Where Did Morton Smith Get the Idea for 'Secret Mark'?

A brief note. The hoaxers always point to what they claim are a number of 'modern cultural references' in To Theodore. Who else but the guy that found the text could have 'added' these references, they reason. I haven't found a shred of evidence that there is so much as a single modern reference in the letter. Neither has any other objective observer.

So what's left to these theories? Why couldn't they simply put forward that Smith forged the letter from 'cues' from antiquity - i.e. create something that suggested or alluded to in the writings of the Church Fathers like the recently discovered Gospel of Judas? That would of course have been the stronger argument. But alas, that is the whole problem with the letter to Theodore and its reference to 'Secret Mark' - there is absolutely no suggestion in antiquity regarding a dispute over the contents of the canonical gospel of Mark.

So you see that's always been my problem with these theories that Morton Smith some how 'forged' this letter or the claim that the ideas contained in To Theodore were developed out of his vast knowledge of the controversies in the earliest period of Christianity.

The problem is that there isn't a single reference in any Church writer anywhere that Christians were arguing over the shape of THIS gospel - the gospel of Mark.

The same cannot be said for the gospel of Luke. The Marcionites and the Catholics are repeatedly said to have argued over whose version of this text was authentic and the degree to which Catholics 'added' or heretics 'removed' passages from the narrative. So too with the Gospel of Matthew which is always compared with a longer
'Gospel of the Hebrews' which Epiphanius identified with the Diatessaron. So too with regards to the Gospel of John. Gaius of Rome's copy of the text had all events transpiring in two calendar years as opposed to our text which depicts a three or four year ministry for Jesus.

So here is my difficulty with the claim that Morton Smith 'forged' the Letter to Theodore and - by implication - constructed the two 'missing passages' from the canonical Gospel of Mark. No one ever suggested that something was 'missing' from Mark. If Smith was going to construct a fake letter why wouldn't he have made reference to the Marcionite verson of 'Luke' or the Jewish Christian interest in 'the Gospel according to the Hebrews'?

It would be hard enough to try to pull off a forgery of a known 'heretical variant' to a gospel. Why go for the 'Hail Mary' and invent a variant gospel tradition that no one ever imagined, that many still don't believe ever existed.

Moreover I have always been puzzled why if Smith was inventing 'missing narratives' from Mark - and specifically missing narratives from chapter 10 of the Gospel of Mark why wouldn't he have insert something to explain the strangeness of verse 32:

They were on their way up to Jerusalem, with Jesus leading the way, and the disciples were astonished, while those who followed were afraid.

Why does Mark make reference to the disciples being 'astonished' and those who followed 'afraid' without a reasonable explanation? If one was inventing an addition to this chapter - this is the natural place to make it.

Yet what's even more peculiar about the language of To Theodore is that Clement goes out of his way to deny that there were any other additions to Mark in this whole section including verse 32.

The point of course is that To Theodore and its reference to a 'secret' gospel of Mark seems to have no precedent in any of our ancient sources. That's not to say that there weren't such references in Clement's day but there can be no doubt that a very small fraction of the ancient works of Christian antiquity have come down to us (I'd estimate 1% or less). As such it is unreasonable that Morton Smith would have attempted to create a forgery that wasn't suggested by surviving ancient witnesses to Christianity.

It is therefore BECAUSE the hoaxers can't argue that Smith derived his 'idea' for To Theodore from antiquity that they develop the essentially unconvincing argument that he was inspired by a range of modern ideas - ideas as varied as 'free flowing salt' from the Morton Salt Company or the Oscar Wilde's Salome.

It is because no rational argument can be made in favor of Smith 'recreating' a known gospel variant that these 'hoaxers' put forward a completely unreasonable suggestion that these modern references were DELIBERATELY included in the text by Smith in order to sabotage his own counterfeiting efforts!

I can't believe these theories have gotten as far as they have with supposed 'men of letters.' Carlson for one argues that Smith - like the villain from a bad comic book - laid out the means for his own apprehension. Indeed the motivation that Carlson lays out for Morton Smith also comes right out of the pages of Marvel Comics. The 'angry scientist' who wants to get revenge on the scientific community that rejected him is a tired cliche which I can't believe hasn't been called out before.

On the other hand in order to accept that Morton Smith actually accomplished the forgery behind To Theodore AND the lost Markan fragments referenced in its narrative - we have to (as Jay notes) accept that Smith had some sort of transformational experience to be accorded superhuman powers that he never had before encountering the document at Mar Saba. These sort of things happen all the time in the comic books - a supernatural event (i.e. a radioactive spider bite, exposure to gamma rays etc.) which in this case transformed an incompetent form-critical scholar into a master forger and moreover an expert on letter writing conventions at the time of Clement.

As such I submit that Timo Paananen is a little off the mark when he identifies these theories as typical "conspiracy theories." They are better described as comic book plots or rip offs of a bad episode of Columbo.

Why would Smith develop his forgery in this remarkably unprecedented direction when we see Origen, Clement's successor, citing from the longer text of Matthew (the Gospel of the Hebrews) in his Commentary on Matthew?

Developing a forgery around Matthew would have been easier to believe.

But then again I forgot - comic books don't have to make sense. They just have to entertain.