The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark | Dr. Stephen C. Carlson

Secret Mark first became known to modern scholarship in 1958 when a newly hired assistant professor at Columbia University in New York by the name of Morton Smith visited the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem and photographed its fragments. Secret Mark was announced on the heels of many spectacular discoveries of ancient manuscripts in the Near East, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi gnostic corpus in the late 1940s, and promised to be just as revolutionary. Secret Mark presents what appears to be a valuable, albeit fragmentary, witness to early Christian traditions, traditions that might shed light on Jesus's most intimate behavior. In this book, Stephen C. Carlson uses state of the art science to demonstrate that Secret Mark was an elaborate hoax created by Morton Smith. Carlson's discussion places Smith's trick alongside many other hoaxes before probing the reasons why so many scholars have been taken in by it.

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[MichaelMendis]

Carlson's argument about salt (beginning at around 26:43) has to be one of the absurdest I have heard in the entire debate about the authenticity of the Clementine letter. On one hand, Carlson invokes Smith's expertise in identifying forgeries as equpping him *supremely* to be the ideal candidate to create a forgery himself. Thjen he goes on to accuse Smith of being so *stupid* as to inject a supposed twentieth-century invention into the forged letter. Carlson appears to want to have his cake and eat it. Smith was *smart* enough to create a highly convincing forgery, but yet *stupid* enough to give himself away by talking about a twentieth-century process involving salt. This argument sounds very much like an act of desperation on Carlson's part to bolster his case for pinning the "forgery" (if it is indeed a forgery) on Smith.

The Clementine letter makes a passing reference to a saying about salt losing its savour. The actual text is: "For the true things, being mixed with inventions, are falsified, so that, as the saying goes, even the salt loses its savor." All that the Clementine letter is doing is alluding to a saying about salt losing its savour. What Carlson conveniently ignores is the word "even". That word puts an entirely different spin on the saying. The saying is a sort of sarcastic hyperbole expressing the idea that the impossible has somehow occurred. It has always been known that salt cannot lose its saltiness except through diluttion in water. To say "even the salt has lost its savour" is like saying "even the Pope has become an atheist". The Clementine letter is saying that we might think that the truth can never be false, but when it is mixed with fabrications, the impossible happens and the truth becomes false.

The saying about salt losing its savour has a precedent in one of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: "Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men." (Matt. 5:13-14. KJV). So, the idea of salt losing its savour is not even remotely related to the twentieth-century discovery that emerged by accident when some people complained that adding iodine to salt changed the flavour. The Clementine allusion and the saying of Jesus have nothing to do with iodine changing the flavour of salt. The old saying was about salt *losing* its flavour altogether, as is made obvious in the saying of Jesus.

Carlson's argument about the ancients not having pure salt is *completely irrelevant.* The Clementine letter is *not* saying that salt loses its savour because it is "adulterated" (as Carlson claims), but rather, that when the truth becomes falsified with the interpolation of fabrications, it becomes worthless, just as salt that has (hyperbolically and hypothetically) lost its savour is "good for nothing, but to be cast out", as the saying of Jesus has it. No one has ever thrown salt away because it lost is saltiness (since salt never loses its saltiness). That is simply one of the many examples of hyperbole that Jesus was fond of using in his sayings (pluck out your eye; cut off your right hand; the camel going through the eye of a needle; straining a gnat and swallowing a camel; and on and on).

Carlson's reference to "Morton Salt" and the Morton Salt Company, and his insinuation that Morton Smith was somehow cleverly using the connection between his own first name and the salt company is truly bizarre.

Carlson's fanciful argument is nothing but clutching at straws.

[ji]

I haven't read Carlson's work, but I have read quite a bit about Morton Smith.

Nothing in his bio suggests that he engineered a hoax. It's quite the opposite really, because as is typical with Bible scholars, he spent much of the rest of his life working on this small document.

Thanks for the video Jacob.

[soupbonep]

Fascinating. After leaning about this on the last episode of Misquoting Jesus, this episode of HIstory Valley is perfect and this author gives a compelling argument for this being a hoax. The evidence he presents sounds solid and the motivation for Smith makes a lot of sense. I admit I know nothing about this guy Morton Smith, but I know a good case when I hear it and Dr. Carlson has one.

This episode of History Valley is a spoiler alert for the next episode of Misquoting Jesus where Bart, in a second part of a two part series, is going to talk about this very aspect of this so called secret gospel. I'm still going to watch it because I'm sure that I will learn something and I'm interested in his opinion on this.

[TheDanEdwards]

Seems like a good concept for an _Indiana Jones_ episode.

[Gary-yv]

One thing Morton Smith could not possibly had known is that modern research proved convincingly that Martha was airdropped into the story with resurrection of Lazarus. Think it through...

[macroman]

The idea that the passages were deleted from the original GosMark is not very plausible. Why would anyone want to delete a second story of the raising of Lazarus? If someone didn’t like the idea of a Lazarus spending the night with Jesus they need only delete a few words - they don’t need to delete raising of Lazarus

[munbruk]

It seems modern scholars are not different from ancient scribes when it comes to forgery.

[notanemoprog]

Interesting.

Btw please look into the source of the hum in your audio setup so you can eliminate it?

[svemory]

I've seen people affirm Smith hoaxing this due to homosexual innuendo - but there really is none in the text, such as it is presented... Canonical Mark IS marinated with 'secret' and 'mystery' allusions, however not a whole lot of commentary on Mark (later redaction/ending not included) seems to recognize that so much, and to me that would support a more 'secret' tradition related to standard Mark. There are some 'too neat' conclusions Carlson presents here that are logical and thus kind of convincing, but ... my Spidey sense doesn't really jive with a Smith-authored hoax.

[integrationalpolytheism]

Tabor vs Carl'son on this subject. A pity that history Valley doesn't host debates!

[bobSeigar]

Whoever wrote the Gospel (Mark) was one of two things:

A Woman.

Or.

A Gay Man.

The Gospels all depict an Animus, not an Anima.

[djelalhassan]

The real and the only gospel was the gospel of Mark Anthony of Ioseus=hail Zeus Divus Iulius Caesar the Rubbed one.