What is the Secret Gospel of Mark?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

To be honest, I am not sure that any period of history has generated as many controversies, spectacular discoveries, and alleged forgeries as the history of early Christianity. 

Every time I hear about the Secret Gospel of Mark, I am reminded that almost every generation seems to witness some remarkable new discovery that promises to transform what we know about Christian origins, only for that discovery, sooner or later, to become the subject of intense scholarly dispute. 

My own generation had the infamous Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, a fragment whose implications seemed almost better suited to a Dan Brown novel than to the painstaking work of historical research. 

An earlier generation had the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark, a text whose dramatic appearance raised equally provocative questions about Jesus, the Gospel tradition, and the hidden diversity of early Christianity.

Yet the controversy surrounding the Secret Gospel of Mark isn’t simply another story about a sensational text or an embarrassing scholarly mistake. It’s also a revealing case study in how historians determine whether an ancient document is genuine. 

What kind of evidence can establish that a newly discovered text really comes from antiquity? How much weight should scholars give to language, literary style, handwriting, provenance, and the circumstances of discovery? And what happens when the physical object at the center of the debate is no longer available for examination?

In this article, we’ll first consider what the Secret Gospel of Mark is and what its surviving passages contain. 

We’ll then examine the principal arguments advanced by scholars who regard the text as ancient, before turning to those who believe it is a modern forgery. 

Finally, we’ll explore a third possibility: that the text may indeed be a forgery, but one produced not in modern times, but by an anonymous Christian author centuries ago.

Quick note: If you're interested in early Christian writings that didn't make it into the New Testament, check out New Insights into the New Testament: Apocrypha and Canon.

What Is the Secret Gospel of Mark? Summary of Its Discovery and Content

In his book Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History, Damian Thompson writes:

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Whether or not Thompson is right that we are living in a golden age of bogus history, the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark certainly stirred the waters both within academia and far beyond it. 

Was it a real ancient document, or (to borrow Thompson’s phrase) pseudoscholarship carefully dressed up to look authentic? Before considering that question, however, we first need to understand what was discovered, how it became known, and what the mysterious text actually contained.

The Secret Gospel of Mark first became known to modern scholarship in 1958, when Morton Smith, a recently appointed assistant professor at Columbia University, visited the Greek Orthodox monastery of Mar Saba, located in the Judean wilderness southeast of Jerusalem. 

Smith had previously spent time at the monastery and returned there to examine and catalogue books in its library. 

Near the end of his stay, he came across a 17th-century printed edition of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch. 

On the book’s blank end pages, someone had copied a Greek text in handwriting that appeared to date from the 18th century. Smith photographed the three handwritten pages but did not remove the volume from the monastery. 

The text itself wasn’t a manuscript of a gospel. Rather, it presented itself as a letter written by Clement of Alexandria, an influential Christian scholar who lived around the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century.

The discovery came at a particularly favorable moment. Only a few years earlier, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the collection of early Christian writings found near Nag Hammadi had transformed the study of ancient Judaism and Christianity. 

Against that background, Smith’s find seemed to promise another spectacular window into the religious world of antiquity.

He spent more than a decade transcribing, translating, and studying the text, consulting specialists in Greek, early Christianity, Clement of Alexandria, and ancient handwriting. 

In 1973, he published his conclusions in two books: a lengthy scholarly study, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, and a more accessible account titled The Secret Gospel. 

By then, the printed volume containing the handwritten pages had reportedly been transferred from Mar Saba to the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem.

It was seen and photographed by several people in subsequent years, but its present location is unknown.

Jesus and Homosexuality: The Content of the Secret Gospel of Mark

But what did the document claim? The letter is addressed to an otherwise unknown man named Theodore, who had apparently asked Clement about teachings associated with the Carpocratians, a Christian group regarded as heretical by writers such as Irenaeus and Clement. 

According to the letter, after composing the familiar version of his Gospel in Rome, Mark traveled to Alexandria and produced a second, more “spiritual” edition. 

This expanded gospel was allegedly intended for advanced Christians and contained additional stories designed to lead readers toward deeper knowledge. 

The Carpocratians, however, were said to have obtained a copy and corrupted it by adding false and morally objectionable material. 

Clement therefore advised Theodore to reject their version, even, if necessary, to deny under oath that the Secret Gospel existed. The portions quoted in the letter were supposedly genuine excerpts from Mark’s more spiritual text, whereas the more scandalous Carpocratian additions were to be rejected.

The longest excerpt was said to belong between Mark 10:34 and 10:35.

In it, Jesus arrives in Bethany, where a woman approaches him and pleads for help because her brother has died. Jesus goes with her to the tomb, rolls away the stone, enters, and takes the dead young man by the hand, raising him from death. 

The story unmistakably recalls the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John, although it is narrated in a compressed style resembling the Gospel of Mark. 

After being restored to life, the young man looks at Jesus, loves him, and asks to remain with him. Jesus then leaves the house, but six days later he tells the young man what he must do. 

That evening, the young man comes to Jesus wearing only a linen cloth over his naked body. He remains with Jesus throughout the night, during which Jesus teaches him “the mystery of the kingdom of God.” Afterward, Jesus departs for the other side of the Jordan.

A second, much shorter passage was said to appear within Mark 10:46, where the canonical Gospel states that Jesus and his disciples came to Jericho but immediately continues by describing their departure from the city.

The secret version inserts a reference to the sister of the young man whom Jesus loved, together with Jesus’ mother and Salome. 

Clement also denies that the authentic text contained several sexually suggestive expressions that Theodore had apparently encountered in the Carpocratian version. 

These details (Jesus’ love for the young man, the linen cloth worn over his naked body, the nighttime meeting, and the revelation of a secret mystery) made the text immediately controversial. 

Some readers interpreted the scene as a baptismal or initiatory ritual; others suspected that it contained erotic implications. Yet the surviving passage never explicitly describes a sexual act, and interpretations of the episode have varied considerably.

A discovery of this kind was almost bound to divide scholars. 

Some were impressed by the text’s apparently Clementine language, its familiarity with the Gospel of Mark, and its plausible setting within early Christian debates about secret teachings. Others became convinced that it was a sophisticated modern fabrication, perhaps created by Smith himself. 

Still others have proposed that the letter may indeed be a forgery, but an ancient or medieval one rather than a modern scholarly hoax. 

The best way to approach such a disputed document is therefore not to begin with a verdict, but to examine the arguments advanced on each side. 

We’ll start with the scholars who regarded the discovery as authentic, or at least as preserving a genuinely ancient text from Clement of Alexandria’s period.

The Secret Gospel of Mark: The Case for Its Authenticity

So, what is the evidence in favor of the authenticity of the Secret Gospel of Mark? Some scholars accepted Morton Smith’s discovery, even while rejecting parts of his interpretation. 

Cyril Richardson, for instance, wrote:

Similarly, Scott G. Brown, in his book Mark’s Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith’s Controversial Discovery, concludes:

One of the principal arguments concerned the letter’s language and style. Scholars familiar with Clement of Alexandria observed that the text contained vocabulary, syntax, and theological ideas that resembled Clement’s surviving writings. 

At the same time, as Richardson noted (also cited in Hedrick’s paper), the imitation wasn’t mechanically perfect: the letter contained apparent discrepancies from Clement’s usual style.

Supporters of authenticity regarded these irregularities as significant. A modern forger attempting to imitate Clement might be expected to eliminate obvious inconsistencies and produce an unnaturally flawless pastiche.

A genuine but occasional letter, by contrast, could naturally differ in certain respects from Clement’s more formal theological works.

The circumstances surrounding the manuscript also appeared to support Smith’s account. Charles W. Hedrick, in his article, emphasizes that later witnesses confirmed that the handwritten pages really existed. 

The former librarian of the Jerusalem Patriarchate reported receiving the volume, removing the relevant leaves, and photographing them in color years after Smith’s discovery and publication. 

These later photographs therefore weakened the early suspicion that Smith had simply invented the manuscript. They also revealed matching patterns of discoloration extending from the last printed page of the seventeenth-century volume onto the handwritten leaves. 

According to Hedrick, this made it difficult to imagine that Smith had recently inserted newly prepared pages into the book and staged their discovery at Mar Saba.

Supporters also pointed to features whose significance Smith himself apparently hadn’t recognized. 

The liturgical scholar Thomas Talley later connected the raising of the young man with Alexandrian traditions surrounding Lazarus, baptism, and the period before Easter. 

When Talley described this connection to Smith, Smith reportedly replied that it had never occurred to him to investigate the liturgical evidence. 

Talley regarded that reaction as a reason to doubt the forgery hypothesis: it would be strange for a forger to construct an elaborate liturgical background and then fail to mention one of the most persuasive elements of his own design. 

The argument is not conclusive (it depends partly on Talley’s recollection) but it contributes to the cumulative case that the text contained historical correspondences not consciously planted by Smith.

Scott G. Brown also argues that several features sometimes treated as evidence against authenticity actually fit Clement and Mark more closely than critics have allowed. 

The letter’s instruction that Theodore deny the authenticity of the Carpocratian gospel, for example, has often been said to contradict Clement’s insistence on truthfulness (see below). 

Brown notes, however, that Clement permitted exceptional forms of deception when employed “medicinally” for another person’s benefit; a carefully phrased denial directed against heretics could therefore be consistent with Clement’s moral reasoning rather than evidence of a modern author’s mistake. 

Brown likewise observes that some allegedly artificial details in the gospel excerpts reproduce genuine Markan habits: the ambiguity over whether the young man in the tomb is truly dead resembles Mark’s resurrection stories, while the peculiar explanation that Jesus returned to his house “for he was rich” parallels Mark’s tendency to insert awkward explanatory clauses beginning with “for.” 

In Brown’s view, a forger would consequently have needed to imitate not merely Clement’s vocabulary, but also his patterns of thought, while simultaneously reproducing subtle features of Mark’s narrative technique.

Finally, defenders of authenticity argued that an expanded or alternative version of Mark wouldn’t be inherently implausible in the 2nd century. 

Early Christian texts were transmitted fluidly, and different forms of the same work could circulate simultaneously. 

Canonical Mark itself survives with more than one ending, while the surviving Greek and Coptic versions of the Gospel of Thomas differ from one another. 

Secret Mark’s combination of Markan narrative features with a story resembling the raising of Lazarus in John could likewise reflect a period when gospel traditions were less stable and less sharply divided than they later became. 

None of these observations proves that Clement wrote the letter, much less that Mark composed the Secret Gospel quoted within it. 

They explain, however, why some scholars considered the document historically plausible and resisted dismissing it as a modern fabrication.

Yet the same evidence that persuaded some scholars left others deeply suspicious. 

We must now turn to the case that the Letter to Theodore and its Secret Gospel weren’t ancient discoveries at all, but an extraordinarily sophisticated modern forgery: possibly created by Morton Smith himself.

Is the Secret Gospel of Mark a Modern Forgery?

In the aftermath of the publication of the Secret Gospel of Mark, Joseph Fitzmyer (cited by Hedricks) wrote:

These were harsh words from a respected New Testament scholar. But was Fitzmyer merely reacting to Smith’s provocative interpretation, or was there genuine evidence that the document itself was a modern fabrication? 

Some critics went much further than Fitzmyer, arguing not only that the Letter to Theodore was forged, but that Morton Smith himself was the person behind it.

The most elaborate version of this argument was presented by Stephen Carlson in his book The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark.

Carlson began with the physical manuscript, or, more precisely, with the photographs of it, since the pages themselves were no longer available for examination. Smith had reported that several experts dated the handwriting to approximately the middle of the 18th century. 

Carlson, however, emphasized that these consultations were largely informal and oral, that no detailed written reports survived, and that the specialists may not have examined the script specifically for signs of imitation.

He argued that the handwriting contained precisely such signs: hesitant strokes, blunt line endings, unnatural pen lifts, retouched letters, inconsistencies in the forms of individual characters, and what forensic document examiners call a “forger’s tremor.”

In Carlson’s reconstruction, the script only looked like rapid 18th-century cursive. In reality, it had been drawn slowly and deliberately by someone imitating an older style.

Carlson also stressed the manuscript’s uncertain provenance. No independent evidence places either the handwritten text or the Voss volume (a 1646 printed edition of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch) at Mar Saba before 1958.

The book itself wasn’t an ancient codex but a printed edition from 1646, copies of which remained obtainable on the antiquarian market. A modern forger would therefore not have needed to manufacture ancient parchment or reproduce a 1st-century hand; he would only have needed an old printed book with blank pages and sufficient knowledge of early modern Greek handwriting.

Carlson further observed that the Voss edition was unusual among the printed books catalogued at Mar Saba: it had been published in Amsterdam rather than Venice, contained Latin, dealt with patristic scholarship rather than liturgy or devotion, and emerged from a Western Protestant-Catholic controversy largely irrelevant to the monks of Mar Saba. 

None of this proves that the volume was planted, but Carlson regarded the cumulative pattern as suspicious.

The strongest and most controversial part of Carlson’s case attempted to connect the manuscript directly with Smith. 

He compared the handwriting of the Letter to Theodore with another hand photographed by Smith at Mar Saba and attributed by him to a 20th-century individual called “M. Madiotes.” 

Carlson interpreted the name as a pseudonym derived from a Greek root associated with baldness or swindling: an alleged joke pointing toward the balding Morton Smith.

He also compared distinctive forms of the Greek letters lambda, tau, and theta in the manuscript with samples of Smith’s own Greek handwriting and argued that they shared several unusual characteristics. 

Carlson supplemented this paleographical argument with literary evidence. 

Secret Mark’s climactic statement that the young man “remained with” Jesus that night, he suggested, evokes the modern English euphemism “spent the night with,” while the passage’s emphasis on nakedness, male love, and the rejection of women resonates more readily with 20th-century concepts of gay identity than with ancient categories of sexuality. 

He also noted that Smith’s pre-1958 publications had already connected Mark 4:11, secret teaching, forbidden sexual relations, and Clement of Alexandria: the same constellation of themes found in the newly discovered text.

Concluding his analysis, Carlson writes:

Carlson’s conclusion is unequivocal: the gospel fragments, the Clementine letter, and the manuscript that preserved them all originated in the 20th century, and the cumulative evidence identifies Smith as their creator.

The Secret Gospel of Mark: Modern Forgery, But Not Done By Smith?

Not every scholar who considers the document suspicious, however, is prepared to accuse Morton Smith of forgery. 

Bart D. Ehrman, responding to Charles Hedrick’s defense of the manuscript, adopted a substantially more cautious position.

Ehrman rejected the claim that the later photographs of the volume had eliminated the possibility of modern fabrication. The fact that the handwritten text appeared on original blank leaves bound into the Voss edition showed only that a forger had not inserted new pages. 

It doesn’t show when someone wrote on those existing pages. 

Ehrman also found Smith’s failure to return to the manuscript difficult to explain. Smith knew that photographs couldn’t disclose many of the physical features used to identify forgery (ink composition, pen strokes, smudging, or the behavior of the ink on the paper). 

Nevertheless, he spent 15 years studying the text without arranging a rigorous examination of the object itself. This isn’t necessarily proof of guilt, but it is a genuine historical problem. And, to be honest, it’s a strange thing that demands explanation. 

Ehrman also drew attention to difficulties within the letter.

For instance, Clement normally understood true gnosis as a deeper interpretation of publicly available Christian writings, not as access to a hidden gospel containing secret instruction. 

Elsewhere, Clement insisted that Christians must not lie, whereas the Letter to Theodore instructs its recipient to deny under oath that the Secret Gospel was written by Mark. 

The document’s vocabulary raised another concern. 

Andrew Criddle, for example, had argued that the letter wasn’t merely Clementine but “more like Clement than Clement ever was”: it contained an unusually high concentration of rare Clementine words, as though an imitator had used a concordance to reproduce Clement’s most distinctive vocabulary while carefully avoiding words unattested in his genuine writings. 

Yet Ehrman stopped short of fully and openly endorsing the modern-forgery thesis. His conclusion was that the evidence remained inconclusive and that the matter couldn’t be settled without recovering the manuscript and scientifically testing its ink.

The debate thus appeared to leave scholars with two sharply opposed alternatives: either the Letter to Theodore preserved genuinely ancient material, or it was an extraordinarily sophisticated 20th-century hoax. 

More recently, however, a third possibility has entered the discussion. One according to which Secret Mark is indeed a forgery, but not a forgery composed by Morton Smith or by anyone else in the modern period.

The Secret Gospel of Mark as Late Antique Forgery: The Smith-Landau Hypothesis

A great deal of ink has been spilled over the Secret Gospel of Mark and Morton Smith’s alleged discovery. 

Most of this scholarship has appeared in English, and it would be impossible here to survey every book and article devoted to the controversy. One recent study, however, deserves special attention because it challenges the basic terms in which the debate has usually been framed. Rather than choosing between an authentic ancient gospel and a 20th-century forgery, it proposes a third possibility.

In 2023, Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau published The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity. 

Their position offers a middle route: the document is neither an authentic first-century Gospel of Mark nor a modern forgery produced by Morton Smith. What, then, is it? 

Smith and Landau argue that both the Letter to Theodore and the gospel passages quoted within it were probably composed in late antiquity by an anonymous Christian author, most likely a monk living in Palestine. 

In their reconstruction, the author falsely wrote in Clement’s name and invented an expanded Gospel of Mark to address concerns within his own monastic environment.

Their first major argument concerns the sources used by the author. Although the letter imitates Clement’s vocabulary and style with considerable skill, Smith and Landau contend that it also draws on Eusebius’ Church History, composed more than a century after Clement’s death. 

The account of Carpocrates using demonic assistance to enslave a presbyter, the description of Mark’s expanded text as a “more spiritual gospel,” and the tradition that Mark traveled from Rome to Alexandria all appear, in their view, to depend on Eusebius.

If this literary dependence is correct, Clement could not have written the letter. Its earliest possible date would therefore move from the late 2nd or early 3rd century to sometime after the composition of Eusebius’ history in the 4th century. 

Smith and Landau then place the text within the world of late antique Palestinian monasticism. 

Stories circulating in that environment frequently combined tombs, miraculous resurrections, linen cloths, naked bodies, and concerns about sexual propriety. Even more important were intense partnerships between male monks, sometimes known as adelphopoiesis, or “brother-making.” 

Such relationships could involve cohabitation, emotional devotion, bodily affection, and spiritual mentorship while still being represented as celibate. 

Against this background, the relationship between Jesus and the young man acquires a particular social function. 

Jesus appears as an older spiritual guide, while the young man becomes a novice who loves him, seeks to remain with him, and receives secret instruction during the night. The story is homoerotic, Smith and Landau argue, but not explicitly sexual. 

It therefore legitimizes intimate male companionship while condemning the more openly sexual interpretation attributed to the Carpocratians.

They conclude:

On this hypothesis, the Secret Gospel probably never existed as a complete, independently circulating gospel. 

The passages quoted in the Letter to Theodore may constitute the whole composition, invented to supply scriptural authority for disputed monastic relationships. The unnamed young man would therefore function as a model for later monks: a younger disciple joined to an older spiritual mentor through an intimate but disciplined Christian bond. 

The text would still be a forgery in the sense that it was falsely attributed to Clement and Mark, but it would be a late antique forgery created within an ecclesiastical controversy, not a modern hoax devised by Morton Smith.

Conclusion

So, what should we think about the Secret Gospel of Mark? Is it authentic, or is it a forgery? Well, if I had to make an educated guess, I would say that the Letter to Theodore is probably not an authentic letter of Clement of Alexandria.

The most serious obstacle is the absence of the physical manuscript itself. I find it difficult to understand why Morton Smith spent more than 15 years studying the text almost entirely from photographs without arranging a direct examination of the document. 

That question demands an answer, because without access to the manuscript, arguments based on handwriting, ink, paper, and physical aging remain necessarily incomplete. As Jean-Daniel Kaestli observes:

Stephen Carlson has also offered several arguments that deserve serious consideration, although they are not all equally persuasive. His observations about the manuscript’s uncertain provenance, the alleged signs of hesitation and retouching in the handwriting, and the possibility that the text imitates Clement and Mark rather than genuinely preserving their work all contribute to the case against authenticity. 

Other arguments, however, are more circumstantial. Carlson’s claim that the clause meaning “he remained with him that night” reflects the 20th-century English euphemism “to spend the night with someone” is ingenious, but not decisive. 

The absence of an exact parallel in surviving Greek literature makes the phrase unusual, yet an unattested expression isn’t automatically an anachronism. Ancient authors could combine familiar words in ways that happen not to survive elsewhere, and the literal Greek remains intelligible without reference to an English sexual euphemism. 

At most, the phrase adds modest weight to a cumulative case for modern composition; by itself, it cannot establish that a modern English idiom was translated into artificial Greek.

At the same time, rejecting Clementine authorship does not necessarily require us to accuse Morton Smith of forgery. 

The hypothesis advanced by Smith and Landau is intriguing and historically possible. Their appeal to the author’s apparent use of Eusebius, the tradition of rewriting Mark, and the social world of intimate male monastic partnerships offers a coherent explanation for several features of the text.

Yet this reconstruction also remains hypothetical. The parallels they identify are suggestive rather than conclusive, and they cannot by themselves tell us exactly when, where, or by whom the document was composed.

In the end, the Secret Gospel of Mark remains suspended between competing probabilities. Without the physical manuscript, a scientific analysis of the ink, and a thorough examination of the paper and handwriting, no decisive verdict is possible. 

My own inclination is that the document is pseudepigraphic rather than genuinely Clementine, but whether it originated in the 20th century or in late antiquity remains an open question. 

Until the manuscript is recovered, the Secret Gospel of Mark will continue to be less a solved historical puzzle than a revealing example of how difficult it can be to distinguish an ancient voice from a skillful imitation.