Unsurprisingly, Smith's interpretation has tainted the fragment itself. And dislike of the gospel fragment, and what some people were making of it, turned out to meld easily with dislike of Smith, a professor of ancient history at Columbia University. "He had a great sense of humour," Brown notes, but "some people hated him, and with good reason -- he could be very mean, verbally abusive, to those he thought fools." But that doesn't mean he'd stoop to fraud, Brown insists. "To study Secret Mark I had to study Smith for 10 years. I've never found anything dishonest in him, and I think I would have after that long."
That's not Jacob Neusner's opinion. The world's most published scholar in the humanities, with more than 900 books to his name, the 72-year-old specialist in ancient Judaism teaches at Bard College in New York State. The subject of a recent admiring profile in the New York Times, Neusner is a vigorous -- not to say violent -- polemicist who has been known to conclude letters to opponents with "Drop Dead." When objecting to another scholar's work, Neusner has several times written an entire volume in refutation, with the offender's name in the title -- in 1995 he published Are the Talmuds Interchangeable? Christine Hayes's Blunder.
Neusner used to be a Smith acolyte, and contributed a sycophantic blurb to Smith's book on Secret Mark. But the two men, so alike in temperament, later parted ways -- in 1984, Smith publically denounced his former student for incompetence at an academic gathering held to honour Neusner's work. Smith may not have been alone in his evaluation; as Brown notes, Neusner's publication pace -- a book every 16.7 days over the course of his career -- "does not suggest only good things about his scholarship." But it was Smith who gave the public insult, and after his death, Neusner began to write about his old teacher's "forgery of the century."
All this matters to the tangled history of Secret Mark because of Neusner's enormous influence. Akenson and others derive their opinions about Smith's character from Neusner's account. "I know of six scholars at least who appeal to his personal knowledge of Smith," Brown comments. And so, in Brown's opinion, a kind of folklore grew up, full of demonstrably wrong beliefs about Smith and his discovery: that he never let anyone else examine the manuscript; that he was an expert in forgery; that he forged Secret Mark to discredit Christianity by "proving" Jesus was a homosexual. [ Mark's secret gospel, Maclean's Magazine, May 12, 2005]
For those who aren't familiar with the journal, MacClean's is the Canadian equivalent of Time Magazine.
