only sharpened the conflict. He told Quesnell that he had not arranged a physical examination because nothing in the manuscript had seemed suspicious to him. The manuscript remained at Mar Saba; the experts had judged from photographs; the lack of testing did not seem serious because the content itself made recent forgery seem implausible. To Smith, this was practical judgment. To Quesnell, it was precisely the scandal. A great critic had accepted too much on trust. Worse still, Smith had done what Smith himself had once taught Quesnell to distrust: he had allowed a grand interpretation to grow out of a fragile evidentiary base.

The result was not simply a debate over authenticity. It was a drama of disillusionment. Quesnell’s suspicion of the Letter to Theodore developed out of the same intellectual and emotional upheaval as his rebellion against Marquette and the Jesuit world. The men who had formed him had failed him. The institution had failed him. And now Morton Smith, the great critic, seemed to have failed him too. The suspicion of Secret Mark was thus not born from a palaeographical discovery. It was born from a collapse of trust.

That does not make Quesnell dishonest. It makes him human. His published argument took the form of scholarly method: Where is the manuscript? Why was it not examined? Why must we rely on photographs and Smith’s account? These are legitimate questions. But beneath the method lay a deeper crisis. Quesnell had learned from Smith to expose apologetic constructions. In 1973 and 1974, while his own life was being torn apart by a Catholic institution, he turned that lesson back against Smith himself. The disciple used the master’s weapon against the master. That is why the charge had such force, and why it never quite disappears from the debate. It was not only about Clement, or Mark, or Mar Saba. It was about the unbearable discovery that even one’s liberating idol might belong to the same fallen world as the institutions one has just escaped.

The two men also shared more in common than either seems to have realized. Both were descendants of Canadians, and more specifically of families connected to Quebec. In Quesnell’s case, his grandfather William Henry Quesnell was born in St. Anicet, Quebec, before settling in Wisconsin. Morton Smith’s Canadian grandfather was born in Toronto, Ontario, but established a stained-glass painting business in Montreal before ultimately moving to Philadelphia to found a similar enterprise. Morton Smith’s father, Rupert Henry Smith, was himself born in Montreal. Quesnell’s ancestry reached back to France; Smith’s parents traced their origins to England. Yet both men, in different ways, stood at a distance from the secure identities they had inherited. Smith may even have suspected that he had no biological connection to the parents who raised him, since his mother was forty-three years old when he was born. If Quesnell’s crisis involved the collapse of a religious identity, Smith’s life may also have been shadowed by questions of origin, inheritance, and belonging.

Seen in this light, their conflict becomes more than an argument over a manuscript. It becomes a collision between two men who had each been formed by institutions, inheritances, and loyalties they could no longer fully trust. Smith discovered, or claimed to discover, a hidden gospel in the desert. Quesnell discovered, or believed he had discovered, a hidden flaw in Smith. The debate over authenticity was therefore never merely about whether Clement wrote the Letter to Theodore. It was also about whether the authorities that shaped modern scholarship—church, university, archive, expert, mentor—could still be believed.