Scott G. Brown

"Mark's Other Gospel" by Prof. Scott G. Brown looks at the many implications of the late Morton Smith's discovery of a lost version of the Gospel of Mark, of which Smith only found two passages quoted in a lost letter by Clement of Alexandria that existed only as an eighteenth century copy, which itself is now lost.(!) The tenuousness of this convoluted history of the lost version of Mark has led to controversy because any step in this copying of copies of copies is open to accusations of forgery. Can the truth be arrived at and if so how?

For those unfamiliar with the longer Gospel of Mark (LGM) 14the less loaded title (or, rather, the mere description) that Brown prefers instead of Smith 19s title, 1CThe Secret Gospel of Mark 1D 14the story related by the two passages from Clement 19s letter is that Jesus comes from Galilee through Perea, stopping in Bethany-Beyond-the-Jordan where he raises a young man from the dead, spends six days there and teaches the youth the mystery of the kingdom of God 14something Jesus only does with his disciples elsewhere in the gospel 14and then crosses the Jordan into Judea where he visits Jericho and meets three women including the mother and sister of the youth he just raised and instructed, but he refuses to see them.

Brown argues against the many attempts to dismiss the longer gospel out of hand. For example, if, as some critics allege, this is a pastiche of the other gospels, especially chapter eleven of the Gospel According to John, why then does it contradict so many aspects of John 19s story about Lazarus raised from the dead? In LGM 19s version of the story, the characters mostly go nameless; the unnamed youth is explicitly a youth whereas Lazarus could have been a middle-aged man; there is only one sister, not two; and the whole thing happens in Perea instead of Judea. There were two places called Bethany on opposite sides of the Jordan. John 19s story takes place at Bethany in Judea and LGM 19s occurs at Bethany in Perea. There are many other differences, and even where there are some similarities they are often treated so differently that it seems more as if the author of each version used a common source but had no knowledge of 14or concern for 14how the other author used it. If someone was trying to harmonize the gospels by writing a pastiche, why change and even spurn so many details of John 19s version? Essentially, there are too many differences, and the inescapable conclusion is that LGM 19s version is not the same story at all, despite the superficial resemblance. More than likely, there was a story about Jesus raising a man from the dead, possibly at a place called Bethany 14who knows which one, originally 14and at least two evangelists had heard or read it, and each used it in his own way.

Brown picks his way through a mine field of problems one at a time. One is that Smith had many personal and professional enemies, including one who praised Smith 19s work on the letter while he and Smith were friends but then turned on Smith 19s work after they had a personal falling out. In addition to this, Brown agrees with other scholars who have noted that Smith 19s own interpretation of the meaning of the longer version of Mark does not match up either with what the longer gospel says or what Clement says about it. (Indeed, if correct, this raises the question of how Smith could have forged a document that he himself proceeded to misinterpret.) Another issue involving academic politics is that biblical scholars are roughly divided into those who, as believing Christians, are understandably biased against anything that casts doubt on their faith, and, on the other hand, skeptics who are equally prone to support anything that casts doubt but also to doubt anything that might argue in favor of faith. That Smith seemed to believe that the letter confirmed an actual practice of early Christians that went back to the historical Jesus gave some skeptical scholars a bad taste. In short, nearly everyone seemed to have a reason to be biased against part or all of Smith 19s discovery regardless of their orientation.

Because the document Smith found in 1958 belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church, Smith could not take it with him when he returned to the United States, so he made black-and-white photographic copies of the letter, which had been handwritten into the blank pages at the end of a 17th century printed book with the 18th century copyist 19s heading: 1CFrom the letters of the most holy Clement, the author of the Stromateis. 1D The Mar Saba Monastery, situated twelve miles south of Jerusalem, is a millennium-and-a-half-old religious center that is believed to have once housed a collection of letters by Bishop Clement of Alexandria (about 150-215 A.D.). The copyist 19s introduction, by its use of the plural 1Cletters, 1D suggests that he had at his elbow more than just the one letter that he found interesting enough to copy. Clement was, indeed, the author of book entitled The Stromateis, which means 1CPatchwork 1D or 1CMiscellany, 1D in which he recorded his thoughts on the Christian life. It is not the only book he wrote, and by the time of Smith 19s discovery, scholars had made a thorough enough study of his work that it is possible to make generalizations about Clement 19s characteristic vocabulary and style. (Critics have suggested that it was also possible to mimic Clement because his writing traits had been so thoroughly catalogued.)

While some critics have said that the document was suspect because only black-and-white photographs were available and they believed that only Smith had seen it, this argument had to be modified when it was learned that three other western scholars and two church officials, all of whom can be identified, actually saw and handled the book with the letter copied into it, and one of the churchmen made color photographic copies of the letter, which have since been published. Unfortunately, this same priest also removed the letter from the book and it was subsequently lost. (Now the book can be found but not the letter.) While it is unfortunate that the church ignored a proposal by one of the three scholars that the ink be carbon dated, Brown points out that this could only have determined whether or not the letter was a twentieth century forgery. If someone in the eighteenth, third, second, or even the first century had forged the letter or the gospel quotations in it, carbon dating could neither establish or rule that out.

After showing that analysis of all the photographs tends to support the conclusion that the letter-copy is more than one hundred years old, Brown argues that the best way to authenticate the document further is to analyze the text to see whether 1) it is a letter that Clement could have written, and 2) the quotations from the alleged expanded gospel could have been written by the same author who wrote canonical Mark. Many critics have pointed out that someone familiar with Clement 19s authentic writings could have forged the letter, but they have rarely sought the opinions of experts on Clement 19s work to see if qualified scholars detect forgery. Brown consulted the work of several experts on Clement, and all but one was convinced that the letter was written by Clement, and the one who had doubts was not willing to say that it is a forgery. What is more, Brown himself shows that the attitude toward hidden and revealed meaning in the scriptures as expressed in the letter is identical to Clement 19s views expressed in his surviving works such as The Stromateis. Brown argues sensibly that too many students of the so-called Mar Saba Letter, including Smith, have dismissed and ignored what Clement says. For one thing, there are those who argue that the two passages quoted in the letter are the only passages that were added to Mark by the author of the expanded gospel, but then Clement 19s own claim that the gospel was enhanced or amplified into a 1Cmore spiritual gospel 1D would not make sense if the additions were limited to two short passages. Rather, the letter clearly implies that Clement is limiting himself to discussion of two passages for two reasons. Obviously because he could not discuss all of the additional passages without turning his letter into a book, and because the two passages he quotes were among the few passages that his correspondent, Theodore had space in a letter to mention.

An intriguing phrase near the end of the letter says, 1CBut the many other things about which you wrote both seem to be and are falsifications. 1D At least one scholar has interpreted this to mean that Clement denied the authenticity of the rest of the longer gospel, excepting only the passages he quoted. Again, as Brown suggests, this would mean that the extended gospel 14which Clement elsewhere calls holy and accuses the Carpocratians of sullying by mixing it with their lies 14consists of nothing but two additional passages. I take two alternative meanings from the above sentence. Either Theodore had written about many other things going on at Jericho aside from the rejection of the three women callers, or he had quoted other passages that were so adulterated from Clement 19s perspective that the bishop would have had to write that book I mentioned to deal with them all.

The next question, then, is whether the quotations from the alleged expanded gospel are authentic or at least sound as if they could have been written by the author of the Gospel According to Mark. Do they fit into Mark 19s theological agenda as expressed in the canonical text? This question leads Brown into an exploration of how the Gospel of Mark has been regarded over time in terms of its literary technique and level of sophistication. I myself remember reading in a book published in the early 1990s the claim that Mark is relatively artless and simple. Brown would say that such a view was already outdated by then, although he allows that even in the late 1980s, a writer had to explain to his scholarly audience that Mark 19s literary techniques are complex and sophisticated. The development of scholarly appreciation of Mark 19s deliberate storytelling techniques was a slow recognition that the evangelist embedded verbal cues in his text that pointed to his theological views. Repetition, stories wrapped around other stories with similar themes, and even seemingly awkward phrases were meant to help communicate his gospel message. Brown argues that what the two passages from the expanded gospel do is amplify the message already in the canonical version of the gospel.

Another intriguing argument is that the author 14whom Brown believes to be the same one who wrote the canonical version 14probably wrote the additions at the same time that he wrote the canonical version. At the same time that they amplify the author 19s message, they also spoil the fabric of his plot, crowding it with additional material that says the same thing. Some believe that the longer version was the original published version of Mark, but Brown thinks that it was not, that Mark thought better of including this material in the original. That would help to explain why the pieces of the longer version fit neatly into the context of chapter ten of canonical Mark. Brown thinks that readers of the longer version were meant to have read the canonical version first so that the additions would resonate and only amplify whatever meanings they had already gotten out of the canonical text.

This strikes some of Brown 19s critics as anticlimactic. Smith had suggested that there was something new and earth-shaking to be learned about early Christianity in the longer version of Mark. That was implied in the exciting name Smith chose for the new version: 1CThe Secret Gospel of Mark. 1D Brown argues that nowhere in the letter does it say that this expanded version had a different title than the Gospel According to Mark. It was more like a second edition of the earlier text. When he referred to it as a 1Cmystikon euangelion 1D 14the phrase that Smith translated as 1Csecret gospel, 1D Clement really meant to describe it as a 1Cmystic gospel. 1D This no more represents a new title for the work than does Clement 19s description of the longer gospel earlier in the letter as 1Ca more spiritual gospel. 1D

Brown 19s primary project is to try to recover the meaning of this gospel as it was understood by Clement and his fellow Alexandrians and, perhaps, the meaning intended by the original author. Whether the original author of longer Mark and canonical Mark were same person depends on whether the two works do have the same meaning. Brown points out that two different authors inevitably have their own agendas, in this case, theological, and even the same author, over time of any length changes in his views, but if longer Mark and canonical Mark are sending exactly the same message using exactly the same literary techniques, as Brown argues, then the likelihood is that they are by the same author.… (lisätietoja)