Is the Secret Gospel of Mark a Forgery?

The short answer, and its three options

Nobody has proved it either way, and the field is genuinely divided. The Secret Gospel of Mark survives only as two excerpts quoted inside a Greek letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria, copied by hand into the blank endpapers of a book printed in 1646, photographed at the Mar Saba monastery in 1958, and unavailable for physical testing since 1976. Specialists of real standing defend both verdicts.

Most coverage treats this as a two-sided fight — ancient or hoax. It is actually a three-sided one, and keeping the three apart is the whole discipline of the question. The letter could be (1) a genuine letter of Clement, written around 200 CE, quoting a real Alexandrian edition of Mark; (2) an ancient or medieval pseudo-Clementine composition, forged long ago in Clement's name, as dozens of ancient texts were; or (3) a modern composition, planted in the eighteenth-century-looking hand of a monastic scribe. Proving the hand is old would not prove Clement wrote it. Proving Clement wrote it would not prove the gospel he quotes is early. Each layer needs its own evidence, and the evidence for each layer is thin.

What Morton Smith found at Mar Saba

In the summer of 1958, Morton Smith — then a historian at Columbia University, later the author of Jesus the Magician — spent several weeks cataloguing the library of the Greek Orthodox monastery of Mar Saba in the Judean desert. On the endpapers of a 1646 edition of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch he found roughly two and a half pages of small Greek script in a hand that looked eighteenth-century. He photographed it in black and white and went home.

He announced the find in 1960 and published it in 1973, in two books at once: a dense scholarly volume from Harvard University Press and a popular account for general readers. That fifteen-year gap is itself argued over. Read one way, it is the caution of a scholar who knew what an explosive claim requires. Read the other way, it is time enough to build one.

The manuscript's later movements matter more than the delay. In 1976 a party including Guy Stroumsa, David Flusser, and Shlomo Pines located the volume still at Mar Saba; it was taken to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate library in Jerusalem. Stroumsa has recounted that they raised the possibility of having the ink tested and were told it was not necessary. At the Patriarchate the handwritten leaves were cut out of the binding and photographed in color by the librarian. They have not been produced for examination since. Every argument about this text is therefore an argument about photographs.

What the disputed excerpts say

The letter warns a certain Theodore against the Carpocratians, a libertine sect, then concedes that a longer, non-public Mark exists in Alexandria and quotes from it to correct their version. The first excerpt belongs, it says, after the words about going up to Jerusalem and before James and John make their request — that is, inside Mark 10. Here it is verbatim from our text of the letter, in Samuel Zinner's public-domain translation, proofread by Mark M. Mattison, and labeled here exactly as it is labeled there: disputed.

“And they entered into Bethany and there was a woman there whose brother had died. And she came and prostrated to Jesus, and said to him, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me.’ The disciples, however, rebuked her.

And growing angry, Jesus went away with her into the garden where the tomb was, and suddenly there was heard a loud sound from the tomb, and Jesus drew near and rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb, and entering immediately where the youth was, he stretched out his hand and raised him up and grabbed hold of his hand, but seeing him, the youth loved him, and started to implore him that he could be with him.

And coming out of the tomb, he entered the house of the youth, for he was wealthy. And after six days, Jesus ordered him, and when evening came, the youth approached him naked, being covered with only a robe. And he stayed with him that night. For Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. From there, he rose and returned to the other side of the Jordan.”

The second excerpt is one line, placed after the entry into Jericho: “and there were the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved, and his mother and Salome, and Jesus did not receive them.” The letter also insists that a phrase the Carpocratians allegedly quoted — “naked on naked” — is not in the real text.

Two resonances explain why the passage electrified everyone. It reads like a compressed cousin of the raising of Lazarus in John 11; and the linen-clad youth recalls the anonymous young man who flees Gethsemane in Mark 14:51, “having a linen cloth cast about his naked body” (KJV), a figure Mark never explains. A document that supplies a missing backstory to a canonical loose end is either a remarkable survival or a very well-aimed invention.

The letter's frame is as striking as its excerpts. It tells Theodore that the mystical gospel must be denied even under oath — “one must never yield nor admit when they make false allegations, that the mystical gospel is by Mark, but should even deny it on oath. For not to everyone should everything that is true be told.” Then it breaks off mid-sentence: “Certainly indeed, the true exegesis, in accord with the true philosophy [. . .]” The gap is where a modern reader most wants the text to continue, which is precisely the kind of coincidence the forgery hunters notice.

The case for forgery

The strongest version does not rest on any single argument but on convergence: a text conveniently matching its finder's published interests, surfacing in the one monastery a 1940 thriller had already made famous for a planted manuscript, in a hand nobody can date from the original, in a document that then became unavailable. Four named strands carry the weight.

• Handwriting. Stephen C. Carlson's The Gospel Hoax (2005) argued that magnified letters show a “forger's tremor” — hesitant strokes, blunt line ends, pen lifts — rather than the fluency of a practiced scribe.
• Hidden signatures. Carlson also read a Mar Saba catalogue entry as a pseudonym punning on a bald swindler, and heard a twentieth-century joke in the letter's remark that “Even salt loses its taste” — an allusion, he suggested, to a famous brand of free-running salt and to Smith's own surname.
• Style that is too good. Andrew Criddle's stylometric study (1995) found the letter's distinctively Clementine vocabulary more concentrated than in Clement's undisputed works — the statistical fingerprint, he argued, of imitation rather than authorship.
• Anachronism and literary parallel. Peter Jeffery's The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled (2007) argued that the initiation scene reflects modern liturgical and sexual assumptions rather than second-century ones; Francis Watson pressed the resemblance between the discovery and James H. Hunter's 1940 novel The Mystery of Mar Saba, in which a forged manuscript is found at that monastery.

Two of those strands have been badly damaged since. Allan J. Pantuck and Scott G. Brown showed that the tremor is visible chiefly in degraded reproductions rather than in better images, and that the catalogue name Carlson read as a pun is more plausibly the ordinary Greek name Modestos. Criddle's and Jeffery's arguments stand; the hidden-signature layer has largely been abandoned even by skeptics.

The case for authenticity

The defense does not claim the letter is certainly Clement's. It claims the forgery case has never met its burden, and that the alternative requires believing something at least as remarkable: that a mid-century American historian imitated an eighteenth-century Greek monastic hand, wrote flawless Clementine Greek before searchable databases existed, and did it well enough that Clement specialists cannot dislodge it.

In 2010 the Biblical Archaeology Society commissioned two Greek experts and got two answers. Venetia Anastasopoulou, a forensic document examiner, judged the writing the work of a fluent, practiced hand and concluded Smith could not plausibly have produced it. Agamemnon Tselikas, a paleographer, concluded the opposite: an imitation by someone working from older models. When the forensic specialists split, the honest reader stops expecting handwriting to settle anything.

The archival strand is the defense's strongest. Pantuck's work in Smith's papers turned up material that sits awkwardly with the hoax narrative, including evidence about the state of Smith's Greek at the relevant time. Stroumsa's published edition of the long Smith—Gershom Scholem correspondence lets us watch Smith discuss the find privately over decades with a friend he had no reason to deceive; defenders read those letters as sustained genuine puzzlement rather than a performance kept up for thirty years. Scott Brown's Mark's Other Gospel (2005) argued that the excerpts, read in context, are about discipleship and resurrection rather than the scandal usually projected onto them — which removes the supposed motive. Helmut Koester, among others, treated the longer Mark as a plausible early stage in that gospel's development.

How the two cases compare

Why the manuscript can't settle it

Ordinarily a disputed document is resolved in a laboratory. Ink chemistry, paper fibers, and pigment aging separate an eighteenth- century hand from a 1958 one in an afternoon. None of that has been done here, because the leaves have not been produced since they were removed from the binding in Jerusalem. The dispute is conducted entirely on photographs, which is why it has lasted seven decades.

And even a decisive lab result would only resolve one of the three layers. Establish an eighteenth-century hand and you have an eighteenth-century copyist — who might have been copying an ancient letter, or a medieval forgery in Clement's name. That is the structural reason this question resists closure, and it is a reminder that the same evidentiary chain sits behind every excluded text: what survives, who copied it, and who vouched for it are three separate questions. The other lost gospels mostly have physical answers to the first two. This one has neither.

Where scholarship stands

Unresolved, and openly so. A 2011 conference at York University in Toronto put the question directly — ancient gospel or modern forgery — gathered both camps, and adjourned without agreement; its published proceedings preserve the disagreement rather than resolving it. Handbooks list the text as disputed. Bart Ehrman has described the case as suspicious but unproven. Working historians mostly bracket it: because the text might be second-century Alexandrian or might be twentieth-century American, almost nobody builds an argument about Jesus on it.

That restraint is the right instinct, and it is also why the document keeps its grip. The excerpts do not decide who Jesus was; the fight decides how a field behaves when it cannot check something. Note what the letter is not: it is not a book that any council considered and rejected, so it plays no part in how the canon was actually settled. It arrived nineteen centuries late to that argument, which is exactly why it has to be judged on evidence rather than on which story about the early church you prefer.

Our own position is the boring one, stated on our standards page and printed on the text itself: we publish the Mar Saba letter in a public-domain translation, labeled disputed, provenance stated plainly, with the break in the manuscript shown as a break. Read it, hold the verdict open, and notice how rarely you are given the chance to do that.