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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  And that is the Christian sect Clement takes on in this letter. He begins by congratulating Theodore, who was evidently some kind of church leader, for "silencing the unspeakable teachings of the Carpocratians." He goes on to indicate that they are the heretics prophesied in Scripture, dwellers in darkness, filled with falsity, slaves of their own servile desires. He then notes that the Carpocratians claim sacred authority for their teachings in the Gospel of Mark, but that they have falsified some of what Mark said and misinterpreted other things. Clement proceeds, then, to clarify some important aspects of Mark's Gospel and to show how the Carpocratians had falsified it.

  Clement indicates that Mark wrote an account of Jesus' public ministry based on his acquaintance with the apostle Peter in Rome; in his Gospel, however, Mark did not divulge the secret teachings of Jesus to his disciples. But after Peter was martyred, Mark moved to Alexandria and there composed a second "more spiritual Gospel" for those who were more spiritually advanced. Even though he still did not divulge the greatest secrets of Jesus' teachings, he did add stories to his Gospel to assist the Christian elite in progressing in their knowledge of the truth.

  After Mark died, Carpocrates managed to persuade an elder of the church in Alexandria to provide him with a copy of this Secret Gospel, which he interpreted according to his own nefarious doctrines and, what is worse, modified by adding some of his own teachings to it. According to this letter, in other words, there were three versions of Mark's Gospel available in Alexandria: the original Mark (presumably the Mark we are familiar with in the canon); a Secret Mark, which he issued for the spiritually elite; and a Carpocratian Mark, filled with the false teachings of the licentious heretic.

  And now comes the most significant part. Clement goes on to quote two passages from Mark's second, secret edition. Here, presumably, we have access to two very ancient accounts of Jesus, known from no other source, until this lost letter reappeared. The first passage, Clement indicates, occurs immediately after what is now Mark 10:34, and reads as follows:

  They came to Bethany, and a woman was there whose brother had died. She came and prostrated herself before Jesus, saying to him, "Son of David, have mercy on me." But his disciples rebuked her. Jesus became angry and went off with her to the garden where the tomb was.

  Immediately a loud voice was heard from the tomb. Jesus approached and rolled the stone away from the entrance to the tomb. Immediately he went in where the young man was, stretched out his hand, and raised him by seizing his hand.

  The young man looked at him intently and loved him; and he began pleading with him that he might be with him. When they came out of the tomb they went to the young man's house, for he was wealthy.

  And after six days Jesus gave him a command. And when it was evening the young man came to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. He stayed with him that night, for Jesus was teaching him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. When he got up from there, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.

  It is this newly recovered story which has caused the greatest stir in connection with Smith's discovery. For even though it is similar to stories in the canonical Gospels, such as the raising of Lazarus in John 11 and the story of the rich young man in Mark 10, there are significant differences. And some of the differences, especially near the end, have appeared to some interpreters, notably Smith himself, to have clear homoerotic overtones. Jesus becomes acquainted with a young man who loves him and who comes to him wearing nothing but a linen cloth over his naked body. Jesus then spends the night with him, teaching him about the mystery of the Kingdom. What is that all about?

  Before discussing Smith's own interpretation, which is what led to the initial furor over the discovery, we should consider what else Clement says about the text. He next quotes several words that Theodore had asked about, words that clearly advance the homoerotic hints already noticed. But Clement insists strongly these were not to be found in the Secret Gospel itself but were, therefore, a Carpocratian corruption. The words were: "Naked man with naked man."

  After all that, the final passage quoted from the Secret Gospel comes as a bit of an anticlimax. Clement indicates that after Mark 10:46 came another addition, which simply said, "And the sister of the young man Jesus loved was there, along with his mother and Salome. And Jesus did not receive them."

  The letter goes on to say that the other passages Theodore had asked about (but which are not cited) are falsifications of the text. It concludes, "Now the true interpretation and that which is in accordance with the true philosophy" And here the text breaks off. We do not know what Clement said next.

  Authenticating and Interpreting the Letter

  Morton Smith devoted much of his research for the next fifteen years to studying this find. Roughly speaking, the work involved establishing the authenticity of the letter and determining the meaning of the passages quoted from the Secret Gospel. In 1973, Smith published the results of his labors in two books, one a popular account for general audiences, full of interesting anecdotes and still worth reading, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark, the other an erudite report on his investigations for scholars in the field, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, an amazing book of scholarship but inaccessible for the most part to those who do not have the requisite ancient languages and extensive expertise in the field of Christian antiquity.

  With respect to the authentication of the letter, there were, and still are, significant questions to be addressed: Was the letter actually written into the blank pages of this book by a scribe in the eighteenth century? If so, did he have a fragmentary copy of a letter of Clement at his disposal? Was this letter written by Clement, or could it have been forged? If it was written by Clement, did Clement actually know of two, or three, versions of Mark in his Alexandrian community? If he did, was he correct in thinking that both canonical Mark and Secret Mark came from the same author? And if he was correct that they did, did he get the sequence correct? That is to say, was Clement right that Secret Mark was an expansion of canonical Mark? Or is it possible that what Clement thought of as Secret Mark was in fact the original version of Mark, and that the stories in question came to be edited out by scribes who did not like their implications (possibly their homoerotic overtones?), thereby creating the Mark that we have in the New Testament?

  Such questions had to be answered even before Smith could move on to interpret the passages of Secret Mark that Clement quotes. The first thing to establish was that an eighteenth-century scribe had written the letter on the blank pages of the book. The book itself, Smith later discovered, was itself a rare volume. Some additional research showed that this was the edition of the letters of Ignatius produced by the seventeenth-century Amsterdam printer Isaac Voss. Ignatius was a famous proto-orthodox bishop of Antioch, Syria, who died soon after most of the books of the New Testament had been written. He is an intriguing person himself: The writings we have from his hand are all letters that he dashed off in haste as he was being taken under armed guard to Rome, where he was to be martyred by being thrown to the wild beasts in the arena. Voss produced this particular edition of Ignatius's letters in 1646, and a significant edition it is. Throughout the Middle Ages there were thirteen or more letters circulating in the name of Ignatius, including one allegedly written to none other than Jesus' mother, the Virgin Mary. In the early seventeenth century, scholars had come to suspect that some, or all, of these letters were in fact forgeries. The debates were heated because the letters advocated the practice of having one bishop over each church, and as Puritans and Anglicans in England were thrashing over the question of the theological legitimacy of the office of bishop in the Church of England, Ignatius's correspondence was brought into play, by Anglicans, in order to show that there had always been bishops in the churches, from the beginning. One of the most significant participants in these exchanges was the young John Milton, years before he began work on Paradise Lost. An ardent Puritan
, Milton insisted that the Ignatian letters were in fact forged. The world of scholarship turned against him, as it was eventually shown beyond reasonable doubt that whereas some of the letters written in Ignatius's name were forged, not all of them were. Some were authentic."

  The 1646 edition by Isaac Voss was the first to print just the authentic letters in their original Greek, none of the forgeries. It was in a copy of this book that Smith found the letter from Clement. Obviously the letter could not have been copied into the back of the book before the book itself was produced; as a result, this copy of the letter could date to no earlier than the end of the seventeenth century. But how could a more precise date be determined?

  Smith could not show palaeographers—experts in ancient handwriting— the book itself: It was still in the library of Mar Saba. But he did have the photographs. And so he showed them to a number of experts, most of whom agreed that the handwriting style did in fact appear to be that of an eighteenth-century hand. There was some disagreement—some thought the hand was late seventeenth century; some thought early nineteenth; some thought there were some strange letter formations, as if the scribe had been influenced by western styles of writing. But for the most part there was fair agreement: It was a Greek handwriting style of around 1750, plus or minus fifty years. The scribe of the letter, it was widely thought, was a scholar who produced his text in a hurry.

  The next question was whether this copyist actually reproduced a genuine letter of Clement of Alexandria. There is no difficulty believing that a scribe of the eighteenth century might have had a fragmentary copy of an ancient letter at his disposal—possibly a loose sheet in the ancient library, known for its famous ancient texts—and that rather than simply discard it, he decided to preserve its contents by copying it onto the only spare pages to be found, those in the blank pages at the back of a book at hand. But how could one establish that the letter was from Clement rather than, say, from a forger pretending to be Clement hundreds of years later (who fooled, then, the eighteenth-century scribe who copied the letter)? The first step Smith took in answering the question was to show the letter to scholars who were experts in Clement, who had spent their lives studying Clement, who would recognize a new work by Clement simply on the basis of its subject matter and writing style. When he did so, the majority of the experts agreed, this looked very much like something Clement would write. If someone had forged it, she or he had done highly credible work.

  But how could one know for sure? The only way to decide is by making a careful point-by-point comparison of the vocabulary, writing style, modes of expression, and ideas found in the letter with the vocabulary, writing style, modes of expression, and ideas found in the writings known to have been produced by Clement. This, needless to say, is not a simple task, not the sort of thing most people would care to undertake. But Smith did it. One word at a time. It was slow, arduous, painstaking work of many years. The results are published in his scholarly volume, and they are impressive.

  It is possible to verify the Clementine vocabulary and style of the letter because previous scholars have devoted so much work to such things for many of the significant early Christian writers. In particular, in the early twentieth century, a German scholar named Otto Stahlin published a four-volume critical edition of the works of Clement, based on a careful analysis of all the surviving manuscripts of his writings. The final volume of Clemens Alexandrinus appeared in 1936 and included detailed indexes of all the Clementine materials, including a complete vocabulary list, with indications of how frequently each and every word occurs in Clement's writings. This was not an easy kind of work to produce in the days before computers. But Smith was able to use this and similar resources to determine whether his discovery followed Clement's writing style and used his distinctive vocabulary and whether it ever used a style or words uncharacteristic of Clement.

  The end result was that this letter looks very much like something Clement would have written. In fact, it is so much like Clement that it would be well nigh impossible to imagine someone other than Clement being able to write it, before tools like those produced by modern Clement scholars such as Stahlin were available. Smith's verdict was that the letter actually was written by Clement of Alexandria.

  But what about the quotations of Secret Mark? Is it really plausible that these come from an edition of Mark's Gospel different from the edition that made it into the canon?

  The first thing to point out is that on the face of it, there is nothing at all implausible about the idea that Mark's Gospel circulated in different versions. In fact, we know that it did, since we have numerous manuscripts of Mark's Gospel, as well as of all the other books of the New Testament, and no two of these manuscripts are exactly alike in all their particulars. In all of them, this, that, or the other verse is worded differently. And some of the differences are significant. For example, when Jesus is approached by a leper who wants to be healed (Mark 1:41), rather than indicating that Jesus felt compassion (as found in most manuscripts), some of our earliest manuscripts instead say that he became angry. This clearly makes for a rather different version of the story.

  Of even greater significance are the last twelve verses of Mark, in which Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection, telling them to preach the gospel to all the nations and indicating that those who believe in him will speak in strange tongues, handle snakes, and drink poison without feeling its effects. But this amazing and startling ending is not found in the oldest and best manuscripts of Mark. Instead, these manuscripts end at Mark 16:8, where the women at Jesus' tomb are told that he has been raised, are instructed to inform Peter, but then flee the tomb and say nothing to anyone, "for they were afraid." And that is the end of the story. For many readers this ending is even more amazing and strange than the other one, for in these manuscripts there is no account of Jesus appearing to his disciples after the resurrection.

  In any event, there were different versions of Mark available in the early church, read by different people in different places. As a result, there is nothing at all implausible about there being two versions of Mark's Gospel in a big city like Alexandria.

  But were the quotations of Secret Mark in this letter of Clement actually written by the author of the Gospel of Mark? Here again, it is a question of vocabulary, writing style, modes of expression, and theology. A careful analysis of the quotations of Clement indicates that these passages, while not in the style of Clement himself, are very much in the style of Mark as found in the New Testament.

  Which version then came first: Secret Mark or canonical Mark? Here Smith pulls a switch, but it is a switch that has proved convincing to several other scholars as well. The quotations that Clement thought of as a second edition, Secret Mark, were in fact, Smith argued, part of the original Gospel of Mark, but were taken out by later scribes. And so the two versions of Mark were not, technically speaking, both produced by him. He wrote the longer version, and it came to be shortened by subsequent scribes who copied his text." Clement misunderstood the true relationship of these two versions.

  There are some interesting features of the shorter version—the one found in the New Testament—that can be explained if the longer version were the original, and this is some of the evidence that Smith and others have adduced for their view. To take the second quotation first. Clement indicates that it appeared after the first part of Mark 10:46: "And they came to Jericho; and as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples...." This is a strange verse for several reasons. Why does it say "they came to Jericho" but then not indicate what happened there? In other words, why would Mark mention their arrival in town if they left without doing anything? And why does the text say that "they" came but that "he and his disciples" left? Why not just say "they" came and "they" left? These may seem like minor issues, but they are the kind of small details that should give one pause.

  Notice what happens when the second passage cited by Clement is inserted into the account. They come to Jericho. Jesus encounte
rs three women there but refuses to see them (this is not the first time in Mark's Gospel that Jesus might seem a bit rude; see Mark 3:31-35). Then he and his disciples leave. The passage seems to make better sense and the tiny problems with the details disappear.

  Or consider the other of Clement's two quotations of the Secret Gospel. One passage that has always perplexed students of the canonical version of Mark's Gospel occurs near the end, when Jesus is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane. When the soldiers seize him, all his disciples flee. But there is someone else there, "a young man" who is "clothed with a linen cloth over his naked body." The soldiers grab this unnamed man, but he escapes, nude, leaving them with the linen cloth in their hands (Mark 14:51-52). Who is this person, this follower of Jesus who has never been mentioned before? What is he doing in Gethsemane? And why is he wearing only a linen garment? Interpreters have propounded a host of possible solutions to these questions over the centuries, but there has never been any consensus.

  Once the longer passage of the so-called Secret Gospel is inserted, however, suddenly it makes sense, for in that story, too, there is a young man who comes to Jesus wearing nothing over his naked body but a linen cloth. This is a person Jesus has raised from the dead. He became Jesus' follower. He is the one grabbed in the garden. Maybe this was originally part of Mark's Gospel.

  Smith, however, went even further. Not only was this passage originally in Mark. It is a key to understanding the ministry of the historical Jesus. Smith spins out an interpretation of the text which, at the end of the day, left most scholars breathless and many incensed. According to Smith, this passage reflects an actual practice of the historical Jesus. We know from other ancient sources that Jesus was widely considered to be a "magician." In an ancient context, that did not mean someone who, like David Copperfield today, can perform illusionist tricks with mirrors and sophisticated contraptions. A magician was someone who could, in reality, manipulate the workings of nature through mystical powers connecting him to the divine realm.