The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Instead, this Gospel assumes that some humans contain the divine spark that has been separated from the realm of God and entrapped in this impoverished world of matter, and that it needs to be delivered by learning the secret teachings from above, which Jesus himself brings. It is by learning the truth of this world and, especially, of one's one divine character, that one can escape this bodily prison and return to the realm of light whence one came, the Kingdom of God that transcends this material world and all that is in it.

  A remarkable document, an ancient forgery condemned as heretical by early proto-orthodox Christians and lost or destroyed, until the remarkable discovery of the Gnostic library in Upper Egypt, near Nag Hammadi, preserved now for us as the secret sayings of Jesus, which, if rightly understood, can bring eternal life.

  Chapter Four: The Forgery of an Ancient Discovery? Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark

  Undoubtedly the best known forgeries of recent memory are the infamous Hitler Diaries. Headline news in April 1983, both before and after their exposure as fabrications, the Hitler Diaries were significant for showing that the art of forgery is still alive and well among us, that some people will go to extraordinary lengths to perpetrate a fraud, and that even experts can be fooled. In this case there is little doubt about the motivation. The West German swindler who wrote the diaries, Konrad Kujau, was paid $4.8 million for his sixty volumes of work, which he produced over the course of three years. Eventually convicted of the fraud and sentenced to prison, he emerged penniless but not broken; he went into the business of producing "genuine forgeries" of great masterpiece painters Monet, Rembrandt, and van Gogh, signing them with both his and their names, and selling them as curiosities for tidy sums. Eventually, in what appeared for a time to be a never-ending story, a counterfeit submarket was established in which Kujau imitators sold fakes of his forged paintings. To cap it all off, Kujau wrote an autobiographical account of his exploits which was to appear in 1998; instead, a different book was published in his name, entitled Die Originalitdt der Fdlschung ("The Originality of Forgery"). Somewhat appropriately, he claimed, evidently truthfully, not to have written a word of it. Kujau was most famous, however, for the fraud he perpetrated on the public in the Hitler Diaries, sold to the German magazine Stem for serial publication. English publication rights were sold to the Sunday Times and Newsweek magazine. There was, naturally, some concern over the authenticity of these amazing documents, which allegedly were Adolf Hitler's own handwritten diaries kept from June 1932 all the way up to the end of his life, April 1945. Kujau claimed that the diaries had been pulled from a downed German plane trying to escape Berlin in 1945 and had remained in East Germany until smuggled out by his brother, an officer in the East German army. In the early days of the "discovery," some suspected an East German or neo-Nazi plot, since the diaries appeared to put a human face on the Furhrer and to exonerate him of any direct involvement with the Final Solution. But on the face of it, the diaries looked authentic. They were, in fact, verified by a famous British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of The Last Days of Hitler. It was on Trevor-Roper's recommendation that the Times had agreed to pay out an enormous sum for publication rights.

  But the day before the first installment was to appear, Trevor-Roper expressed some second thoughts. He had seen the diaries only briefly under tight security, and believed, a bit late in the day, that further corroboration was needed. Experts were called in. And the diaries were shown beyond any doubt to be forged. Kujau later explained how he had done them: pouring tea on the pages and striking them on his table to make them look old and worn, using a Gothic style script for authenticity, borrowing heavily from published biographies for the nuts and bolts of Hitler's daily life, and adding mundane and at times insipid details of his thoughts and feelings to round it all out. As it turns out, the political agenda is not what drove the deceit. Kujau just wanted the money.

  Other forgeries have been perpetrated in modern times, of direct relevance to our current study of early Christian apocrypha. One might think that in our day and age, no one would be so deceitful as to pawn off any firsthand accounts of Jesus as authentic. But nothing could be further from the truth. Strange Gospels appear regularly, if you know where to look for them. Often these record incidents from the "lost years" of Jesus, for example, accounts of Jesus as a child or a young man prior to his public ministry, a genre that goes all the way back to the second century. These accounts sometimes describe Jesus' trips to India to learn the wisdom of the Brahmins (how else would he be so wise?) or his exploits in the wilderness, joining up with Jewish monks to learn the ways of holiness.

  These new Gospels do not need to concern us overly much here; most of them are as artificial as one can imagine and are useful chiefly in revealing the gullibility even of modern readers. They tend to be the stuff of supermarket tabloids and are valuable in showing that there are still forgers in our midst who have no qualms about fabricating complete lies, even about their own religion, in order to make a splash and possibly get across their point of view. Or, at least, to earn some royalties.

  But what about serious forgery by trained academics, experts in ancient languages and history? Does such a thing ever occur in the modern world? Do scholars ever forge documents for their own ends, whatever those ends may be?

  The answer here again is quite unambiguous, for it occasionally does happen and the forgers themselves are occasionally detected. It tends to be harder to pin forgery on a real scholar than on a creative but unskilled layperson: No one attempts the deed without feeling reasonably good about his or her chances of pulling it off, and given sufficient scholarly ingenuity, it is indeed sometimes possible to stay a step ahead of the skeptics. But not always.

  An amusing instance involves an article published in a highly respected scholarly journal in 1950. The article was entitled, somewhat ironically, "An Amusing Agraphon." The term agraphon literally means "unwritten," but it is a technical term used by New Testament scholars to refer to a saying of Jesus that is recorded in some ancient source other than the canonical Gospels. There are a large number of such sayings, for example, in the noncanonical Gospels (as we are seeing) and other places. In Acts, Paul quotes Jesus as saying, "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35). Jesus may well have said so, but the saying is not found in the canonical Gospel accounts of his teachings, and so it is an agraphon.

  The "amusing agraphon" was allegedly found in a manuscript that contained a set of sermons on the Gospel of Matthew. The author of the article was a respected professor of classics at Princeton University, Paul Coleman-Norton, who indicated that in 1943, while with the U.S. armed forces in the town of Fedhala, in French Morocco, he was visiting a Muslim mosque and was shown there a peculiar thick tome filled, as one might expect in that setting, with Arabic writings. But inserted among its leaves was a single parchment page containing a Greek text, a fragmentary copy of a Greek translation of a set of originally Latin homilies on Matthew chapters 1-13 and 19-25. Given the situation—war time in French Morocco—and the exigencies of the moment, he was not able to photograph the page, but he was allowed to make a careful transcription of it. Later, when Coleman-Norton was able to study the text at greater leisure, he found that it contained a striking and previously unknown agraphon.

  In Matt. 24:51, after Jesus' famous warning about the one who will be "cast into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth," the manuscript indicated that Jesus' conversation continued. One of the disciples, puzzled by Jesus' statement, asked a question that may have occurred to others over the years: "But Rabbi, how can this happen for those who have no teeth?" Whereupon Jesus is said to have replied: "Oh you of little faith! Do not be troubled. If some have no teeth, then teeth will be provided."

  It is a terrific little agraphon, almost too good to be true. And in fact, it was too good to be true. My own professor in graduate school, Bruce Metzger, had been a student of Coleman-Norton in the classics departm
ent at Princeton before the war. As Metzger himself tells it, his revered Latin professor used to regale his class (in the 1930s) with the witticism that dentures would be provided in the afterlife for all those who were toothless, enabling them to weep and gnash their teeth.

  No one else has ever seen the ancient page of Greek text in French Morocco that allegedly contained the verse. Metzger concludes—and everyone appears to agree with him—that Coleman-Norton simply made the story up and published it, with an erudite philological analysis, in the respected Catholic Biblical Quarterly.

  Why? Possibly because he thought it would be a good joke to play on his fellow scholars and possibly to see if he could get away with it. And he nearly did/

  I have begun this chapter with these accounts of modern forgery not because I think that the text I want to discuss here is the same thing—a forgery by a modern scholar intent on deceiving the academic world—but because scholars in increasing numbers have begun to suspect that it is. As far as I can tell, the jury is still out. The person at the center of the controversy is no longer living to answer the charges—one of the reasons, no doubt, they have started to proliferate. This was one of the truly brilliant scholars of ancient Christianity in the late twentieth century: massively erudite, enormously well-read, and, to put it bluntly, an intellectual cut above most of the academics he had to contend with. And he knew it. Known for his rapier wit, his general unwillingness to suffer fools gladly, and an occasional mean streak, Morton Smith was not someone to cross swords with.

  Morton Smith spent the bulk of his career as professor of ancient history at Columbia University. His learned scholarly contributions covered many fields: Greek and Latin classics, New Testament, Patristics, second-temple Judaism, rabbinics. Few could match his range or depth. But he is probably best known for a remarkable discovery made relatively early in his distinguished career: the discovery of a previously unknown letter by Clement of Alexandria, a famous proto-orthodox church father of the early third century, many of whose other writings we still possess. In this newly discovered letter, Clement indicates that the church in Alexandria had several versions of the Gospel according to Mark. One was for regular Christians, and another was for the spiritually advanced. But this one for the spiritually advanced had been pilfered by a group of heretics, who corrupted its teachings to make it conform with their own lawless and licentious religious practices. Clement writes this letter to explain the situation and to indicate what the second version of Mark's Gospel (for the spiritually elite) contained. In doing so, he quotes two of the passages from this other version, passages not known from the New Testament. If authentic, this letter would raise significant questions for the study of the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. It would make us rethink our interpretations of the earliest surviving accounts of Jesus. It would drive us to reconsider our reconstruction of the historical Jesus. It would be one of the most significant discoveries of the twentieth century. If it were authentic.

  The Discovery

  We need to begin with the tale of the discovery, as recounted by Morton Smith in his sundry publications on the Secret Gospel of Mark, especially the two books published fifteen years after the discovery—one for a general audience, a beautifully written piece that reads like a detective novel, and one for scholars, a detailed linguistic and philological analysis of the text and its significance.

  In 1941, as a twenty-six-year-old graduate student, Smith had gone to the Holy Land on a traveling fellowship from Harvard Divinity School. Unfortunately, the Mediterranean was closed by the war, and he was stuck in Jerusalem. While there he became acquainted with a leader of the Greek Orthodox Church, who invited him to services at the famous Church of the Holy Sepulchre and, eventually, to visit the famous Orthodox monastery of Mar Saba, some twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem. Mar Saba was established in the fifth century of the Christian era and had been the scene of ongoing monastic activity virtually nonstop ever since.

  While Smith was there on his visit, he absorbed the fascinating worship life of the monks, who devoted their lives to the adoration of God, beginning their communal daily services of worship six hours before sunrise. During the day he was shown around the place. He saw, among other things, the monastery libraries, not much used by the monks, who had matters other than study on their minds. After two months, Smith returned to Jerusalem and his work, writing a doctoral dissertation in modern Hebrew, later translated into English as Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels, a work of real erudition.

  When the war ended, Smith returned to Harvard, and there did a second Ph.D. on ancient Palestine. During that time, he became interested in Greek manuscripts, their discovery and decipherment, working under a well-known scholar of classics. Eventually he landed a teaching position, then another, and eventually became professor of ancient history at Columbia.

  In 1958, Smith was awarded a sabbatical and decided to return to Mar Saba, now not as a young graduate student but as an established scholar. His interests had evolved over the years; now he was far less intrigued by the monastic patterns of worship and far more interested in the monastic library. Everyone connected with the monastery knew that its literary treasures had been removed long ago to the library of the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem. But Smith recalled that the monastic library was a disordered shambles and that its collection had never even been cataloged. He decided to spend his sabbatical making a catalog, partially in hopes of finding something of significance among either the ancient printed editions or the few manuscripts (i.e., handwritten documents) still there.

  He worked daily, going through a few volumes at a time. It is not easy producing a catalog like this; the books are in Greek and Latin, some are missing their covers and title pages, and it is only by reading around in them a bit that one can learn what they are. But Smith was unusually gifted in languages and was able to make progress, one volume at a time, determining what each book was and preparing cards for a full catalog. And he found some interesting and valuable items, for example, fragments of a fifteenth-century manuscript of an otherwise lost work of the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, fragments that had been used to strengthen the binding of an eighteenth-century prayer book. Nothing that he found, however, prepared him for what was to become the major discovery of his life and arguably one of the most significant finds of the twentieth century.

  Leafing through a volume that was missing its cover and title page, but which he recognized as an early edition of the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, a proto-orthodox bishop of the early second century, Smith found, scrawled on the blank pages at the end, a handwritten copy of a letter. It was in Greek, in what appeared to be an eighteenth-century style of handwriting. The handwritten text began with the words, "From the letters of the most holy Clement, the author of the Stromateis. To Theodore ..."

  After deciphering that much, Smith realized he was on to something. Scholars of ancient Christianity know a great deal about "Clement, author of the Stromateis." This is Clement of Alexandria, a famous theologian and ethicist who lived and wrote around 200 ce. A number of his writings still survive, including a book of ethical instructions concerning how Christians should live their daily lives and a book that is called the Stromateis, which means something like "the miscellanies," a collection of somewhat random theological and moral reflections. Smith already knew that among all the writings of Clement that survive, none is a personal correspondence, a letter. This, then, was a new discovery of a lost document from early Christianity. How often does that happen? For most scholars, never.

  On the spot, Smith decided to photograph the three pages that contained the handwritten copy of Clement's letter, but chose to hold off translating the entire text until later, reasoning that if some such treasure had turned up, there might be more where that came from; given his limited time, he did not want to miss a thing. Using a handheld camera, he took three sets of photos, just to be sure. And then he went about his business hunting for other significant finds
and cataloging the results.

  Nothing else of comparable significance turned up. And Smith did not realize the full significance of this handwritten letter until later, when he translated it and saw what it actually contained. The letter is addressed to an otherwise unknown person named Theodore, written in response to some of his queries about a particularly notorious sect of early Christians known as the Carpocratians, named after the founder of their sect, Carpocrates.

  We know about Carpocrates and his followers from the other writings of Clement and from those of his older contemporary, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, and some years later, Hippolytus of Rome. The Carpocratians were particularly vilified by such proto-orthodox authors because they were believed to engage in wild licentious activities as part of their liturgical services of worship, which were reputed to be nothing short of sexual orgies conducted under the guise of religion. In one place Clement indicates that the Carpocratians had invented a theology to justify their lecherous activities, proclaiming that since God had made all things, all things were to be held in common among God's people. Thus no one was to own any property or to keep anything to himself or herself. This included one's spouse. To celebrate the sovereignty of God over all things, therefore, the Carpocratians urged a kind of liturgical spouse-swapping, in which each person would have sex with someone else's spouse as part of the worship service (Miscellanies 3.2).

  Irenaeus also indicates that the Carpocratians taught a peculiar doctrine of reincarnation, which said that the soul must be progressively trapped in human bodies until it had experienced everything that a body could experience, after which it could be released. The way to ensure a quick release, then, was to allow the body to engage in every kind of profligate activity. And so, on religious grounds, claims Irenaeus, the Carpocratians urged every bodily experience imaginable, including every sexual experience imaginable, all as part of their plan of salvation (see Against Heresies 1.25). The Carpocratians, in short, were not looked upon as a moral lot.