The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness
in a Biblical Forgery, by Peter Jeffery (Yale U.P., 2006) offers further
evidence that Morton Smith composed the MS claimed to be a Letter of Clement of
Alexandria that quoted a Secret Gospel of Mark. Jeffery examines the history of
liturgy and finds that Smith's imagined initiation ceremony did not fit the
practice in Alexandria at the time. Jeffery shows that Smith pursued fairly
desultory work in cataloging the Mar Saba library, if that had been his main
purpose. For example, why didn't Smith examine the folder of old MS fragments,
if his interest had been to find old texts? Smith didn't bother to check in the
Jerusalem library (where most Mar Saba MSS had been moved) for texts by the same
hand as his claimed find. And, as I noted previously, why didn't Smith--who
published the admonition for scholars to check old books for marginal
annotations--say anything about the 1646 Voss book margins?

Jeffery engages previous critiques of Smith's claims mostly merely quite
briefly, and goes his own way. So the work of integrating his insights with
previous scholarship remains for reviewers to evaluate. The book is not free of
errors; on page 2 Jeffery says Smith got his "second doctorate" at Hebrew
University, but that 1945 degree was before his 1957 Harvard Th.D. Perhaps
others will comment on Jeffery's Roman Catholic perspective on the Anglican
church and on homosexuality. In any case, this is a learned and lively book
that, in my view, shows even more than before that Smith wrote the Letter with
Secret Mark.

Jeffery wrote (p.263 n.65) that Smith's 1958 private publication Manuscript
Material from the Monastery of Mar Saba, Discovered, Transcribed and Translated
by Morton Smith "no doubt" included photographs. Perhaps so, but he has not seen
it (nor I). It was an exceedingly limited publication. The Smith papers (minus
letters destroyed; except for the Scholem correspondence, originals of both
sides, preserved in Jerusalem) are being cataloged at Jewish Theological
Seminary. Those papers may provide more insight.

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson