Peter Jeffery, The
Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and
Madness in a Biblical Forgery. Yale University Press, 2007.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
Stephen
C. Carlson’s
Gospel Hoax,
lately reviewed in these pages, adequately demonstrated the
spurious character of Morton Smith’s pet pseudepigraphon the Secret
Gospel of Mark. Carlson’s forensic approach requires no supplementation.
But then again it is nice to have two or three witnesses to establish a
testimony. And musicologist/liturgiologist Peter Jeffery has “sung” like
Joe Valachi. Jeffery shows that both the Secret Gospel/Epistle of
Clement text and Smith’s scholarly discussion of it are riddled with
cultural anachronisms, which however do more than show us the fallacy of
the historical connection the text claims: it opens the way for
situating the project in the era from which it actually stemmed. In this
Jeffery fires the same double-barreled shot as the Shroud debunkers. Joe
Nickell’s researches show not only that the Turin Shroud is not a relic
of the first century CE, but that it is rather a product of the 14th—precisely
matching the date of the Shroud’s unheeded forger! Even so, Jeffery
shows that the liturgical background which the Clement letter
presupposes for the church of Alexandria does not square with what we
know about early Church liturgy there or anywhere else. Instead, it
seems to reflect Episcopalian reconstructions of early baptism popular
among Prayer Book reformists in the 1950—just the time Episcopalian
Smith was working on the Secret Gospel. Likewise, the hints of
homosexual practice in the Secret Gospel (the implied relationship
between Jesus and the young man, or Quazarus, as I like to call
him) does not fit the options available for homosexual tutelage familiar
for the ancient world, but appears to reflect that of the age and
culture when Smith was writing. (Among the ancients, as far as we know,
the older partner initiated the affair, whereas the Secret Gospel seems
to have the young man cry out to Jesus.) In addition, Smith’s earlier
and later accounts of his two stays at the Mar Saba monastery seem to
have been confused. When he first visited, he was, to hear him tell it,
an enthusiastic seminarian eager to participate in the liturgy. By his
second sojourn there he had lost his faith. Yet he slips and remarks how
his attendance at the services the first time around was merely
aesthetic, since he did not share the monks’ faith. The confusion
matters because it is only in the later memoir that he claims to have
experienced the mind-altering character of the holy service, and that it
inspired his reconstruction of the Sitz-im-Leben of Secret Mark
as part of a mystery rite of ecstatic ascension. But he was ostensibly
no longer open to such experiences on the visit in which the liturgy
would have abetted his interpretation of the Secret Gospel. It looks
like he was faking his later recollection of pious transport.
Jeffery examines a number
of Smith’s writings that would not at first seem to bear on the Secret
Mark controversy. He shows how Smith seems to have embraced an extreme
version of the Anglo-Catholic “Branch theory” whereby Anglicanism,
Orthodoxy, and Catholicism, by token of the apostolic succession of
bishops, were all really Catholic. This allowed him to embrace extreme
versions of Catholic moralism out of step with contemporary Catholic
pastoral/penitential theory, especially with regard to homosexual
practice. Smith, it seems, was constructing a straw-man of a merciless
Christian/Catholic Church, virtually synonymous with Christianity per
se, which exacted such ascetical discipleship that it forced an
alternative between eternal bliss in heaven and relentless cross-bearing
on earth. Setting up the alternatives in such a manner made it easy to
decide between them. All this was a running start for him to abandon
Christian faith and to seek revenge upon it in oblique, scholarly ways.
And though Jeffery is discreet, it is plainly implied that it was the
discovery of homosexuality and its overwhelming ecstasies that made
Smith turn the corner and, in the end, to try to “correct” the wrong
turn Christian moral theology had long ago made. What if the authentic
teaching of Jesus had been preserved best by libertine Gnostics? What if
the very essence of Christian initiation were actually homosexual
encounter with one’s Lord? “Oh, he walks with me and he talks with me
and he tells me I am his own, And the joy we share as we tarry there no
other has ever known.” (Indeed one wonders why Smith never thought of
capitalizing on the implicit homoeroticism of “real men” who “love
Jesus” in the teariest, gushiest, most sentimental manner imaginable.)
As Jeffery wisely notes, it
was this concern to claim the historical Jesus for homosexuality that
forced Smith to ignore more promising, more modest scholarly approaches,
e.g., arguing merely for a Gnostic provenance for his text. No, that
wouldn’t have been good enough. It had to be Jesus himself. And this
desire necessitated Smith’s grand hypothesis of early Christianity’s
origin as a libertine Gnostic-hekhaloth cult. Instead of documenting
these claims, Smith merely proof-texted them. All he was finally able to
do was to show that a number of the required dots had once existed
(visionary ascents, libertinisms, baptismal rites, etc.), but he could
find nothing to support the particular way in which he connected them.
Why embark upon such a project, a whole new etiology for the Christian
religion, based on one small fragment? Clearly it was to serve a larger
polemical agenda. You don’t need Smith’s reconstruction in order to
understand the text; you only need it if you are trying to bulldoze a
path amid the scattered evidence to a desired conclusion: this was the
historical Jesus.
Jeffery shows how detail
after detail of the Clement letter and the Secret Gospel make the best,
natural sense when viewed in light of a particular English University
homosexual culture (“Uranianism,” overlapping the Cambridge Apostles)
that read its own sexuality back into Plato and the Classics, and of
other nineteenth-twentieth century ecclesiastical conflicts interesting
to Smith. For instance, Smith refers to a long debate over a passage in
Cardinal Newman where some took him to mean it was permissible to tell
untruths for the benefit of the unenlightened, appealing in the process
to Clement of Alexandria. It is no surprise, then, that Smith
“discovers” a letter from Clement, of all people, in which he offers
precisely such advice: one must deny under oath any knowledge of Secret
Mark and its authorship.
Uranianism despised women,
and so Smith’s Jesus rebuffs the women who approach him. One of these is
Salome, whom we are at first to identify with the Gospel character, one
of Jesus’ followers. But Smith was really hinting of Salome, the
daughter of Herodias, whose female arts led to the decapitation of the
Baptist. Oscar Wilde had her dance the dance of the seven veils, and
what do you know? Clement says the Markan Secret is to be hidden behind
seven veils. Uranian culture despised Christian moralists as stinking
hypocrites for condemning a higher, purer sexuality between men. And
this is how the Clement letter depicts Clement and his lying church,
which not only prevaricates about possessing the Secret Gospel but
harrumphs about the sexual liberation it preaches. Jeffery shows how we
are to understand Smith’s Clement as an “unreliable narrator.” We are to
see him as the villain, his Carpocratian targets as the heroes. Indeed,
I would take a step farther in Jeffery’s direction: I think Smith,
having established his Clement as a priestcraftian liar, intends us to
discount Clement’s protests that the juiciest portions of Secret Mark
are Carpocratian interpolations. The implication (used as a distancing
device) is that Theodore is himself not yet ready for the fullest
version of the truth, including homosexual initiation, and so Clement
lies to him about the true extent of Secret Mark’s arcana. Smith intends
that Clement shared the same gay text with the Carpocratians, but for
the moment he must hide the fact behind the veneer of churchly faith,
which is all Theodore has yet attained to.
When we learn from Jeffery
that Wilde and others of the English Uranians often composed scripture
pastiches to satirize the New Testament, the case is closed. Smith is
now seen to have followed the same practice. Some had even argued that
Jesus was the gay lover of the Beloved Disciple and that the naked man
fleeing Gethsemane was his rival for Jesus’ affections. This is the
secret of the Secret Gospel.
Well, one must congratulate
Morton Smith on attaining his goal, at least in large measure. He did
manage to become one of the New Testament writers, albeit like one born
out of season. For from now on, his Secret Mark will ever hold a place
on the margin of the canon, a tenuous member of Eusebius’ fourth
scripture category: heretical forgeries wrongly accepted as apostolic by
some.