I feel bad about producing three or four pages from Brown's book. I don't know if Scott reads this blog but if you have an issue please let me know (he has only returned one of my emails over the last five years). All I can do is perhaps cite the appropriate pages without footnotes (to encourage everyone to buy the book at the Amazon link above) and how that Brown is okay with this. I hope everyone else who reads this develops a deep respect for Brown's research and writing skills:
This growing deference to scholarly folklore, together with Smith’s death in 1991, cleared the way for one of Smith’s former students to declare him “a charlatan and a fraud, and his discovery a hoax.” [1] Jacob Neusner has made this allegation in a variety of contexts, most notably as part of a review of books by John Meier and John Crossan on the historical Jesus. Under the pretence of defending the enterprise of historical Jesus research against the “disgrace” brought to it by Smith’s fraud, [2] Neusner felt free not only to refer to the Letter to Theodore as “what must now be declared the forgery of the century,” but even to claim that this “brilliant forgery,” this “out-and-out fakery,” was “exposed” by Quesnell. [3] Neusner did not hesitate to assure us that Quesnell’s “Further Questions for Smith” were a discreet way of accusing Smith of forgery, a ploy adopted in order to avoid getting “sued for libel.”[4] Yet apart from rephrasing Quesnell’s points to make them sound incriminating, Neusner offered no evidence of his own aside from baseless characterizations of Smith’s intentions, and numerous, egregious misrepresentations of fact. Where most scholars would do research, Neusner consulted the one famous opinion, then confabulated a new version of the reception of Smith’s scholarship that suited his agenda:
The very quest [for the historical Jesus] met its defining disgrace by Smith, whose “historical” results — Jesus was “really” a homosexual magician — depended upon a selective believing in whatever Smith thought was historical. Even at the time, some of us told Smith to his face that he was an upside-down fundamentalist, believing anything bad anybody said about Jesus, but nothing good. And no one who so rebuked him objected to the campaigns of character assassination that Smith spent his remaining years conducting; there is a moment at which, after all, truth does matter ….
… As a matter of fact, Smith’s presentation of the evidence for his homosexual magician, a Clement fragment he supposedly turned up in a library in Sinai [sic] in 1958, ranks as one of the most slovenly presentations of an allegedly important document in recent memory; and, to understate matters, it left open the very plausible possibility of forgery. Smith himself was an expert on such matters, having devoted scholarly essays to great forgeries in antiquity. [5]
This first assault was published as many times as Neusner could find new ways to introduce it. In subsequent attacks upon Smith’s memory, Neusner took it for granted that his allegations had had their intended effect. Hence he set aside the pretence of having evidence, and referred to the supposed fraud and imaginary scandal as facts: “As to the scholarly fraud, who speaks of it any more, or imagines that the work pertains to the study of the New Testament at all? I need not remind readers…of the scandal of Smith’s sensational discovery’ of the Clement fragment, the original of which no one but Smith was permitted to examine. Purporting, in Smith’s report, to demonstrate that the historical Jesus was ‘really’ a homosexual magician, the work has not outlived its perpetrator. In the end many were silenced — who wanted to get sued? — but few were gulled.” [6]
This is an astonishing assessment of the Letter to Theodore and its discoverer — all the more so when we consider that Neusner expressed the exact opposite opinions when he wrote the dust jacket endorsement for The Secret Gospel:
This is a brilliant account of how Morton Smith reached a major discovery in the study of first-century Christianity. We have not only his conclusions and the way in which these are argued, but also his own life and thought as he reached them. The discovery itself ranks with Qumran and Nag Hammadi, Masada and the Cairo Geniza, but required more learning and sheer erudition than all of these together, both in the recognition of what has been found, and in the interpretation and explanation of the meaning of the find. All this Smith has done—and he tells us about it in a narrative of exceptional charm and simplicity. [7]
In addition to writing this radiant endorsement, Neusner had assisted with the proofreading of CA before its publication. [8] So when we contemplate the sincerity of his opinion that very few scholars were fooled by this self-evident fraud, we cannot help but wonder whether Neusner categorizes himself among the many who were cowed or the few who were gulled, or whether instead he wants us to believe that he willingly contributed to and endorsed research that he considered fraudulent. I suspect that he knows full well that most knowledgeable scholars then and now could find little reason to doubt the authenticity of the letter and has gambled that the memory of his wholehearted endorsement of this text vanished with Smith and the dust jackets.
Except for the less outlandish remarks in the dust-jacket endorsement, none of the sentences by Neusner that I have just quoted could be deemed accurate. What he offers us is a combination of standard academic folklore and his own far-fetched invention. Much of his first assault was pointed out to him to be either false or unbelievable shortly after he wrote it. When Neusner published “Who Needs ‘the Historical Jesus,’” the invited respondent, Craig Evans, pointed out that there was never any scandal caused by the “secret” gospel in the context of historical Jesus research, that “several patristic scholars” consider the letter authentic, and that it is “hard to believe that anyone would devote years of painstaking labor to the production of a 450-page technical book that studies a writing that the author himself faked.” [9] In 1996, Shaye Cohen pointed out that “homosexual magician” was “a caricature of Smith’s view” and that the longer gospel continues to interest New Testament scholars. [10]Unfortunately, these objections did not deter Neusner from repeating the same notions in the attack on Smith that he contributed to the reprint of Birger Gerhardsson’s book Memory and Manuscript. Nor will mine, I expect. But since we all agree that “truth does matter,” I will point out some other statements that are demonstrably false. Neusner’s recollection that the manuscript “supposedly turned up in a library in Sinai” is a good indication that he did not even review the facts about the manuscript before declaring it a forgery. His description of CA as “one of the most slovenly presentations of an allegedly important document in recent memory” is an absurd generalization derived from Quesnell’s view that CA contained “an extraordinarily high proportion of inaccuracies.” Quesnell was the only scholar to express a negative opinion of Smith’s technical competence, and he substantiated his opinion by noting the errors in Smith’s treatment of less than one sentence of the letter. [11]Most reviewers who commented on the book’s technical merits were highly impressed; some were nearly as impressed as Neusner had been himself. [12] Neusner’s statement that “Smith himself was an expert on” forgery, “having devoted scholarly essays to great forgeries in antiquity” was, of course, offered as incriminating evidence, and was wisely left undocumented. Apart from a study of Deuteronomy and some discussions of Jewish pseudepigraphical writings, there are no such studies in the bibliographies of Smith’s published and unpublished writings.
Of particular interest is Neusner’s claim to have “told Smith to his face that he was an upside-down fundamentalist, believing anything bad anybody said about Jesus, but nothing good.” Here Neusner was talking about Smith’s 1978 follow-up book, Jesus the Magician, indicating that the rift between himself and Smith came when Neusner decided to criticize this book in defence of Christianity:
thought and told him to his face that his results were nothing more than antiChristian propaganda and, in a simple, but uncompromising, footnote, as I said, in the published version of my 1979 SBL address, dismissed Smith’s account of Jesus, calling it not history but ideology. In our time a great many Christian scholars have done…no less for Judaism than I meant to do for Christianity: label prejudice and bigotry for what they are, so remove from scholarly discourse what does not belong among decent people. I did not regret then, and do not regret now, enduring Smith’s vengeance for doing what I knew, and now know [sic], was right and also required of me. In his day, many feared Smith and his clones, and only a very, very few in the world he dominated defied him. I am proud that, when the occasion demanded, I was one of the few. By publicly condemning his Secret Gospel’s outcome, Jesus the Magician, I opposed anti-Christianism [sic] just as so many Christian scholars, from Moore through Sanders, have opposed anti-Judaism. I take pride that, when it was time to stand up and be counted, I said in print that Smith’s portrait of Jesus was not history but contemptible, hateful ideology. [13]
In a more popular book, Neusner added more information about this valiant footnote: Smith “chose to believe everything bad he could about Jesus, perhaps making up what he could not read into the sources. Since I had done my dissertation with him, I bore a special responsibility to say that that was what I thought. So, when I published that lecture, I said so in footnote 18 (the number eighteen standing for life in its Hebrew character).” [14]
Whether Neusner privately said anything like this to Smith, I do not know. But since he offered proof for this explanation of the break between himself and Smith, we can compare his story with the published footnote: At this point [referring to his dictum “what we cannot show we do not know”] I regret I have to part company with my teacher, Morton Smith. Compare the opening chapters of his Jesus the Magician…, pp. 1–67, with his discourse on magic, pp. 68–139. The former discussion is tendentious; Smith sets out not to analyse a possibility but to prove a proposition. The shift in the tone of the book and in the character of the discussion when Smith turns to an academic account of magic in antiquity is stunning. This other part of the book is a model of academic clarity and deep learning, while the discussion on “the historical Jesus” is a morass of “proofs” of propositions. [15] Clearly, there is a discrepancy between Neusner’s descriptions of this note and the note itself. The footnote contains no suggestion that Smith made up evidence, praises his discussion of ancient magic, and faintly criticizes his discussion of the historical Jesus as “tendentious” and “a morass of ‘proofs’ of propositions.” One might gather that Neusner thought Jesus the Magician was biased and methodologically flawed or that it contained assumptions that were inadequately substantiated. But clearly in this published version of his 1979 SBL address, Neusner made no valiant, public defence of Christianity against the “contemptible, hateful ideology” of Jesus the Magician and no intimation that he thought Smith had committed fraud—not even in a footnote. The fact that the 1981 paperback edition of Jesus the Magician sports Neusner’s endorsement of Smith’s “compelling and powerful historical argument” makes it even harder to believe that the rift between Smith and Neusner was the result of Neusner’s noble condemnation of this book, rather than the other way around. Neusner has misrepresented not only the facts pertaining to the scholarly reception of the “secret” gospel but also his own prior views about this text and the time and manner in which he came to think of Smith and the Letter to Theodore as academic frauds.
So what really happened? What led Neusner to stop thinking of Smith as “the first, the only, and the last authentic teacher I ever had” and start thinking of Smith as “a crank and a crackpot,” a “nasty old fool,” “a conceptual bungler,” a “know-nothing,” and a “fraud”? [16] I doubt all the pieces of the puzzle are available in the secondary literature, but Smith’s public denunciation of Neusner in 1984 for academic incompetence is the best-attested factor and is sufficient reason in itself.
In order to understand that event, one must know something about the history of these two scholars. Smith was one of the supervisors of Neusner’s doctoral dissertation. Neusner learned from Smith’s dissertation Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels that the methodologies of New Testament scholarship were relevant to the study of rabbinic literature, and this insight “shaped” “the entire course” of Neusner’s career. [17] During the decade after Neusner’s graduation, Smith promoted Neusner’s work in book reviews, and defended Neusner against his critics. But as far back as 1967 and 1970 Smith’s positive reviews of Neusner’s books were tempered with references to Neusner’s “constant carelessness of execution,” inexcusable “inaccuracies,” and “slovenliness in details.” [18] Smith stopped promoting Neusner’s work after favourably reviewing Development of a Legend but noting that there were so many errors that “one cannot rely on the statements of fact and would be advised to check everything.” [19] Smith put great emphasis on accuracy, and would sometimes look up hundreds of references in the course of preparing a book review. But Neusner did not heed Smith’s criticism, so in 1973 Smith very politely informed Neusner that he was no longer going to read his books. [20] For many years Neusner continued to pay homage to his teacher, and even edited a four-volume Festschrift in Smith’s honour, but their admiration became less mutual as the pace of Neusner’s publications became more manic. Neusner is reluctant to admit that his distinction of being the world’s most published scholar in the humanities, averaging one book every seventeen days over the entire course of his career, does not suggest only good things about his scholarship, and that some scholars would rather not be associated with him because of this. [21]
As long as Smith showed restraint in the way he expressed his disapproval, Neusner paid no attention to Smith’s opinion about his careless scholarship. So in 1979, Smith made his first public demonstration. He stood up, turned around, and sauntered out during a plenary address that Neusner gave at an SBL meeting—a calculated gesture of disapproval. This attempt to sever their connection proved inadequate, as one can see from Neusner’s feeble attempt to “part company” with his teacher, now enshrined in note 18 of the published version of that address. So Smith staged a second, unmistakable public demonstration at the 1984 AAR-SBL meeting. Prior to that meeting Smith explained his reason to Shaye J.D. Cohen, who recounted this information in a review of Neusner’s book on Smith: “Smith explained to me that, because he had been instrumental in launching Neusner’s career, he felt responsible for the ‘slovenliness’ of Neusner’s scholarship, which had grown worse over the years. Neusner had proven to be incorrigible in this matter, and therefore Smith wanted to dissociate himself publicly from his student.” [22] So at the conclusion of a session honouring Neusner’s work, Smith took the podium to denounce Neusner’s The Talmud of the Land of Israel: A Preliminary Translation and Explanation as “a serious misfortune for Jewish studies, because the people who use it will not only repeat Neusner’s mistakes, but make new ones based on the misinformation his work will provide them.” [23] Smith then passed out copies of a review by Saul Lieberman of two volumes of this (now) thirty-five volume translation, in which Lieberman undertook to illustrate Neusner’s “ignorance of rabbinic Hebrew, of Aramaic grammar, and above all of the subject matter with which he deals.”[24] This was more than a public dissociation; it was an attack on Neusner’s reputation and influence. The lamentable event was a major humiliation to Neusner and one in a rapid series of blows to his ego. That year he felt he was being “shoved down the memory-hole.” [25] His response was to do whatever he could to reclaim his reputation and discredit the people who had threatened it.
When Hershel Shanks recounted Smith’s escapade in Biblical Archaeology Review in a report on the annul meeting, Neusner likened the journal to Hustler magazine and wrote a letter threatening a lawsuit for defamation. [26] He also informed Shanks that he was contemplating suing Smith and Lieberman’s estate (Lieberman died before his review was published). [27] William M. Calder III, a long-time friend of Smith, recalled that Smith showed him a letter from Neusner’s lawyer threatening litigation, and that Smith found the threat greatly amusing. Smith responded by writing a letter to Biblical Archaeology Review in which he pointed out a slight error in this journal’s description of Lieberman’s review: “Saul Lieberman’s review did not say that Neusner’s essays in this book ‘abound in brilliant insights,’ etc. That praise…referred to Neusner’s earlier works. In the present volume he found nothing to recommend, but recommended the whole ‘for the wastebasket.’” [28] Neusner’s writings thereafter contain the occasional insult directed at Smith, but he waited until Smith could not reply before he set out to destroy his reputation. Within two years of Smith’s death, Scholars Press released the book Are There Really Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels: A Refutation of Morton Smith, in which Neusner critiqued Smith’s then half-century old dissertation, characterizing it as “trivial and, where interesting, quite wrong, ignorant, and misleading.” The book abounds with spiteful characterizations such as “surpassingly commonplace triviality,…ignorant and incompetent,…insufficient, shoddy work,” “a mess of contradiction and confusion,” and—not surprisingly—“fraudulent.” [29] The claim that Smith forged his important discovery is of a piece with the book’s theme that Smith led a “tragic, fruitless career” and “died a figure of ridicule.” [30] That Neusner’s assessments of Smith’s work have always been indistinguishable from his feelings about Smith should now be obvious, but in case there is any doubt, I will point out that prior to 1984, Neusner described the same dissertation as “the most beautifully argued work of historical reason I know.” [31]
I must, therefore, disagree with Romano Penna, who, when borrowing Neusner’s phrase “forgery of the century” second-hand from Graham Stanton, remarked “it is natural to agree with an impartial author such as the famous Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner.” [32] It is hard to mistake Neusner’s opinions on this subject as either knowledgeable or impartial, yet at least six other scholars have noted Neusner’s opinion about this document and appealed to his knowledge of Smith—without mentioning his defamatory purpose. [33] Neusner’s false witness is taking the place of incriminating evidence. Neusner’s attacks on Smith’s memory have proved especially useful to his protégé, Donald Harman Akenson, who utilized Neusner’s “secret” gospel scandalmongering as a weapon against liberal Jesus scholars. With a flare for righteous indignation, Akenson rendered this temerarious verdict upon “anyone” who would take this gospel seriously:
the Secret Mark issue…is a rare moment, a clear adjudication point that allows laymen…to judge the competence of the leading scholars in the field: not the technical competence in small matters, but on the big matters; and to determine, not to put too fine a line on it, whether they have at least as much common sense as God gives to a goose. For look: Secret Mark is a forgery and not one that requires forensic methods and high magnification to detect. Anyone who could not spot it as a forgery from a height of 3,000 feet should not be allowed to make authoritative pronouncements on the authenticity of texts that relate to Yeshua of Nazareth. [34]
Akenson went on to explain to his lay readership that the inability of most biblical scholars to recognize longer Mark for what it is—“a nice ironic gay joke at the expense of all of the self-important scholars”—is proof that “some of the most powerful, most influential persons in the so-called ‘liberal’ wing of the field…are far from being omniscient or, often, even ordinarily shrewd. Vain, yes; credulous, yes; shrewd, no.” [35]
Although admitting that the majority of North American Jesus scholars, liberal and conservative, consider “secret” Mark to be a real gospel, Akenson was mainly interested in using “the gimcrack false-antiquities of the sort exemplified by Secret Mark” to embarrass Crossan, Koester, and the Jesus Seminar. [36] He did not tell us how this gospel has influenced liberal portraits of the historical Jesus, but that is not surprising since none of his ideological opponents do in fact view LGM 1 and 2 as reliable evidence about Jesus. Koester’s writings on the subject have mostly concentrated on the question of the composition history of the Gospel of Mark. Crossan decided that the whole of LGM 1 was invented to justify Christian baptism. And the Jesus Seminar gave every sentence of LGM 1 and 2 a black vote (meaning “largely or entirely fictive”) except for those that have structural parallels to the raising of Lazarus (LGM 1:4–7), which were voted grey (meaning “possible but unreliable”). It would appear that for the Jesus seminar, longer Mark merely bolstered the credibility of a passage in John that they would not otherwise have considered credible. [37] Most other Jesus researchers do not mention longer Mark, or do little more than reiterate the standard reasons not to make use of it. Smith appears to be the only Jesus scholar to have factored LGM 1 into his reconstruction of the historical Jesus, and even he devoted only twelve lines to this text in his book Jesus the Magician. So it is quite unclear how anyone familiar with New Testament scholarship could think this text played an important part in Jesus research, let alone state that “Secret Mark…cruised into most of the work on the Historical Jesus and upon early Christian texts conducted in the 1980s and 1990s”! [38]
A more plausible figure would be a fraction of one percent. But the notion that liberal Jesus scholars have embarrassed themselves by relying on a bogus text is useful as propaganda; accordingly, Neusner’s contrivance that “the spectacle” of historical Jesus research was “exposed” by its inability to distinguish longer Mark as a forgery is brought to its natural, if illogical, conclusion: [39] the majority of scholars who have not dismissed the Letter to Theodore as a worthless fraud are less rigorous and less competent than the few who have: “The field of the Quest for the Historical Jesus would be considerably clarified if (a) someone would definitively drive a stake into the heart of this particular scholarly vampire and thereafter (b) those scholars who have affirmed the work would publicly recant and then examine how they might recalibrate their own scholarly standards so as to avoid being gulled in the future.” [40] If this sounds like a misguided inquisition against scholars allegedly, but not really, guilty of confounding historical Jesus research through their acceptance of a brief description of Jesus teaching the young man from Gethsemane the same mystery he gave his closest followers (Mark 14:51; 4:11), that would probably not be too far from the truth.
The premise sustaining the most recent comments by Akenson and Neusner is that the Letter to Theodore is an obvious forgery. If that were the case, they should have no problem providing definitive proof, but both avoided that responsibility by describing the document as so obviously fraudulent that proof would be superfluous. Neusner wrote as if he could will the fact of fraud into existence by declaring it forcefully. Akenson held out the hope that someone else will slay the vampire by doing the requisite research. However, in lieu of the anticipated proof, he listed some “obvious flags” of fraud:
(a) the only person ever known to have seen the document in question was Professor Morton Smith; (b) there are no known letters of Clement of Alexandria preserved in their original form. Although some of his theological works survive, the nature and content of Clement’s letters are known only through their being cited in other men’s writings; (c) the text in question was produced not on a first- [sic] or second-century piece of writing material, but in the end leaf of a book made of seventeenth-century paper; (d) this obviated the need for ancient handwriting and no one flinched when the text was adjudged to be that of a mid-eighteenth-century hand. (The hand-writing expert was, not surprisingly, Professor Morton Smith); (e) though, in the actual event, no one but Smith ever saw the document, the inks would, of course, have been eighteenth-century inks, chemicals readily obtainable. [41]
Once again, the most incriminating elements of this presentation of suspicious evidence are the least accurate. Akenson should know that the manuscript remained at Mar Saba and was later moved to Jerusalem, since he quoted from one of the articles containing that information. [42] It is deceptive for him to imply that Smith prevented others from seeing the document. The fact that no other letters of Clement exist apart from second-hand quotations is irrelevant, particularly since a large collection of Clement’s letters once existed in the very monastery in which this manuscript was catalogued. The second-hand quotations come from one writing, Sacra Parallela, which John of Damascus produced when he resided in Mar Saba (716–749). [43] The notion that a mid-eighteenthcentury Greek hand would be easier to imitate than ancient Greek handwriting is illogical. If Akenson wants to challenge the dating of this hand, he needs to do something more than suppress the opinions of the nine experts in Greek handwriting whose views are summarized on the first page of CA; [44] he needs to present contrary assessments by experts in Greek palaeography. As far as I am aware, no one has offered any reasons to dispute Smith’s position on the century of the handwriting. In fact, in 1991, Father Joseph Paramelle, the former director of the Section Grecque at the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes anciens in Paris, offered his opinion that the manuscript looks very authentic and typical of the eighteenth century. [45] Essentially, Akenson’s only valid point is that the manuscript was written in a seventeenth-century book rather than on papyrus or parchment. Of course, considering that Clement’s Stromateis is preserved principally in one eleventh-century manuscript, we would not expect to have a manuscript earlier than the middle ages. But the lateness of our first and only witness to this letter is a legitimate concern.
Fortunately for Akenson, his coup de grâce does not concern the manuscript. The decisive point for him is the observation that the gospel excerpts read like a “gay joke.” He is fully aware that few North American scholars perceive this joke, but in his opinion, the fact that they are not laughing with him does not belie the obviousness of his interpretation. Quite the contrary, “the burlesque of scholars and scholarship…is the basis of the joke.” That is, the real joke is that so many formally trained New Testament and patristic scholars missed such an obvious joke (Akenson is a Professor of History: Irish history). This, indeed, was Smith’s intention: to expose the pretentiousness of “the most powerful figures in the liberal wing of the Quest establishment” with a text that an untrained observer can immediately spot as a fake. [46] Smith’s agenda, in other words, perfectly complemented Akenson’s.
The people who now parade the “secret” gospel as an obvious hoax perpetrated by Smith have had some success convincing non-specialists. But the paucity of so-called “more rigorous scholars who see it as a chimera” remains an awkward incongruity for them, particularly since this shortage includes both New Testament scholars and authorities on Clement. [47] In general, the scholars who most confidently ascribe this letter to Clement are ones noted for their facility in patristic Greek, including several who have published translations of Clement’s writings and articles on his thought. [48] That the inverse would hold true should only be expected. The real scandal here is that such unscholarly substitutes for expertise and analysis reach publication. [Mark's Other Gospel pp. 39 - 48]
