Exhibit One: The Writing of M. Madiotes

Argument: Carlson's first argument concerns the manuscript that Smith catalogued as item number 22 during his stay at Mar Saba in 1958. A reproduction of the first page (recto) of this manuscript appears in both The Secret Gospel and the journal Archaeology as anillustration of how monks sometimes pasted together loose pages of old manuscripts in order to fortify the bindings of books.

¹²

This page contains personal notes written by several different individuals. The names of some of these men appear in Smith's published catalogue of Mar Saba's manuscripts.¹³

According to Carlson, the uppermost handwriting (see figure 1) is the same as that of MS 65, the one containing Clement's Letter to Theodore, yet Smith attributed this eighteenth-century hand to a twentieth-century individual named “M. Madiotes” (M.

), whose surname must be fictitious because it does not appear in the online Greek phonebook.

¹⁴

This odd attribution is a deliberate clue. The name Madiotes is a pseudonym meaning “baldy” and “swindler,” derived from the verb

. A balding Morton Smith invented Madiotes, added his handwriting to MS 22, assigned this hand to the twentieth century, and included a picture featuring this writing in both Archaeology and The Secret Gospel as a clue that he was swindling people with a twentieth-century forgery.

¹⁵

This argument is represented graphically on the cover of The Gospel Hoax, which uses a colorized rendering of Smith's photograph of MS 22 with a magnifying glass superimposed to tell the publisher's story of how a “master sleuth” found this clue to Smith's hoax by poring over a forgotten manuscript.¹⁶

Although this novelesque image suggests a visit to Mar Saba, Carlson actually inspected the published photograph and not the manuscript itself.

Assessment: The possibility that a twentieth-century individual wrote the Letter to Theodore using an eighteenth-century hand would be damning evidence of forgery, so I examined this claim in detail when the editors of The Expository Times invited Carlson and me to reply to each other's books on longer Mark.¹⁷

Here I shall summarize the two main points that I made in that paper. First, the top handwriting on the first page of MS 22 is too limited to permit a positive identification of its author. In order to eliminate the possibility of two different writers, one must have writing samples that are extensive enough to exhibit several instances of most (preferably all) letters of the alphabet and the ligatures that each writer uses, for the examiner needs to determine whether these letterforms are rendered the same way in both the questioned writing (here MS 22) and the known samples (here only MS 65), whether these letterforms display the same range of natural variation (discussed under “Exhibit Two”), and whether the questioned and known specimens demonstrate the same habits in the way that they connect, or do not connect, the various letter combinations. Second, even though the small sample does not permit a positive conclusion of one writer, it nevertheless allows this conclusion to be refuted, for as experts in handwriting identification insist, “Repeated small differences establish clearly that two specimens are the work of two individuals despite a great number of general similarities.”¹⁸ We cannot always talk about repeated differences in the case of the top handwriting in MS 22, because the specimen is so limited. But since the four distinct words and five isolated letters visible in the published photograph differ from the writing of the Letter to Theodore in over a dozen respects, these differences cannot all constitute aberrations. Here I shall discuss the most significant differences. For convenience, I shall use “MS 22” hereafter to refer to the top hand on the first page (recto) in Smith's photograph.

The top line of figure 2 compares the form of the definite article

in MS 22 with the first twelve instances of

in MS 65.

¹⁹

For this word, both writers use the taller, rounded form of tau, but the similarities end there. In MS 65, the initial stroke quickly curves upward to the right, causing the whole letter to slant in this direction, and the base of the stem curves in order to connect with the omicron. This combining of tau with a following omicron holds true for all sixty-four instances of

(with or without an accent) in the letter but not for the example of

in MS 22.

The second line compares the first three letters of the word

in MS 22 with all seven places in MS 65 where these three letters occur together. Two differences readily appear here. First, although both writers use an unusual form of cursive pi(i.e.,

), the latter writes it differently when it precedes alpha. In these cases, rather than connecting to the next letter at the baseline, the stroke loops backward over the top of the pi in order to form the horizontal bar before continuing to the next letter. This form of cursive pi also occurs before epsilon, eta (without an accent), lambda, nu, rho, tau, and a space. The form used in MS 22 does appear in MS 65, but only before eta (with acute accent), iota, omega, and the omicron-upsilon ligature (

). In the 112 instances of pi, no exceptions to these habits occur. Second, when alpha precedes rho in MS 65, the letters are connected, and the top of the rho is shaped like a loop. The first hand in MS 22 did not connect these letters, and the top of his rho is circular.

The third line of figure 2 compares the way both documents combine rho with omicron. Again, the unconnected form of rho usedinMS 22 does appearin the Letter to Theodore (examples occur under

in figure 2), but only before certain letters: gamma, theta, kappa, nu, pi, tau, chi, a space, and, occasionally, alpha, epsilon, eta, and omega. It never appears before an omicron. Instead, in these twenty-five instances, the tail of the rho always curves up to the right to connect with the omicron (a common ligature). The fourth line illustrates the shape and position of circumflex accents in both writings. Those in MS 65 are wavy (tilde), and the start of the stroke is normally aligned vertically with the left edge or the center of a wide vowel, but the stroke often continues past the right edge. The circumflex accent visible in the published photograph of MS 22 is straight, and the stroke begins before the left edge of the vowel and ends nearly in line with the right edge. Lines five and six compare the individual letters beta and gamma. Unlike the beta in MS 22, the upper loops of the fourteen betas in MS 65 vertically overlap the bottom loops, which are not tight against the “back” of the letter, as they are in MS 22. The downward stroke of the gammas in MS 65 is noticeably straight, resulting in a letter that resembles an elongated v, unlike the downward stroke of the gammas in MS 22, which bends sharply to the left, resulting in a letter that resembles a y. These side-by-side comparisons demonstrate how very different these two writings are.

Of equal significance is the lack of accentsin MS 22 on the words

, and

and the incorrect accent on

.

²⁰

The omicrons in the words

(meaning “the present,” or simply “this”) should both have grave accents. If

representsthe definite article, then

and

should have circumflex accents. If instead

represents the last three letters of the last word on the previous line, accents might not be required. Whatever the case, any competent scribe would have put an accent over

, and no competent scribe would have put a circumflex accent over a short vowel. As William Wallace put it, “A short vowel circumflexed is, like metal on metal or colour on colour in heraldry, pour enquérir.”

²¹

This writer's problem with accents strongly indicates that he was not only a different individual but also a considerably less competent scribe than the one who penned MS 65, whose use of accents was excellent.²²

Carlson has simply mistaken two different writers for one. On its own, this conclusion eliminates his basis both for treating the photograph of MS 22 as a deliberate clue and for attributing MS 65 to a twentieth-century individual who “uncannily resembles Smith himself.”²³

This case of mistaken identity does not end here, however. When some bureaucratic issues get resolved, Allan Pantuck intends to publish two documents that demonstrate that Carlson misattributed the top handwriting to M. Madiotes.

Exhibit Two: Anomalous Letterforms Attributable to Smith

Argument: Carlson turns to paleography for additional circumstantial evidence, arguing that MS 65 contains four paleographical anomalies that agree with Smith's Greek handwriting. These anomalies are established by comparing MS 65 with a few manuscripts written at Mar Saba in the eighteenth century, whereas Smith's writing habits are establishedfrom annotations that he wrotein the margins of books that he owned (the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City now houses his personal library). Carlson notes that the writer of MS 65 joined the left “leg” of his lambdas near to the bottom of the right leg and that he formed some of his lambdas in only one stroke. Smith also wrote lambdas in both ways. Carlson also notes that both Smith and the writer ofMS 65 used a one-stroke short tau, where the horizontal line curves back and then turns down at the midpoint. And Carlson notes that the thetas in MS 65 appear “very similar” to the thetas that appear in Smith's marginal annotations, “including a leading horizontal stroke at midline.”²⁴

Assessment: Four fundamentalproblemsin Carlson's approach undermine his paleographical argument. First, his determination of anomalous letterforms presumes that authentic manuscripts written at Mar Saba in the eighteenth century should share the same traits. That premise is erroneous. After the twelfth century, Greek handwriting became less standardized and more individualistic, with the result that we can more easily identify individual scribes. By the fifteenth century, “the varieties ofstyle are numerous and overlapping, and thereis no clear distinction between styles thought suitable for copying Biblical and patristic texts and those for secular manuscripts; still less are there any differences according to where in the by-now-shrunken Byzantine empire a manuscript was written.”²⁵

So we should not expect manuscripts written in Mar Saba in the eighteenth century to share all the same stylistic traits. Indeed, they do not: atleast seven differences in letter forms appearin the undisputed samples displayed in figures 2 and 7 of Carlson's book.²⁶ Moreover, as Aristarchos Peristeris noted, Mar Saba was from its inception “a monastery for more advanced and experienced monks.” Consequently, “a considerable number of monks were already highly educated when they joined the monastery.”²⁷ That was particularly true of the scribes, many if not most of whom developed their writing styles elsewhere prior to their stay at the monastery. Smith himself believed that the person who penned MS 65 was a Phanariot scholar who “had been trained in the Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople.”²⁸ Why exclude that possibility? Finally, although it makes perfect sense that a manuscript containing a letter of Clement would be produced at Mar Saba, where a large collection of Clement's letters once existed, we cannot know for sure whether the manuscript was penned before or after the book came to Mar Saba, as Smith himself observed.²⁹ Thus, Carlson's position that MS 65 is anomalous wherever it differs from undisputed Mar Saba manuscripts of the same period (and accords with Smith's handwriting) is based on false or arbitrary premises. This fact eliminates his reason for treating the four alleged similarities as significant and suspicious.

Second, Carlson's neglect of the phenomenon of natural variation in handwriting renders his handwriting comparison dubious. People are not machines, so they never write a letter exactly the same way twice.³⁰

Naturally, the variations in the way writers render letters have limits. One can establish this range of variation for a particular individual only by examining numerous instances of the way he or she writes individual letters, preferably from a variety of writing samples.³¹ Onlythen can one make generalizations about a writer's habits and abstract a “master pattern” for any letter, a description of its typical shape. Thus, as a preliminary to handwriting comparison, practitioners often produce tables displaying numerous instances of particular letters as they appear in writing samples by the suspect and in the questioned document, as I did in figures 2–5. Carlson's own table (his figure 7) defeats the purpose of this procedure, for it compares two select examples of Smith's rendering of three Greek letters against two select examples fromMS 65 and either one, two, or three select examples from seven eighteenth-century manuscripts from Mar Saba. By offering a few selective examples, he creates the impression that Smith's ways of writing the letters lambda, tau, and theta resemble the habits of the writer of the letter and differ from the “authentic” manuscripts without having established how these writers typically form these letters. In order to correct this problem, we need to examine a larger and more representative selection of these letters from Smith's Greek handwriting and MS 65 before generalizing about similarities and differences.

Third, Carlson's premise that a modern forger would “lapse” into his or her own writing habits when forging an eighteenth-century manuscript disregards an important distinction between publicly and privately executed forgeries.³²

Forgers are most likely to lapse into their own habits when they are obliged to work in public before witnesses and therefore do not have an exemplar present from which to copy. Hence document examiners can reasonably expect to find some of a suspect's writing traits in, for example, signatures forged in front of bank tellers or court-ordered writing samples produced by someone who is trying to disguise his or her writing. In such cases, forgers of necessity fall back on their own habits to supplement their imperfect memory of the writing they are attempting to simulate. The lapses, moreover, are not limited to a few features of a few letters but extend to many aspects of the forgers’ writing habits, precisely because the forgers are relying completely on memory.³³ If the Letter to Theodore is a modern forgery of an eighteenth-century hand, the forger would not have produced it in public and naturally would have copied from exemplars, since the amount ofinformation he or she would have to retain in memory in order to imitate so many foreign letterforms and habits of connection without the aid of exemplars would be astronomical. With the aid of exemplars, a forger might occasionally lapse into his or her usual writing habits at times of waning concentration, in which case both the simulated letterform and the forger's own way of writing that letterform would appear,³⁴ with the latter occurring “progressively at various points” in the document.³⁵ The only times a forger might consistently substitute his or her usual habits while privately drawing the letter forms in exemplars are when those forms are too subtle to discern or too complicated to replicate. Thus, we should entertain the premise of Smith lapsing into his own habits only if the alleged similarities, like true lapses, occur “progressively at various points” in the manuscript or else involve very subtle or complex features.

Fourth, Carlson never addresses the question of whether the similarities he adduced between Smith's writing and MS 65 are probative. The handwriting of any two individuals using the same alphabet should contain similarities, including some striking ones. How do we know that these four alleged similarities are not simply coincidental? Ordway Hilton discussed this issue in connection with forged signatures:

When dealing with the possibility of a simulated forgery, then, the discovery of “a number of [the suspect's] small but highly individual habits” can at best con stitute evidence supporting the identification, but only if these habits are “highly individual,” which is to say, quite unlikely to occur in the writings of most other individuals. Accordingly, the only similarities between Smith's Greek handwritingand MS 65 that might be probative are the ones that are highly unusual, both for the eighteenth century and the twentieth.

From the preceding theoretical considerations we may distill four criteria that every alleged paleographical similarity must meetin order to have value as evidence against Smith. The letterforms in question must 1) represent Smith's normal ways of writing those letters; 2) be “highly individual” in relation to twentieth-century Greek writing; 3) be equally unusual for the eighteenth century; and 4) make sense as lapses or deliberate substitutions. Put differently, if these letterforms are easy to reproduce or appear consistently in MS 65, then the similarity to Smith's writing is probably coincidental. If they are normal for the eighteenth century, then there is no basis for treating them as suspicious. If they are commonplace in twentieth-century Greek handwriting, then there is no basis for ascribing them specifically to Smith. And if Smith normally wrote these letterforms in a different way, then Carlson's examples of Smith's Greek handwriting are unrepresentative, and there is no way to explain why forms that are atypical for Smith's writing would appear with any regularity in MS 65.

We begin our reassessment of Carlson's paleographical evidence with the two-stroke lambda. The top line of figure 3 reproduces the first fourteen lambdas in Smith's book Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels, where he added the Greek text by hand. The lambdas in the second line come from annotations in Smith's books and a letter he wrote in 1955. The third line, as best as I can determine using photographs, reproduces eight two-stroke lambdas from MS 65.³⁷

This figure readily illustrates the wide variation in the way Smith wrote this letterform. Note in particular the variations in the height of the left leg. We can quantify the range of this variation using the large sample of Greek writing in Tannaitic Parallels. There, 55 percent of the lambdas have a low left leg, 35 percent are formed with the left leg intersecting the middle of the right leg, and 10 percent intersect above the middle.³⁸ This natural variation in the way Smith wrote lambda is not reflected in MS 65, where 96 percent of the lambdas have a low left leg. The consistency of this feature in MS 65 eliminates the possibility that we are dealing with a forger's lapse here, as does the fact that a high left leg is too obvious a feature for a forger to overlook so consistently if it appeared in his or her exemplars.

Figure 4 compares Smith's one-stroke lambda with (what appear to me to be) eight one-stroke lambdas from MS 65.³⁹

With respect to frequency, Smith's one-stroke lambdas are rare (these are the only ones I have seen to date), whereas most of the lambdas in MS 65 appear to me to be rendered in one stroke. With respect to appearance, Smith's one-stoke lambdas look very different from his regular two-stroke lambdas, whereas the two types of lambdas in MS 65 normally take the same shape except for the fact that the pen does not leave the page in the one-stroke form. Smith's one-stroke lambdas are angled to the left, whereas those in the letter are roughly vertical or angled to the right. Most of Smith's one-stroke lambdas beginat the height of a tall Greekletter, whereas thoseinMS 65 always begin at the height of a small letter. The left leg of Smith's one-stroke lambdas is formed either as a right angle (which does not occur anywhere in MS 65) or as an arch to the left; as a consequence, this stroke retraces much less of the right leg if at all. The left leg of the one-stroke lambdas in MS 65 is usually formed by a stroke that retraces part way up the right leg before branching off in an abrupt, downward angle. The top of the right leg and the bottom of the left leg curve toward each other in MS 65 but not in Smith's writing. Thus, generally speaking, the pen strokes Smith made to produce his one-stroke lambdas are different from the ones made in MS 65. This fact is hard to explain if the latter represent an inveterate writing habit into which Smith constantly lapsed. Indeed, the premise that Smith used eighteenth-century exemplars containing lambdas with a high left leg but consistently overlooked this one obvious feature, lapsing instead into a letterform he rarely used and usually wrote very differently, makes no sense at all.

The only thing that is distinctive about the lambdas in MS 65 is the writer's preference for a low left leg. The majority of Greek writers in the eighteenth century preferred a high left leg, but there was also a minority who preferred the middle or a low left leg or showed no evident preference at all. This fact adequately explains why all of Carlson's examples from Mar Saba purportedly have a high left leg.

With respect to the small tau, Smith wrote it in both one and two strokes (the latter appears in Tannaitic Parallels). The single-stroke form used by Smith and MS 65 has been in common use in Greek handwriting for centuries and is anything but distinctive, let alone anomalous. Since this is the regular form of small tau in the letter, and its use is restricted to the article

(with one exception noted by Carlson),

⁴⁰

it also cannot be considered a lapse. Accordingly, we have no reason to view this letterform as suspicious or to connect it specifically with Smith.

The top line in figure 5 reproduces the first fourteen thetas in Tannaitic Parallels. The second line reproduces the first fourteen thetas that Smith wrote while making notes on C. H. Turner's study “Marcan Usage.”

⁴¹

The third line reproduces the first fourteen thetas in MS 65. As with the one-stroke tau, there is nothing unusual about the way Smith wrote the letter theta with a “leading horizontal stroke.” Smith and MS 65 usually employed the one-stroke cursive form of theta (

) that has been the standard form in Greek handwriting for many centuries. This “open theta” (also called script theta and curly theta) is common in printed books and is a familiar symbol in mathematics.

Again, what is most noticeable about Smith's open theta is the variation, which is even wider for this letter than it is for lambda, perhaps because open theta is more elaborate. Smith learned Greek as an adult and apparently wrote this letter too infrequently to develop a regular form. The more limited variation in MS 65, however, centers around a master pattern. The thetas in MS 65 are almost always completed with the stroke crossing the oval, and the top halves of the letter are generally (but not always) much larger, more open, and more rounded than the bottom halves, which appear tight and angular. The letter slants to the right. Smith, by contrast, had much less of a tendency to finish the stroke by crossing the oval and a greater tendency to write without a slant (a general difference between his Greek writing and MS 65).

The one aspect of this letterform that Carlson identified as a suspicious parallel between Smith and MS 65 is the “leading horizontal stroke at midline” (e.g.,

). Forms of open theta without a leading stroke (

) or with a stroke that curves upward on an angle from below midline (

) appear in the eighteenth-century Mar Saba manuscripts that Carlson presented as comparisons. He describes this difference imprecisely, however, for as the extended comparisons in figure 5 reveal, both Smith's writing and that of MS 65 exhibit no fixed angle or length of leading stroke. The variability in the way they render this feature is common in informal Greek handwriting.MS 65is basically an informal documentary hand. Although the distinction is not clear-cut, it is the more formal and aesthetic book hands, like the ones in Carlson's figures 2b and 2c, that attempt to keep this feature of the letter consistent and, in some cases, ornate. If there is anything unusual here, it is the fact that Smith's leading stroke frequently descends on an angle.

Given the wide variation in the way Smith wrote this letterform, it is easy to find the occasional “match” between one of his thetas and one in MS 65, but to present such random similarities as evidence of common authorship is highly dubious. For in handwriting identification, what matters is agreement in the master pattern and in the range of natural variation, which we clearly do not have here.

None of Carlson's four alleged similarities between Smith's writing and MS 65 satisfy more than one of the four criteria for evidence of common authorship. It is hard to imagine a less compelling paleographical argument tying this manuscript to Morton Smith.

Later in his book Carlson mentions in passing the existence of “modern letter forms” in MS 65.⁴²

This statement is surprising because he did not establish that any of the letterforms in this manuscript do not appear in eighteenth-century Greek handwriting. He merely mischaracterized these four letterforms as “anomalous” because they purportedly do not appear in the samples he obtained of eighteenth-century manuscripts from Mar Saba.

Exhibit Three: The Allusion to Morton Salt

Argument: We return to Carlson's exposé of deliberate clues left by Morton Smith. Carlson detects an intentional anachronism in the Letter to Theodore 1.11–15, which reads, “Now of the things they [the Carpocratians] keep saying about the divinely inspired Gospel according to Mark, some are altogether falsifications, and others, even if they do contain some true elements, nevertheless are not reported truly. For the true things, being mixed with inventions, are falsified, so that, as the saying goes, even the salt loses its savor.” The problem with this statement, as Carlson sees it, is that “it presupposes salt technology that did not exist in Clement's place and time”:

Carlson explains that for “the modern reader of Theodore … the salt allusion is natural: free-flowing salt was and continues to be mixed with other ingredients perceived as affecting its taste. This was particularly true starting in the 1930s when Morton Salt added another ingredient to their table salt, harsh-tasting potassium iodide for the prevention of endemic goiter.”⁴⁴

But for an ancient reader, the salt metaphor would not make sense, for the technology did not exist for mixing salt with other foodstuffs, and the adulteration of salt was not an issue. We have no evidence of the intentional adulteration of salt “even in Pliny's encyclopedic discussion of adulterated foodstuffs.” So the letter contains a metaphor that would not have made sense to its reader prior to Morton Salt's invention. Morton Salt contains Smith's given name, so Smith himself planted this “damning” “technological anachronism” as a clue to his authorship.⁴⁵

Assessment: This argument is one long sequence of mistakes, beginning with Carlson's initial premise that “the imagery in Theodore involves mixing an adulterant with salt and spoiling its taste.”⁴⁶

The letter nowhere refers to salt being mixed with anything. It is “the true things” spoken by the Carpocratians that are mixed with inventions, so presumably Carlson has inferred that the salt saying is intended as an analogy for how the true things are made false, as if the author wrote, “for the true things, being mixed with inventions, are falsified, just as salt (being mixed with adulterants) loses its savor.”

But that is not what the author wrote. The syntax of the sentence precludes the dependent clause containing the salt saying from reiterating the independent clause in the form of an analogy. Instead, the conjunction

indicates that the dependent clause conveys a consequence or result of the independent clause.

⁴⁷

The coordinating conjunction is properly translated “so that” or “with the result that” instead of “just as” or “much as,” which is what an analogy requires. Furthermore, the phrase “as indeed the saying goes” (

) indicates that the salt saying is being employed in its conventional sense, which is unlikely to have anything to do with how salt loses its savor. The proverbial meaning of the expression “even the salt loses its savor” is evident from its connection with two sayings of Jesus, specifically, “Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its saltness, how will you season it?” (Mark 9:50//Luke 14:34) and “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men” (Matt 5:13// Luke 14:35). In both cases, salt signifies goodness or a good influence, whereas the loss of its taste signifies uselessness.

⁴⁸

Thus salt losing its savor is a metaphor for the loss of innate goodness and value. The adverb “even” (

) indicates that this loss is surprising.

None of the words coordinating the salt saying with the preceding clause make sense within an interpretation that supposes that the dependent clause reiterates the independent clause in the form of an analogy. That fact is readily illustrated by adding into the sentence the words that Carlson assumes to be implicit:

Clearly the comparison that Carlson imagines must be expressed differently:

Carlson's theory requires not only a thorough revision of the coordinating words but also a strictly literal reading of the word salt, despite its connection with the metaphorical sayings in the gospels. What Carlson offers us, then, is not a “damning” anachronism, but unseasoned exegesis.

In order to appreciate the actual metaphorical comparison expressed through the salt saying, we must interpret this saying as a corollary of the mixing of “true things” with “inventions.” The true things in question are the passages from the longer Gospel of Mark that Theodore wrote to Clement about. Clement is explaining to Theodore that these passages have been falsified by the “inventions” and “shameless lies” that Carpocrates added to his copy of this gospel, such as the words “naked man with naked man” and “the many other things about which [Theodore] wrote” (Letter to Theodore 1.13–14; 2.8–9; 3.13, 17). The additions “polluted” the longer text of the Carpocratians, with the result that “the spotless and holy words” inspired by God have been nullified. What is implicit within this sentence may be rendered so:

This statement does not imply Carlson's notion of salt being mixed with other substances, and the sentence would make little sense if it appeared there.

The problems with Carlson's exposition of an anachronism alluding to “the iodization of table salt by the Morton Salt Company” extend beyond the syntax of the sentence to the literal sense and proverbial point of the expression “even the salt loses its savor.”

⁴⁹

The verb in this phrase (the passive of

) means either to become insipid (without taste) or to become foolish (without wisdom).

⁵⁰

When applied to food and condiments, it refers to a lack of taste, not a modification in taste. Clearly, the addition of iodine does not cause table salt to become insipid (would anyone use it if it did?), so Carlson's focus on a chemical that supposedly adds a sharpness to salt disregards the literal meaning of the saying. In point of fact, the added iodine has no demonstrable effect on the taste of salt, so Carlson's reference to “harsh-tasting potassium iodide”is simply deceptive.⁵¹

Iodized table salt not only tastes the same as plain table salt but also retains all of its other beneficial qualities. It is in fact more beneficial than plain table salt because it counters iodine deficiency disorders, including goiter, hypothyroidism, and cretinism, so the proposed allusion to iodized salt also disregards the point of this expression, which is that something intrinsically beneficial can become worthless. Again, these problems are readily illustrated by rewriting the sentence to fit Carlson's argument:

Carlson's theory requires this nonsensical revision of the salt metaphor because the table salt produced by Morton Salt, and other salt companies, is a highly refined form of a stable chemical compound, sodium chloride. Pure salt cannot lose its savor. The imagery in the letter presupposes an impure form of salt that can lose its sodium chloride without the compound disappearing altogether. Many of the salts used in antiquity were of this sort. As Pliny noted, the salt in these impure compounds was occasionally dissolved away by water, leaving “salt” that lacked its distinctive savor: “The drier the salt, the stronger it is in taste; but the most agreeable of all, and the whitest known, is that of Tarentum. In addition to these particulars, we would remark also, that the whiter saltis, the more friableitis. Rain water deadens every kind of salt, but dew-water makes it more delicate in flavour” (Naturalis historia 31.41).⁵²

The fact that sodium chloride dissolves more readily than the other compounds in complex salts creates a serious problem when these salts are stored on earthen floors, for if the ground becomes damp, “the sodium chloride [is] dissolved and leached away,” leaving a residue that, as Jesus put it, “is no longer good for anything.”⁵³

In addition to these exegetical errors, Carlson has erred in supposing that salt needs to be processed and “free flowing”in orderforits taste to be modified through interaction with other substances. When theological dictionaries explain how salt can lose its savor, they often note that “the complex salts of Palestine … can lose savor through physical disintegration or through mixture with gypsum.”⁵⁴

When windblown gypsum dust covers salt, it masks the sodium chloride, leaving “a stale and alkaline taste.”⁵⁵ Thus, impure salt can lose its sodium chloride (through leaching or disintegration) or acquire an unpleasant taste (through mixture with gypsum) prior to being processed. Furthermore, the free-flowing property of modern table salt is not a requirement for mixing. For thousands of years, people have used mortar and pestle to grind chunks of salt into grains that are small enough to sprinkle onto food and mix with other substances. Thus Morton Salt's invention of an anti-caking agent is irrelevant to our understanding of the letter's salt metaphor, which envisions complex salts and is not at all concerned with how salt loses its taste but merely with the fact that this sometimes happens. Although the deadeningof salt's taste was unusual, the ancients were more familiar with this phenomenon than are patrons of Morton Salt. It is the modern readers of the gospels who wonder how salt can lose its savor and need to be told that unprocessed salt is often impure. The salt saying in the letter would have made more sense to Clement's contemporaries than it does to us.

Exhibit Four: The Confession Hidden in the Ellipsis

Argument: Having misinterpreted the words “even the salt loses its savor” as a deliberate anachronism, Carlson proceeds to argue that Smith covertly embedded his surname in the section of his commentary that discusses this metaphor as part of his supposed confession of authorship. No, the word Smith does not actually appear here. But another word containing the word smith, at least when translated into English (“every goldsmith [

] is put to shame by his idols”), would have appeared in the ellipsis of a sentence that Smith quoted from the Septuagint translation of Jeremiah:

Carlson finds Smith's suggestion of an allusion to Jeremiah very suspicious. Translating the sentence from Jeremiah as “every person is made dull from knowledge … because they have cast false things, there is no breath in them,” he notes that “the linkage to Matthew 5:13's use of ‘cast out’ works only in English, not in Greek…. The only verbal commonality in the Greek lies in different forms of the verb

…. Such an allusion based on casting out could only be ‘typical of Clement’ if Clement knew English.”

⁵⁷

For Carlson, Smith's confusion is unthinkable “in light of his otherwise superlative exegetical ability,” so it must be a deliberate hint that the allusion to Jeremiah is about something else. Carlson finds the clue to Smith's intention in Smith's next sentence, which notes that for Clement, “the salt of the earth” signifies the true gnostics who hide away mysteriesin the depth of thought. In Carlson's words, “The connection between Morton Smith and Morton Salt signifies that this comment applies to himself—that he has hidden away a mystery not to be uttered. Smith's use of an ellipsis in the Jeremiah 28:17 passage is the ‘unuttered mystery’ to which he then refers.” The statement about goldsmithsin the ellipsis thusindicates thatlonger Mark is “a graven image that will confound its own smith: Morton Smith.”⁵⁸

Assessment: Carlson's rationale for taking the ellipsis as a cleverly concealed mystery hinges upon the letter's allusion to Morton Salt, which does not exist, and the premise that Smith's inference of an allusion to Jeremiah is based on Smith's association of two words that can be rendered as homonyms in English but have no connection in Greek. I concur that such an association would be a “howler.”

⁵⁹

But since Smith left the sentence from Jeremiah untranslated and did not call attention to the words “cast out” when summarizing Matt 5:13, it is not at all clear that Smith did associate Jeremiah's “cast (a mould)” with Matthew's “cast (something) out.” Carlson simply inferred this association. Evidently he reasoned that the shared verb

in the saying: “But if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored?” and the passage in Jeremiah is not enough to justify Smith's claim of an allusion, so Smith must have implied that the passage in Jeremiah in some way parallels the idea of “corrupted Christians fit only to be cast out.” Since the only commonality Carlson could perceive between Matt 5:13b and the quotation from Jeremiah was the verb “cast” in his own English translation, Carlson deduced that Smith made an unthinkable exegetical error.

Apparently Carlson did not consider the possibility that the parallelism with Matt 5:13b exists not in the words Smith quoted from Jeremiah but in the continuation of this verse indicated by “(and ff)” at the end of Smith's quotation. Smith would not have added “ff” unless the words following the quoted words were relevant to the point he was trying to make, and indeed the next sentence in Jeremiah parallels the concepts of worthlessness and destruction in Matt 5:13b:

In other words, the parallelism Smith perceived involved not only the context of the Greek words that he quoted from Matthew and Luke but also the context of the Greek words that he quoted from Jeremiah. It had nothing to do with the English word “cast.” The ellipsis in Smith's quotation is a straightforward indication that the omitted words were not relevant to his point.

Although the allusion to Jeremiah that Smith proposed is not particularly convincing, it is not nearly so incredible as the mystery Carlson read into this allusion based on his own English translation of Jer 28:17 and neglect of Smith's appeal to the larger context. Carlson's highly unorthodox approach to interrogating texts has elicited another false confession.

Preamble to Exhibit Five: The Life Setting of the Gospel Excerpts

Argument: Carlson's last argument connecting the Letter to Theodore with Morton Smith is the most complicated. Essentially, he tries to show that the reference to the mystery of the kingdom of God in the letter's gospel quotation connotes a forbidden sexual encounter (homosexuality) using a twentieth-century euphemism and that Smith made this association in his writings prior to his discovery of the text. Instead of summarizing this lengthy argument at the outset, I shall critique it step by step. This topic requires familiarity with the gospel quotation, so I shall begin by reproducing Smith's English translation, using the standard versification:

Assessment: Carlson's attempt to prove that these verses anachronistically depict a modern homosexual encounter begins with an attempt to prove that the sentence “and he remained with him that night, for Jesus was teaching him the mystery of the kingdom of God” is a creation by the author of “secret” Mark: “The latter part of this sentence is a close parallel to Mark 4:11 but the main clause does not parallel the gospels but rather is crafted by the author of Secret Mark. Both its climactic location [within the pericope] and its composed, unparalleled nature indicate that it was carefully constructed by its author.”⁶⁰

It is difficult to follow the logic here. Even if the clause “and he remained with him that night” were unparalleled in the gospels (it does have a parallel), that would not prove that the author of “secret” Mark composed it. When unique statements in the gospels contain no traces of redaction, scholars are free to ascribe them to oral tradition. Carlson cannot exclude that possibility here without presuming what he ultimately intends to prove, namely, that longer Mark is a modern composition. And why should the climactic position of this sentence prove that it was composed—even carefully composed—by the author of longer Mark? The climax of a gospel pericope is frequently the most secure traditional element, as in the case of pronouncement sayings at the conclusion of controversy stories.⁶¹

Having reasoned that the clause “and he remained with him that night” is an important sentence created by the author of longer Mark, Carlson attempts to prove that this sentence does not mean what it says. The obvious meaning, which is that the young man stayed with Jesus after sunset because Jesus was teaching him, is rejected by Carlson because it is too “bland” to fit the “compositional importance” of the sentence and would simply repeat information the reader already knows about Jesus’ “lodging arrangement.”⁶²

Both claims areincorrect. The reader will probably infer that Jesus resided at the young man's house for a week but has no reason to infer that they shared the same room at night. Ordinary hospitality dictates that a guest in a rich man's house receive a guest room. Paul, for instance, expected Philemon to prepare a guest room for him in case he showed up (Philemon's house was large enough to accommodate a church; see Phlm 1–2, 22). The fact that the young man comes to Jesus rather than the other way around, even though they are both inside the young man's house, makes more sense if Jesus had a guest room.⁶³ So the reader will probably not assume that Jesus and the young man stayed together in the same room every night and that the clause “and he remained with him that night” is superfluous. Rather, this clause implies that this was the only night that the young man remained in Jesus’ room.

Carlson's argument that this clause cannot mean something as banal as it appears to mean is disproved by a parallel to this statement in John 1:39: “They [two disciples of John] came and saw where he [Jesus] was staying; and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour.” As Raymond E. Brown pointed out, the verbal parallels with LGM 1:12 are strong:

In his 1966 commentary on the Gospel of John, Brown reasoned that the phrase “they remained with him that day” probably means that the disciples stayed with Jesus overnight, because the tenth hour, according to the Jewish reckoning of time, is about fourin the afternoon(a new day begins at sunset).

⁶⁴

The narratoris explaining that these two individuals lodged with Jesus because the hour was already late. Carlson discounted this parallelby observing that “the preposition,[the]word order, the time period, and the number of the verb are all different,” adding that “Brown's proposed parallel in another gospel actually shows how different [sic, distinctive?] this clause is.”⁶⁵

Of course, if these features were exactly the same in both texts, we would not be dealing with a parallel at all but with a repetition. What makes a parallel a parallel and not a repetition are the differences. One could argue, for example, that “even the salt loses its savor” is unrelated to “But if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored?” by noting even more of the same sort of differences, but that maneuver would ignore the patent similarities that make the comparison legitimate and helpful. In the case of John 1:39b and LGM 1:12a, none of the verbal differences affect the meaning: the different prepositions and time periods are semantically equivalent; the different position of the verb in relation to the prepositional phrase is semantically irrelevant; and the different number of the verb

merely reflects the different number of the subject. Moreover, there is a remarkable agreement between these two incidents: They take place in an otherwise unattested “Bethany” on the east side of the Jordan River (John 1:28; LGM 1:1).

⁶⁶

This fact indicates that LGM 1:12a is a different form of John 1:39b and not just a similar sentence.

Other similarities between LGM 1:8–13 and John 1:35–40 are worth noting at this point. In both passages admirers of Jesus look intently at him, and men who have just met him express their desire to become disciples by indicating that they want to be with him. In the Fourth Gospel, John the Baptist, “looking upon Jesus” (

), says, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” Hearing this, two of his disciples start to follow Jesus, the way disciples follow their teacher. When Jesus asks, “What do you seek?” they phrase their request to become his disciples as, “‘Rabbi’ (which means Teacher), ‘where are you staying?’” Jesus replies, “Come and see.” In other words, they express a desire to be with him, and Jesus consents. In longer Mark, as soon as Jesus raises the young man, the latter, “looking upon him [

] loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him.” They then go to his house. That this request to “be with him” is a request to be a disciple is evident from the larger context. Mark used the words “began to beseech him that he might be with him” (5:18; exactly in D) to describe the way the man formerly possessed by Legion implored Jesus to let him join his group. Jesus declined but commissioned him to preach on his own. Mark likewise used the expression “to be with him” (3:14) to denote Jesus’ closest disciples: “And he appointed twelve, to be with him, and to be sent out to preach.” So although these two accounts of men staying with Jesus in Bethany differ in many respects, they are different versions of the same story, much as LGM 1:1–7 and John 10:40–11:46 are different versions of the same raising miracle.

This parallel story in the Gospel of John proves that a gospel pericope can end with a banal description of Jesus staying overnight with an anonymous disciple without this comment requiring “anidiomatic meaning that goes beyond merelodg-ing.”

⁶⁷

Indeed, the banality of this incident within the context of the Fourth Gospel is perhaps the most interesting thing about it, for whereas LGM 1:12 indicates that Jesus spent the night teaching his new disciple the mystery that separates “those outside” from disciples (Mark 4:10–12), John 1:39 simply indicates that Jesus stayed overnight with two new disciples because it made sense for them to do that. This information seems so unedifying that some commentators feel compelled to propose that the verb

(“remained”) must have the theological overtones of “abiding in” Christ and his teachings that it later acquires in the course of John's narrative.

⁶⁸

In other words, they read into this statement an evening of theological teaching, like LGM 1:12. But no one supposes that the incident is actually about casual sex.

What Carlson wants to suggest, of course, is that “remained with him that night” must be a euphemism for sexual intercourse, specifically, the twentieth-century euphemism “spent the night together” or “spent the night with him.” The longer gospel's own explanation for why the young man stayed with Jesus that night poses a problem for this thesis becauseit confines their activity toinstruction and specifies the subject matter as the same eschatological mystery that is concealed within the parables of Mark 4. Carlson solves this problem by rewriting the sentence: “The clause's bland recital of their lodging arrangement thus conveys almost no additional information and belongs more to the background, forinstance, with somethinglike: ‘Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God, for he spent that night with him.’”⁶⁹

Now spending that night together is itself the mystery of the kingdom of God and not the circumstance in which Jesus imparted an eschatological mystery. Eventually, the adjective that drops out of Carlson's translation as he silently assimilates the actual phrase “stayed with him that night” to the actual idiom “spent the night with him.” It hardly needs to be said that rewriting a sentence in order to make it express a preconceived meaning does not constitute exegesis. Exegesis is reading out of a sentence the meaning that it has within its immediate and larger contexts. Where gospels are concerned, this involves reading it as part of a pericope and reading that pericope as an episode within a larger narrative. It also involves respecting theliterary techniques employed by the author, since these exist to guide the reader's interpretation. This is the domain of narrative criticism, and it is the method I followed in part 2 of Mark's Other Gospel.

Longer Mark's incident of nocturnal instruction makes sense within the larger context of Mark's gospel as an incident of private discipleship instruction. In Mark 4:10–12, Jesus revealed to “those who were about him with the twelve” that a particular mystery concerning the coming reign of God has been reserved for them. “Those outside” are prevented from understanding this mystery by the fact that, to them, “everything occurs in parables” (i.e., riddles), with the result that they do not understand what they see and hear and accordingly do not repent and receive forgiveness. Both the insiders and the outsiders “see” and “hear” the parabolic deeds and words of Jesus, but only the insiders receive private explanations relating to this mystery. Since this mystery “has been given” to the larger group of Jesus’ disciples, and Jesus granted the young man's request to “be with him,” the young man likewise receives private instruction in the mystery of the kingdom of God. As with the parable discourse, the author does not directly disclose the content of this mystery to the reader but does supply enough clues to allow the reader to perceive its meaning.⁷⁰

There are two more steps in Carlson's argument for reading “remained with him that night” as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. First, he notes that longer Mark “contains explicit statements of love between the two males plus Jesus’ rejection of three different women”; these details establish “an exclusive sexual preference” for Jesus.⁷¹

The phrases in question are “But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him” and “the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them.” Carlson offers no explanation for his simplistic equation of love and rejection with sexual orientation, presumably because this equation would be difficult to substantiate exegetically. The obvious reason for the young man's love for Jesus is the fact that Jesus delivered him from the grave. The platonic nature of this love is evident from his immediate resolve to become Jesus’ disciple. Like the man who had been possessed by Legion, the young man responded to his savior by begging to join his group.

Jesus’love for the young manis conveyed as an afterthoughtin LGM 2:1, where the sister is described as “the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved.” What is the nature of this love? Some scholars, including Smith, suppose that this rich young man is the same man who asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Of him, the narrator reported, “And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said to him, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor’” (Mark 10:21). I doubt that these men are the same individual.⁷²

In my view, the phrase “whom Jesus loved” signifies a bond of friendship like the parallel description of Lazarus in John 11:3: “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” This bond is much more emphatic in John's version of this story, where Jesus actually cries at Lazarus's tomb and “the Jews” remark, “See how he loved him!” (11:5, 35–36).

Carlson'sinference that LGM 2 helps establish Jesus’ exclusive sexualpreference is even more arbitrary and implausible. A variety of motives could explain Jesus’ refusal to meet with these three women. One very plausible explanation emerges from Jesus’ actions earlierin this narrative. At Mark 3:19b–21, 31–35, Jesus’ mother and brothers resolved to take control of him, but when they arrived at his home, Jesus refused to receive them, explaining to those around him that his true family consists of those who do the will of God. Given this precedent, the reader may infer that the same thing is happening in LGM 2. The young man's mother and sister intend to assert control over the son (it is unclear whether Salome is related to them), but Jesus anticipates theirintentions and refuses to give them an audience. This action says no more about Jesus’ sexual orientation than did his rudeness to the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:24–30). Carlson's presumption that Jesus rejects the women because they are women disregards the fact that homosexuality is a sexual orientation, not a generalized aversion to the opposite sex. Indeed, gay men often have enviably close friendships with women. The only way homosexuality could explain Jesus’ rudeness in LGM 2 is if we presume, on the one hand, that the three women intended to seduce Jesus, and, on the other, that the immorality of having sex with a disciple's mother and her daughter and a third woman is not a sufficient reason for him to snub them. Why would we assume this?

Other explanations of LGM 2:2 are possible as well. Some scholars have interpreted Jesus’ rudeness in terms of male chauvinism. Cyril C. Richardson, for instance, suggested that this verse “perhaps … reflects an Encratite group which did reject women.”

⁷³

Smith himself viewed the clause “and Jesus did not receive them” as a gloss added by a redactor who eliminated a discourse between Jesus and Salome. Smith reasoned that “the story, as it stands, can have been invented and preserved only as polemic against these women or their followers or persons who appealed to their authority (as the Carpocratians did to that of Salome: Origen, Contra Celsum V.62).”⁷⁴

Thus Smith believed that longer Mark originally depicted Jesus accepting and conversing with these women, indeed, validating Salome's authority. Smith never changed his mind about this. The annotation on page 190 of his personal copy of Clement acknowledges Richardson's explanation of LGM 2:2 and then states, “But he doesn’t notice that it's secondary.” Two years before his death Smith encouraged John Dart to eliminate LGM 2:2 from his reconstruction of the original form of Mark because Mark would not have used the Lukan-sounding verb

(“received”).

⁷⁵

Carlson's sexual interpretation of this verse is not only implausible but also incompatible with that of the man who he claims is its author.

Carlson's argument for reading “and he remained with him that night” as a twentieth-century euphemism concludes with an attempt to demonstrate that ancient readers would have detected nothing sexual in this statement because 1) it has no euphemistic meaning in Greek and 2) homosexual relationships in the Roman world normally occurred between persons of unequal status, whereas the twenty-something rich man and the thirty-something messiah were social equals. Only modern readers, who are familiar with the English euphemism “spent the night together” and with homosexual relationships between social peers, could see the sexual import of this encounter.⁷⁶

This argument actually undermines Carlson's thesis, because it takes no account of the fact that the social world in which the nocturnal instruction occurs is first-century Palestine. If the sentence

is not a euphemism in Greek and would imply nothing sexual within the social world represented in this text, then there can be no justification for rendering this sentence as a sexual euphemism. It helps little to complain that Smith's translation is “wooden” and to point out that Smith advocated “idiomatic renderings.”

⁷⁷

What Smith advocated is idiomatic parity: if a phrase has an idiomatic meaning within the vernacular employed by the author, then it should receive a comparable idiomatic rendering in translation.

⁷⁸

It is precisely because the words

do not constitute a sexual euphemism in koine Greek that the unidiomatic translation “remained with him that night” is appropriate in LGM 1:12.

Ultimately, this compendium ofargumentsis meant to prove that LGM 1 reflects a particular life setting within 1950s America:

Since none of Carlson's arguments in support of reading LGM 1 as a “sexually charged” homosexual encounter bears scrutiny, this attempt to assign longer Mark to “a specific moment within a changing twentieth-century legal landscape that peaked in the 1950s” cannot be any more compelling.⁸⁰

In fact, it is remarkably less compelling, for it is predicated on a patently false statement about what “Secret Mark easily conjures up to the twentieth-century reader.” Among the hundreds of twentieth-century discussions of “secret” Mark that exist in print and on the inter net, I have yet to come across the observation that LGM 1 implies that “Jesus was arrested for soliciting a homoerotic encounter in a public garden.” There are two good reasons actual readers of longer Mark (or, more accurately, of canonical Mark supplemented with LGM 1 and 2) do not make this inference. First, this gospel is set in first-century Palestine and not twentieth-century America. A man who lived two thousand years ago in another part of the world cannot be busted by the NYPD vice squad on charges of public lewdness. Second, Mark made it perfectly clear that Jesus was arrested because Judas betrayed him to members of the Sanhedrin and that Jesus was tried on false allegations of threatening the temple. His arrest by “a crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the scribes and the elders” is in no way connected with the young man who suddenly appears as Jesus is being led away. These constraints upon the reading process prevent real readers from imagining the scenario that Carlson claims it naturally evokes.

The only support that Carlson can muster for this implausible reading of Mark 14:51–52 is Smith's “inference” “that both young men came to Jesus seeking the same thing (Clement 177; Secret Gospel 81).” This comment appears to imply that Smith read 14:51–52 as intimating a homosexual encounter. What Smith actually stated in those two books is that “this youth, too, had come to be baptized”: “The business in hand was a baptism; the youth wore the required costume. The time—night—agrees with the storyin the secret gospel;the place—beside a stream in a lonely garden—is suitable.”⁸¹

In other words, Smith fit this pericope within his theory that Jesus offered a mystery-cult rite called the mystery of the kingdom of God, whereby the initiate united with his spirit and ascended by hallucination to God's heavenly kingdom, where he or she was freed from the obligation to keep the Torah.⁸² Smith's notorious speculation about physical symbolism of spiritual union being a conceivable(reread thelast word)elementin this baptism waslimited to two brief comments that he made in Clement and Secret Gospel.⁸³ When Smith raised the specter of homosexuality in connection with the naked flight of the young man in Gethsemane, it was always as a foil to make his baptismal explanation appear more plausible. Specifically, in his replies to Reginald Fuller, Frans Neirynck, and Frank Kermode, he argued that the information about the naked flight of a young man during Jesus’ arrest is historically reliable because it is too “embarrassing” and unedifying to have been invented by Christians (as a tradition, it has no apparent Sitz im Leben). Although this detail “is apt to elicit a snigger from the modern reader” (i.e., “Holy man arrested … naked youth escapes”), it must have meant something very different to the evangelist Mark or he would not have included it. Given the facts that some mystery and magical initiations included a linen sheet worn over the naked body and that such a sheet eventually became the Christian baptismal garment, Mark (and the tradents before him) probably believed that the young man was dressed for baptism.⁸⁴ In other words, Smith rejected a gay reading of Mark 14:51–52 as incapable of explaining the preservation of this incident in a canonical gospel.

Argument: Unfortunately for Carlson, the last of his arguments connecting the Letter to Theodore to Morton Smith flows from the previous one. Carlson claims that Smith placed his own seal of authorship (sphragis) on the Letter to Theodore:

The statements in question appear in Smith's 1951 book Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels, which is a revised form of his 1948 dissertation, and a paper titled “The Image of God,” which was published “in March of 1958, … right before he returned to Mar Saba.”

⁸⁶

The former mentions Mark 4:11–12 in a paragraph that also mentions t. Óag. 2.1; the latter cites in a footnote a passage from Clement's Stromateis as a point of comparison to the rabbinic secrecy concerning Ezekiel's vision of the throne of God, which is mentioned in t.

ag. 2.1 and its parallels.

Why is this significant? According to Carlson, t.

ag. 2.1 mentions “forbidden sexual relationships,” which is what “the mystery of the kingdom of God” denotes in longer Mark. This connection proves that Smith knew about the sexual nature of the mystery of the kingdom of God and linked it with Clement's secrecy before he discovered this text.

⁸⁷

Assessment: Clearly the key to this argument is the claim that both t.

ag. 2.1 and LGM 1:12 are about forbidden sexual relations and that Smithintended to draw this connection in his dissertation; otherwise, the former passage just happens to be something Smith mentioned once in the same context as Mark 4:11–12, and again, some years later, in the same context in which he mentioned Clement's reluctance to put secret teachings in writing. I have argued at length elsewhere that LGM 1:12 is not about gay sex.

⁸⁸

What I intend to show here is that the “connection” between t.

ag. 2.1 and Mark 4:11–12 in Smith's dissertation has nothing to do with forbidden sexual relationships and that Smith's interpretation of Mark 4:11–12 was in no sense sexual prior to 1958.

Let us look at the passage from Smith's dissertation:

As Smith explicitlyindicated, the point atissuein this paragraphis the fact that both the Christians and the Tannaim drew a distinction between exoteric and esoteric teaching. What those subjects consisted of does not matter here. Smith was simply describing “parallels with a fixed difference,” as the title of this chapter of his book indicates. Carlson's quotation of this paragraph ends before the reference to the account of creation and the vision of the chariot (i.e., the throne of God), which would have put the reference to the Leviticallaws about “forbidden sexualrelationships” (incest, intercourse during menstruation, adultery, male homosexuality, and bestiality) in a different light. As Joachim Jeremias explained, these passages from the Jewish scriptures concern “the deepest secrets of the divine being,” such as “theosophy and cosmogony,” which must be apprehended with “great respect.”

⁹⁰

Jeremias made the same point years earlier in his book Die Abendmahlsworte Jesu, where he discussed t.

ag. 2.1 as evidence of the esotericism of the scribes and cited 1 Cor 2:6–3:2, the concept of “those outside” (

) and “the mystery of the kingdom of God” from Mark 4:11–12, and other New Testament passages as points of comparison.

⁹¹

Carlson's attempt to associate Smith's reference to “the mystery of the kingdom of God” in Tannaitic Parallels with forbidden sexual relations makes nonsense of the fact that in the same book Smith associated possession of this mystery with increased virtue. Smith cited Mark 4:11–12 as an example of “the rather interesting theory, not found in all systems of moral theology, that God helps the good to become better and the bad worse. The latter element of this theory is expressed in the Gospels … by … [the words] ‘To those who are outside all things are in parables, in order that they may surely look and not see, and may surely hear and not understand, lest they should turn back and be forgiven,’ and ‘in [Tannaitic literature] … by the rule ‘That the virtuous are caused to perform acts of virtue, and sinners acts of sin.’” ⁹²

The logic of Smith's interpretation indicates that it is “those outside” who are made to sin, not the insiders to whom the mystery of the kingdom of God is given. God helps them to perform his will (i.e., the Law).

When Smith wrote Tannaitic Parallels, he viewed the whole of Mark 4:11–12 as a Christian invention, as the words Carlson quoted suggest: “Such a doctrine is suggested by the words put in the mouth of Jesus, speaking to his disciples: ‘To you is given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but to those outside.…”⁹³

Smith's rationale for dissociating this sayingfrom the historical Jesus is apparent in Smith's 1955 article on Vincent Taylor's commentary on Mark:

In both this article and Tannaitic Parallels, Smith interpreted Mark 4:11 in light of 4:12. He was highly critical of “T[aylor]'s attempt to escape the obvious meaning” of this saying by proposing that “the ‘parables’ originally meant riddles and the statement as a whole meant, ‘In spite of all I do to make myself clear, it's Greek to them.’”⁹⁵

This explanation struck Smith as an apologetic attempt to neutralize Mark'simage of Jesus deliberately preventing his fellow Jews from believingin him and being saved.⁹⁶ Smith's own critique of Taylor's position became problematic after he adopted Cyril C. Richardson's hypothesis that LGM 1:10–12 depicted a baptism and decided that the phrase “the mystery of the kingdom of God” denoted a baptismal mystery initiation.⁹⁷ Thus in Clement Smith made a silent about-face and approved the position of Taylor (and Jeremias before him) that Mark 4:11–12 was “an old logion” that originally referred not to parables but to the idea that for outsiders “everything is puzzling.”⁹⁸ This reversal allowed Smith to sever the mystery of the kingdom of God from its literary context, wherein it denotes a secret doctrine hidden in the parables, and to interpret it as a rite that the historical Jesus gave to his disciples.

The fact that prior to 1958 Smith associated possession of the mystery of the kingdom of God with moral improvement and viewed Mark 4:11–12 as a polemical Christian invention intended to defend Jesus’ messiahship negates Carlson's simplistic position that Smith “connected” the mystery of the kingdom of God with forbidden sexual relations because the two ideas appear in the same paragraph. Like Jeremias before him, Smith cited Mark 4:11–12 as a salient example of “the fact that an important part of primitive Christianity was a secret doctrine which was revealed only to trusted members.”

As for Smith's mentioning of t.

ag. 2.1 and Clement's Stromateis in two consecutive footnotes in an article published a few months before he returned to Mar Saba, it is hard to see any veiled significance to this fact. The proximity of this publication to Smith's stay in Mar Saba is coincidental. Carlson's statement that “Smith revisited this Talmudic passage right before he returned to Mar Saba”

⁹⁹

requires his reader to overlook the process of peer review, the queue for accepted articles, and Smith's statement in the first footnote that this article was based on three lectures he gave at the Hebrew Teachers’ College, Boston, in 1955.¹⁰⁰

The sequence of footnotes citing

agigah and Clement is no more suspicious than the timing of the article's publication. Again, Smith was discussing secret doctrines, and Clementis the most obvious Christian example of the widespread philosophical attitude that the most profound doctrines should not be put in writing:

¹⁰¹

The relevant footnotes read:

Notice that, contrary to Carlson's introduction to this passage, Smith did not link Clement with both Mark 4:11 and t.

ag. 2.1 in this passage.

¹⁰²

Smith said nothing here of Mark 4:11 and simply compared the rabbinic secrecy about the doctrine of the throne of God with Clement's secrecy. Smith did not even mention the Levitical laws concerning forbidden sexual relationships when describing t.

ag. 2.1, since the only part of that passage that concerned him was its reference to secrecy in connection with Ezekiel's vision of the throne of God. Indeed, the throne imagery and its connection with Tannaitic esotericism is the only real overlap between the paragraph from Tannaitic Parallels and the paragraph from “The Image of God.”

Carlson's discovery that Smith possessed “the crucial linkage between Mark's mystery of the kingdom of God, forbidden sexual practices, and Clement of Alexandria's discussion of secrecy” before going to Mar Saba in 1958 is yet another figment of his imagination.¹⁰³

Longer Mark does not depict homosexual sex; Smith did not connect the mystery of the kingdom of God with homosexuality or any other “forbidden sexual practices” before he discovered the manuscript; and he did not connect this mystery or homosexuality with Clement's reluctance to put certain doctrines in writing.¹⁰⁴

Conclusion

According to The Gospel Hoax, Morton Smith invented “secret” Mark as a hoax in the 1950s in order to suggest that the authorities who were clamping down on gay sex in public parks were “crucifying Jesus Christ all over again” but then spent years researching his own hoax and developing a different, scholarly interpretation so that he could distract people from its true meaning and thereby successfully dupe his colleagues, using this text as a private test of their competence.¹⁰⁵

It is little wonder that Carlson devotes one paragraph to Smith's eighty-three-page analysis of the historical background to the initiation story¹⁰⁶ and skirts the fact that Smith defended the various components of this theory in numerous articles from 1967 until his death in 1991.¹⁰⁷ Carlson's tale of “Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark” is bizarre and illogical and has no credible support. The confession of M. Madiotes the bald swindler, the anomalous letterforms that agree with Smith's handwriting, the anachronistic allusion to Morton Salt, the veiled confession of the goldsmith who is confounded by his own idol, the gay life setting in 1950s American parks, and Smith's seal of authorship are mere chimeras, specious attempts at squaring the facts about “secret” Mark with the academic folklore about Morton Smith.