Chapter Three

 The reason I have spent so much time analyzing what amounts to the worst possible proof of “inauthenticity” is not that I want to ridicule the hoax side. That would hardly be necessary, given the quality of some of the arguments that have been made on that side. The point is rather that even in the most feverish version of the theory — the suggestion that two homosexual men in the 1960s, one older, established, and approaching the end of his career, the other younger, ambitious, and perhaps still uncertain about himself, somehow conspired to shape the meaning of the Letter to Theodore — there is a real insight buried under the madness.

For once one gets past the insinuations, the gossip, and the sheer melodrama, one is left with a genuine question. Why did Morton Smith translate a phrase which every Greek philologist I have consulted reads as “nakeds with the Naked One” as “naked man with naked man”?

This is not a small matter. It is one of the places where the entire modern mythology of Secret Mark was born. The Greek phrase, as it appears in the manuscript, is not the simple singular phrase Smith made famous. The manuscript does not naturally say “naked man with naked man.” It reads γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ — “naked ones with the naked one,” or, more awkwardly but more literally, “nakeds with the Naked One.” The difference between γυμνοὶ and γυμνὸς is only the difference between an iota and a sigma, between plural and singular. Yet that tiny difference helped create the enormous interpretive atmosphere surrounding the text.

Smith’s translation was not made in a vacuum. It was made under the guidance, or at least under the influence, of Arthur Darby Nock. And this is where the hoax theorists, despite themselves, may have noticed something real. It does not follow that Nock and Smith sat together and decided to turn the Letter to Theodore into a referendum on a “gay gospel.” Nor does it mean that either man fabricated the manuscript, planted it at Mar Saba, or consciously inserted a homosexual thesis into the early Church. But it does mean that the presence of Nock — older, more famous, more secure, and carrying his own complex relationship to the question of sexuality in antiquity — may have influenced Smith’s youthful decisions about how to render the Greek.

That influence matters because the translation “naked man with naked man” did not merely clarify the text. It sexualized it. It made the scene sound like a pairing, a direct male-with-male encounter. It created an image. It gave the later controversy its central icon: the young man, the linen cloth, the night, the nakedness, and Jesus. Without that translation, the sexual atmosphere surrounding the Letter to Theodore would have been far less immediate. There would still have been mystery, secrecy, initiation, and danger. But there would not have been the same blunt phrase, the same suggestive symmetry: “naked man with naked man.”

This chapter adapts an argument I first presented in Bertinoro, Italy, in 2024 and later developed for the Society of Biblical Literature. My point is simple. The very phrase that has been used to make Secret Mark seem like a product of Morton Smith’s imagination is, in fact, one of the strongest indications that Smith did not forge the text. He misread it. And he misread it in exactly the place where, if he had been the forger, he would have had every reason to get it right.

The hoax theory depends on a picture of Smith as a kind of diabolical genius. He is supposed to have possessed not only the imagination to compose a lost Clementine letter, but the technical skill to imitate eighteenth-century Greek monastic handwriting, the historical learning to situate the text plausibly in the debates over Mark, Clement, and the Carpocratians, and the theatrical patience to deposit it in a monastery library where it might or might not ever be found. This is already a great deal to believe. But the theory becomes much harder to sustain when we look closely at what Smith actually did with the manuscript.

He did not handle it like an omniscient creator. He handled it like a discoverer. More precisely, he handled it like a brilliant but imperfect scholar who had found something larger than his own technical abilities could fully control.

Smith was a formidable historian of religion. No serious person should deny that. He had range, nerve, and an unusual ability to see connections where others saw only settled categories. But he was not a world-class paleographer. He was not a specialist in eighteenth-century Greek cursive. He was not, in the narrow technical sense, the sort of person one would expect to produce a flawless imitation of a post-Byzantine monastic hand. The evidence points instead to a scholar who could read Greek, who could work with difficult materials, but who still made mistakes in transcription, accentuation, and letter recognition.

That is exactly what we find in his work on the Mar Saba manuscript. Between his early transcription and his final publication, Smith made small corrections. Some involved accents. Others involved ordinary confusions in reading. These are not the marks of a man reading his own secretly manufactured text. They are the marks of a scholar struggling with photographs, revising himself, second-guessing himself, and trying to bring a difficult manuscript into publishable form.

The decisive case is the phrase γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ. In the high-quality photographs later taken by Quentin Quesnell, the reading is clear. The first word is plural: γυμνοὶ. The ending is not a sigma. It is an accented iota. The phrase does not say γυμνὸς γυμνῷ, “naked man with naked man.” It says γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ.

This matters because Smith’s interpretation leaned heavily on the singular. “Naked man with naked man” is suggestive in a way that “naked ones with the naked one” is not. The former sounds like an encounter between two males. The latter sounds like an awkward but recognizable symbolic or theological phrase. It may refer to initiates. It may refer to those stripped of the passions. It may belong to the language of mystery, baptism, purity, or spiritual transformation. But it does not, by itself, produce the same erotic picture.

This is where the forgery hypothesis begins to collapse under its own cleverness. If Smith forged the Letter to Theodore in order to produce a homoerotic Jesus, why did he not simply write the Greek phrase that would have made the point? Why write γυμνοὶ and then read it as γυμνὸς? Why compose a text that says one thing and then build one’s most sensational interpretation on a misreading of it?

The usual answer, if it can be called an answer, is that Smith was so clever that he deliberately planted the ambiguity. He wrote the phrase one way, read it another way, and thereby created a trail of confusion that would protect him from detection. But this is not an argument. It is a magic trick. It asks us to believe that Smith forged a manuscript, intentionally misread his own forgery, made himself look less competent as a reader of Greek handwriting, and then built an interpretive edifice on the error — all so that future scholars might be misled into thinking he was not the forger.

At some point cunning becomes indistinguishable from absurdity.

The simpler explanation is that Smith misread the word. He saw what he expected to see. Or perhaps, under the influence of Nock and the intellectual atmosphere in which he was working, he saw what the phrase could become. The manuscript gave him γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ. His imagination, or his expectations, or the interpretive pressure of his circle, turned it into γυμνὸς γυμνῷ.

This does not require conspiracy. It requires only the ordinary human weakness of scholars: the tendency to make the text say what the argument needs it to say.

That weakness is far more interesting than the hoax theory. The hoax theory turns Smith into a villain and then congratulates itself for having discovered villainy. But the misreading shows us something subtler. It shows us the moment where a real manuscript passed through a particular human mind and came out changed. The text itself may not have been forged, but its meaning was bent. It was bent by misreading, by expectation, by the intellectual climate of the 1960s, and perhaps by the authority of Nock.

Nock’s role is therefore important, but not in the crude way imagined by the conspiracy theorists. The point is not that Nock and Smith collaborated in a fraud. The point is that Nock represented a certain older scholarly authority, one that Smith respected. Nock had written about Paul in ways that some readers later thought encoded or hinted at homosexual interpretation. Whether that reading of Nock is finally right or wrong, the fact remains that Smith’s translation emerged in a world where sexuality, secrecy, initiation, and early Christianity were being newly imagined together. The 1960s did not invent homosexuality in antiquity, but they did alter the conditions under which scholars could speak, hint, conceal, or dramatize it.

Smith’s “naked man with naked man” belongs to that moment.

It is not the reading of the manuscript. It is the reading of the manuscript through Smith. And perhaps through Nock. And perhaps through a larger world in which the old Christian categories of purity, secrecy, initiation, and forbidden knowledge were being reinterpreted through the language of sexuality.

This is why the misreading is so devastating to the claim that Smith forged the Letter to Theodore. A forger who wanted a sexualized Secret Gospel would not need to misread his own text into existence. He would simply create the text he wanted. He would write the singular. He would make the evidence match the interpretation. He would not leave the decisive word in a form that later photographs would expose as plural.

Nor would he create a manuscript whose most explosive modern meaning depended on a paleographical error. That is not how successful forgery works. A forger hides his weaknesses. Smith exposed his. He gave the world a reading that later made him look less like a mastermind than like an overconfident interpreter of difficult handwriting.

The delayed publication of the text fits this same pattern. Smith waited years before publishing his full study. Critics have taken this as suspicious, as if the delay gave him time to refine the forgery. But anyone who has worked with difficult manuscript material knows another explanation: fear. Not fear of being caught in a crime, but fear of being wrong. Fear of publishing a flawed transcription. Fear of making a public error that other scholars would preserve forever as evidence of incompetence.

Smith’s conduct makes sense as the conduct of a scholar who knew he had found something explosive and also knew that he might not be fully equal to the technical demands of editing it. He registered an early version. He delayed. He revised. He guarded the photographs. He controlled access. None of this is admirable, exactly, but it is recognizable. Scholars are territorial creatures. They are also terrified creatures. They know that a single mistake in an editio princeps can follow them for the rest of their lives.

In Smith’s case, that is exactly what happened. The mistake was not peripheral. It sat at the center of the controversy. It helped create the sexual aura of the text. And once the phrase “naked man with naked man” entered the discussion, it became almost impossible to remove. Even those who rejected Smith’s conclusions continued to inhabit the atmosphere his translation created.

This is the great irony. The hoax side accuses Smith of manufacturing the scandal, but the scandal may have arisen from something much more ordinary: a bad reading of a single word. The manuscript was not necessarily designed to suggest a homoerotic Jesus. Smith’s translation helped make it suggest one.

That does not mean the Letter to Theodore is boring. It remains strange, difficult, and dangerous. It still speaks of secrecy. It still distinguishes between a public Gospel of Mark and a more spiritual version preserved in Alexandria. It still places Clement in conflict with the Carpocratians. It still suggests that texts could be copied, expanded, guarded, corrupted, and fought over in ways that unsettle modern assumptions about Christian origins. But the particular sexual charge that has dominated the modern debate depends more heavily on Smith’s singular “naked man” than the manuscript itself appears to allow.

Once we see this, the whole controversy shifts. The question is no longer, “Why would Morton Smith forge a gay gospel?” The better question is, “Why did Morton Smith read a plural as a singular, and why did that singular become so important to him?”

The answer may lie in the convergence of text, personality, and influence. Smith was young when he found the manuscript. He was ambitious. He was brilliant, but not yet the older figure he would become. Nock, by contrast, represented authority. If Nock encouraged, approved, or even merely failed to discourage the more suggestive translation, that would have mattered. Smith did not need Nock to tell him to invent anything. He only needed Nock to make a certain reading feel plausible, elegant, or interesting.

This is how influence usually works. Not as conspiracy. Not as command. But as permission.

An older scholar gives a younger scholar permission to see something. The younger scholar then sees it everywhere.

That, I think, is the real insight hidden inside the otherwise insane theory of the two homosexual scholars. The hoax writers were wrong to imagine forgery. But they may have sensed that the sexualized reading of the Letter to Theodore did not come from the manuscript alone. It came from a relationship between men, from a line of influence, from an intellectual atmosphere in which certain possibilities could be hinted at more easily than stated plainly.

The manuscript gave Smith a difficult phrase. Smith, perhaps under Nock’s shadow, gave the world “naked man with naked man.”

And that phrase changed everything.

It made the Letter to Theodore seem more scandalous than it was. It made Secret Mark into a cultural object rather than merely a textual one. It allowed hostile readers to imagine Smith as a forger driven by sexual motives. It allowed defenders to become trapped defending not only the manuscript but Smith’s interpretation of it. It ensured that every discussion of authenticity would be haunted by the same question: what exactly was Jesus doing with that young man?

But if the Greek reads γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ, then the question has been malformed from the beginning. The issue is not whether the manuscript gives us “naked man with naked man.” It does not. The issue is how Smith’s mistaken singular became the controlling image of the whole debate.

That mistake should humble both sides. It should humble the defenders of Smith, because it shows that his interpretation cannot simply be identified with the text itself. But it should humble the hoax theorists even more, because it removes one of their favorite motives for forgery. The supposedly perfect clue to Smith’s erotic imagination turns out to be a misreading. The manuscript itself is less convenient than the theory requires.

A forged text designed to advance a homosexual reading of Jesus would have been clearer. This text is not clear. It is awkward, resistant, and strange. It does not behave like propaganda. It behaves like a manuscript.

And Smith does not behave like the author of that manuscript. He behaves like its discoverer: excited, anxious, controlling, brilliant, careless, and finally wrong in a crucial place.

That is why the misreading matters. It is not merely a technical correction. It is a window into the entire human drama of the Letter to Theodore. A real manuscript was found. A young scholar read it imperfectly. An older scholar’s influence may have shaped the way that imperfection became meaningful. A sensational translation entered the world. Decades of argument followed.

The hoax theory, in its cruder form, tries to turn all of this into a crime story. But the truth is more interesting. It is a story about how texts become sexualized, how authority moves between scholars, how a single Greek ending can redirect an entire field, and how the desire to find scandal can create scandal where the manuscript itself is more ambiguous.

Morton Smith did not need to forge the Letter to Theodore in order to distort it. He only needed to misread it.

And that is exactly what appears to have happened.