The Case for the Real Jesus

by Lee Strobel

  “No legitimate scholar believes they were wed,” he replied. “It’s the irresponsible, the Dan Browns and Michael Baigents of the world, who use the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip to try to make that case, but they utterly fail. Those texts are not only unhistorical, but even they don’t say they were married. Only the truly gullible—or those advancing their own theological agenda—buy into that.”

  DOCUMENT #4: THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK

  I have investigated a lot of extraordinary cases as a journalist: police framing innocent people, corporate bigwigs knowingly producing dangerous products, and political corruption of all kinds. But as I sat in Evans’s dining room, listening in astonishment, he unfolded a bizarre story of academic intrigue that rivaled anything I had ever landed on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. On the surface, the Secret Gospel of Mark’s homoerotic suggestions were shocking enough; beneath the surface, the story behind the gospel left me shaking my head in bewilderment.

  “The story goes like this,” Evans began. He took a sip of water and then settled into his chair. “Morton Smith was a professor of Judeo-Christian origins at Columbia University for years. At a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1960, he announced that two years earlier he had made a historic discovery at the Mar Saba Monastery in the Judean wilderness.

  “In the back of a 1646 book was two and a half pages of a letter ostensibly from Clement of Alexandria, who lived in the second century, to someone named Theodore. Smith speculated that a monk copied the letter onto the blank pages at the back of the book to preserve it, maybe because the original papyrus had been crumbling.

  “The letter was in Greek, and Smith said it was written with an eighteenth-century hand. Here’s what was so interesting: the letter contained two quotes from a previously unknown mystical or secret version of the Gospel of Mark. It describes Jesus raising a young man from the dead, and then later the youth comes to him ‘wearing a linen cloth over his naked body’ and ‘remained with him that night’ so that he could be taught ‘the mystery of the kingdom of God.’ Frankly, the homoerotic suggestion was hard to miss. The letter then ends very abruptly, just after it indicates that something really important was going to be revealed.”

  “How important was this discovery?” I asked.

  “Well, if it really was written by the author of the Gospel of Mark, then it would certainly be significant,” Evans said. “Smith later wrote two books analyzing it—one 450-page scholarly treatment published by Harvard University Press, and a more popular edition for a general audience. A few prominent scholars from the Jesus Seminar said Clement’s letter could contain an earlier version of Mark than what we have in the New Testament. They made some pretty bold claims about it. But from the beginning there were rumblings that this might be a forgery.”

  Indeed, the headlines in the New York Times at the time of Smith’s announcement reflected the brewing controversy. “A New Gospel Ascribed to Mark,” said the newspaper on December 30, 1960. The next day came this headline: “Expert Disputes ‘Secret Gospel.’”

  For a journalist, the next question was obvious: “Why wasn’t the document simply examined by experts?”

  “Because,” Evans said with a grin, “It’s gone. Vanished. Smith said he left it at the monastery, but today nobody can find it, so it can’t be subjected to ink tests and other analysis. But he did photograph it, and after he died in 1991, large color photographs of the text were studied by Stephen Carlson.”

  Carlson, a well-regarded patent attorney and amateur biblical scholar, thoroughly investigated the case, bringing in handwriting experts and writing The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark in 2005.41

  “What’s your opinion about the authenticity of the letter?” I asked.

  Evans’s answer was dramatic: “I think the clues clearly lead to the conclusion that the letter is a hoax and that Smith is almost certainly the hoaxer.”

  I sat back in my chair. This was absolutely incredible to contemplate: a prominent professor—lauded by Pagels as having “impeccable…scholarly credentials”42—supposedly falsifying an ancient letter and fooling a lot of other scholars, who formulated their own elaborate theories based on the spurious text.

  “Are you saying Smith not only forged the document,” I said in amazement, “but that he then wrote a 450-page scholarly book analyzing it?”

  “Yes,” Evans replied. “It’s bizarre. Actually, if you really read his book, you’ll find much of it was filler. But I’ve met people who say, ‘I knew Morton Smith, and he was fully capable of doing such a thing.’ I do think, though, that the question of his motive is the weakest part of the case. He himself was gay, which was a closely guarded secret in the 1950s. He had been denied tenure at Brown University and may have wanted to demonstrate his intellectual superiority by pulling off something like this.”

  Evans picked up Carlson’s book and searched through it until he came to the quote he was after. “Carlson put it this way,” he said, reading:

  [Smith] was denied tenure in 1955 at the university where he started his career. Smith was forty years old and might have been perceived as over-the-hill. A successful hoax could be exactly what Smith needed to prove to himself that he was smarter than his peers and might even jump start his career in the process.43

  Evans closed the book. “Who knows? I certainly can’t divine someone’s intentions,” he concluded. “But why he did it is a rather secondary question. The big issue is whether he did, indeed, write the text—and I believe the evidence is compelling that he did.”

  “MORTON THE BALDY”

  I prodded Evans to elaborate. “What’s the evidence?” I asked.

  “When experts examined the magnified photos of the text, they could see what they call ‘forger’s tremor,’ where the text isn’t really written, but instead it’s being drawn by a forger in an attempt to deceive. There are shaky lines, pen lifts in the middle of strokes—all kinds of indications that this was forged. On top of that, when the Greek letters were compared to a sample of Smith’s own writing, they found the Clement text had the same unusual way of making the Greek letters theta and lambda as he did. That’s a powerful link.

  “Plus, the photos indicated the presence of mildew on the book—something that wouldn’t occur in a book from the dry climate where the monastery was located. More likely, the book was from somewhere else—Europe or North America. Also, there was no evidence of this book being in the Mar Saba library prior to Smith’s ‘discovering’ it.

  “And here’s something strange: the book had ‘Smith 65’ written on it. Would you, if you were a guest in somebody’s library, looking at his rare books, write ‘Strobel 65’ on the title page? I find that very strange. If it’s your book, however, you might not hesitate. By the way, a copy of that book back in the 1950s would have cost only a couple of hundred dollars and easily could have been smuggled into the monastery library.

  “But one of the most intriguing clues involves another Mar Sara document that had been cataloged by Smith. It’s written in the same hand as the Clement letter. But there are two unusual things about it. First, Smith himself dated this sample to the twentieth century, rather than the eighteenth century when the Clement letter was supposedly written. And second, it’s signed ‘M. Madiotes.’”

  The name didn’t mean anything to me. “Who’s that?”

  “Very good question. It sounds like a Greek name, but it turns out it’s pseudo-Greek, coming from a root that means ‘sphere,’ ‘cueball,’ or ‘bald.’ Interestingly, Smith was prominently bald for his entire adulthood. So could the name mean ‘Morton the Baldy’? Certainly seems possible.”

  In his book, Carlson said, “It’s not uncommon for the hoaxer to plant deliberate mistakes or jokes as clues to the fake’s true nature.”44 Secret Mark, he said, “abounds in jokes” that point toward Smith as the hoaxer.45

  Also intriguing, wrote Carlson, is that Smith’s next major work, Jesus the Magician, “was
careful not to rely on Secret Mark itself,” even though it would have seemed appropriate to do so. In fact, he said, “Secret Mark did not become a major factor in his scholarship apart from the books disclosing it to the world.”46

  Evans said this makes perfect sense to him. “After all, Smith considered his other books to be real scholarship. He was enough of a scholar that he wasn’t going to damage his own work by incorporating into his footnotes and references a work that he knows is phony.”

  “Anything else?”

  “There are a lot of other clues, but one that’s particularly damaging is the fact that before he announced the existence of Secret Mark, Smith had earlier written about Mark’s mystery of the kingdom of God and forbidden sexual practices—themes that he also finds in Secret Mark, which he just coincidentally happened to have ‘discovered.’ That’s extremely suspicious.”47

  An Episcopalian priest-turned-atheist, Smith has been described as someone who reveled in enraging the establishment, “provoking the conventionally faithful,” and painting a portrait of Jesus that was “far from the respectable, rational, middle-class Christianity of most of his readers.”48 His writings claimed Jesus was a magician who used hallucinatory techniques to initiate his closest confidants “into ecstatic visions of heaven…to share with them his experience of liberation from Jewish law.”49 Wrote Carlson:

  Secret Mark supports not only Smith’s love of controversy but also his favorite target. It was written during the 1950s, during an especially oppressive moment in American history when mainline ministers were urging the police to crack down on gay men gathered in public parks. What could be more upsetting to the Establishment in this historical moment than the intimation, revealed in an ancient text by the author of the oldest gospel, that they are crucifying Jesus Christ all over again?50

  “What does it say about biblical scholarship,” I asked Evans, “that many scholars accepted Secret Mark apparently without asking enough critical questions?”

  “I think it’s an embarrassment,” came his reply. “Too many well-publicized scholars are so fond of oddball documents and theories that they were too ready to accept Secret Mark as genuine. In fact, some in the Jesus Seminar were too quick to say, well, yes, there probably was a Secret Mark floating around and, well, yes, it probably is earlier than the canonical Mark.

  “And Smith,” he added, “had to be laughing.”

  DOCUMENT #5: THE JESUS PAPERS

  I knew I was going to get an earful when I brought up Baigent’s recent bestseller The Jesus Papers. Scholars uniformly scoff at Baigent’s conspiracy theories and poorly supported allegations, which sound convincing to those untrained in ancient history but which quickly collapse upon examination by experts. The coauthor of Holy Blood, Holy Grail isn’t a historian; his degrees are in psychology and “mysticism and religious experience.” Still, I couldn’t ignore a book that has received as much media attention—and that has sold as many copies—as The Jesus Papers.

  “Baigent reports the discovery of two papyrus documents, both written in Aramaic and dated back to the time of Jesus’ crucifixion,” I said. “The writer calls himself ‘the Messiah of the children of Israel,’ and he clarifies to the Sanhedrin that he never intended to claim that he was God, but that he merely embodied God’s Spirit. Wouldn’t you concede that if this is legitimate, it would be a huge discovery?”

  “Well, of course. If we were to find something that we had good reason to believe Jesus actually composed, then that would be breathtaking,” he said. “But the flimsiness of this entire thing is just ridiculous. Baigent says he met somebody who said that in 1961, while excavating underneath a house in Jerusalem, he found two documents written in Aramaic, which he showed to two famous archaeologists who confirmed their date and authenticity. They dated them to roughly the time that Jesus was put to death.

  “Baigent describes how he went into a walk-in safe of an antiquities collector and saw the papyri under glass. He couldn’t take a picture of them, of course. He has admitted that he doesn’t read Aramaic and said the other guy doesn’t either—so how does he know what they say? He’s assured that two well-known archaeologists, Yigael Yadin and Nahman Avigad, have confirmed it. Oh, but did I mention that Yadin and Avigad are dead?

  “So we have an author with dubious credibility in the first place; an antiquities dealer who can’t be identified; documents that Baigent can’t read or produce and for which we have no translation or verification; and two archaeologists who are dead. This is just the dumbest thing.”

  “Yet,” I pointed out, “the book became a bestseller and some people apparently believe it.”

  “It’s astounding,” he said, his voice betraying more frustration than amazement. “This is voodoo scholarship. It’s just so silly. It’s possible that there are some documents under glass that aren’t ancient at all and that are spurious or misunderstood. But you have to remember that no papyrus buried in the ground in Jerusalem will survive two thousand years, period. This might happen in the dry sands of the Dead Sea region or Egypt, but it rains in Jerusalem. It’s nothing to get two inches of snow in January in Jerusalem. You can’t bury papyrus in the moist ground and expect it to still be there, legible, two thousand years later. Any archaeologist will tell you that. So there’s nothing to this.

  “He’s playing on the ignorance of people as well as the desire for a titillating tale of conspiracy, intrigue, and hiding the truth. And it’s always the Vatican getting involved—buying off people or pressuring people into silence. Baigent says Pope John XXIII asked the archaeologists to destroy these incriminating documents, but they refused.”

  Evans’s sarcasm hit full stride. “It’s astonishing for as active and energetic as the Vatican is when it comes to bribing people and destroying documents that they never are able to cover their tracks,” he said, smiling. “Baigent can always find out.”

  DOCUMENT #6: THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS

  On April 6, 2006, facing the bright television lights of more than a hundred members of the news media, Evans was among the biblical scholars who announced the discovery and translation of the long-lost Gospel of Judas. The National Geographic Society had recruited Evans to be part of a team to assist with interpreting the codex, which was discovered in the late 1970s and took a circuitous route to end up the focus of intense worldwide interest.

  Carbon-14 dating indicates the papyrus dates back to AD 220 to 340, although team members leaned toward 300 and 320. The original gospel, however, was written prior to 180, which is when the church father Irenaeus warned that this “fictitious history” was floating around.51

  The most sensational claims in the text are that Judas Iscariot was Jesus’ greatest disciple, who alone was able to understand Jesus’ most profound teaching, and that the two of them conspired to arrange for Jesus’ betrayal. “You will exceed them all,” Jesus is quoted as telling Judas, “for you will sacrifice the man who clothes me.” If true, this would obviously cast Judas and Jesus in a much different light than has traditionally been accepted.

  I pulled out a copy of some commentary I had printed out from the Internet. “This person suggests that the Gospel of Judas predates the biblical Gospels and was burned by the church at the Council of Nicea in 325,” I said.

  Evans was taken aback. “That’s just not true,” he replied indignantly.

  I added, “There was even a crawler along the bottom of a television news program that said: ‘The Gospel of Judas was edited out of the Bible in the fourth century.’”

  Evans laughed. “Edited out of the Bible? Someone is accepting what Dan Brown says about the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century determining what was in and out of the Bible—which, of course, is pure poppycock.”

  “Is there anything historical about Jesus and Judas in this document?”

  “Probably not. Notice, by the way, that the document calls itself the ‘Gospel of Judas,’ not the ‘Gospel According to Judas,’ as we have in the New Testament Gospels. So whoe
ver wrote this document may have been indicating that Judas should not be understood as the author of the gospel, but rather that this is a gospel about Judas. In any event, it’s written long after Judas lived. But still, it does have historical significance.”

  “How so?”

  “It tells us Irenaeus knew what he was talking about when he wrote that this gospel existed; so that’s another point in favor of his credibility. It tells us something about second-century Gnosticism and perhaps a group called the Cainites, who are a bit mysterious to us. Did they really exist? Maybe.”

  “What did they believe?”

  “They identified with the villains of the Bible,” he said. “They believed that the god of this world is evil, and so anyone that he hates must really be a hero. So they would lionize Cain, Esau, the people of Sodom—and naturally Judas fits right in there. Just how positive the portrait of Judas is in this new text remains an open question.

  “Of course, our tendency is to demonize Judas, but it’s interesting that he carried the money box for Jesus. If you look at the hierarchy in the priestly establishment, you’ve got the high priest, then number two is the captain of the treasury. He’ll be the next high priest, more than likely. And Judas was walking around with the treasury box.”

  “So he may have been more prominent than we give him credit for?” I asked.

  “Yes, exactly. It’s interesting too that in the Gospel of John, Jesus says to Judas, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly.’52 The other disciples didn’t know what Jesus was talking about. Jesus had apparently made a private arrangement with Judas; we also have other examples of Jesus having a private arrangement with a few disciples.53 It may be that the Gospel of Judas gives us a greatly developed, unhistorical, and imaginative expansion of this theme.”

  I said, “You and the other scholars involved with this project have been careful to caution that this gospel doesn’t really tell us anything reliable about Jesus or Judas. But I’ve seen all kinds of wild speculation on the Internet. Does that concern you?”