Book Reviews

The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity

Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2023; xi + 227 pp., hardcover, $35.

One of the greatest twentieth-century puzzles in New Testament scholarship is a letter discovered at the Mar Saba monastery in present-day Israel by the biblical scholar Morton Smith in 1958.

It is a fragment of a letter from the second-century church father Clement of Alexandria to one Theodore, and it discusses a secret version of the Gospel of Mark. According to this letter, Theodore (whose own letter has not survived) has an alleged copy of this text, but believes it has been corrupted by insertions of the Carpocratians, a libertine sect of the era.

Clement claims that this secret, longer version of Mark—“a more spiritual gospel for the benefit of those being made perfect”—was still preserved in the church of Alexandria in his time, though it was “very well guarded, being read only by those being initiated into the great mysteries.”

Clement also writes that he has a copy of this Gospel and compares his version with passages sent to him by Theodore. Clement quotes a passage from this secret Gospel. It describes the resurrection of a “young man” like the Lazarus of the Gospel of John. One evening six days later, says this Gospel, “the young man comes to him wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, because Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.”

Some people see sexual antics here, and so apparently did the Carpocratians, because their version of this Gospel adds the expression “naked man to naked man,” but this and other passages mentioned by Theodore “are not found” in the authentic Secret Gospel, writes Clement.

Smith introduced this text to the learned world at a biblical conference in 1960, arousing a tumult that has not settled to this day. Smith’s own view of this letter was straightforward: he considered it to be a genuine document by Clement and that it described an initiation involving “the mystery of the kingdom of God.”

Many other scholars scoffed at this suggestion with cruel vehemence. Smith himself, some claimed, had forged the letter as an elaborate practical joke, leaving hidden “clues” to his identity in his handiwork. To give one especially ridiculous example, at one point Clement writes, “true things mixed with fictions are effaced, so that, as it is said, even salt loses its saltiness.” Guess what? This supposedly points to Morton Smith as the forger, because—Morton Salt! Get it?

Many other such pieces of “evidence” range from the ludicrous to the insane, but over decades of scrutiny, certain facts were sifted out. To judge from the handwriting, the text, found written in the inside of a seventeenth-century Latin volume, probably dates from the eighteenth century, so it was not from the author’s own hand (but that is true of practically all texts from antiquity). Its literary style is completely like Clement’s—too much so, some contend, that very fact marking it as a forgery.

This new book on the Secret Gospel controversy takes the discussion further. It goes through the previous claims of forgery by Smith and refutes them in a way that would be difficult to counter. Nevertheless, say the authors, the letter is a forgery—only not by Smith, who published it in good faith. They contend that it was written between the fifth and seventh centuries by an unknown monk supposedly legitimating “same-sex pairings through the special relationship he had with one younger, ‘beloved’ male disciple.” As these authors indicate, the Greek Orthodox church did in that period have a rite of adelphopoiesis (“making brothers”), which joined two men in a quasi-sacramental bond of chaste friendship that some have likened to gay marriage. The authors contend that Secret Gospel was written to vindicate this kind of same-sex relationship, chaste or not. Indeed the Secret Gospel says that after his resurrection, “the young man, looking at him [Jesus], loved him, and he began to beg him to be with him.”

This book’s discussion of the Secret Gospel debate from 1960 to the present is clear-headed and enlightening. But Smith and Landau’s arguments for their own hypothesis are almost as absurd as the ones they refute, and in fact they put their idea forward only in the briefest and sketchiest terms at the end of the book. In the first place, they make no reference to any polemic about same-sex relationships among monks, either in the period they mention or at any other point, so we have no reason to believe that this was an issue to begin with.

Furthermore, anyone wanting to concoct Scriptural evidence for same-sex relationships would not have written this text: it is too oblique for that purpose. It does not even mention same-sex relationships, except in the reference to “naked man to naked man”—but the letter itself says that this detail is not authentic to the Secret Gospel. Moreover, someone engaging in this supposed polemic could just as well have used quotes about the beloved disciple from the Gospel of John, which was universally accepted as canonical.

As for the fact that the young man “loved” Jesus, the Greek word here is egapesen—from the familiar Greek word agape—which does not connote any erotic or amorous themes; indeed it is the word the ancient Greeks used when those elements were absent.

It makes sense that Smith and Landau would see this text in the light of same-sex relationships, since present times are preoccupied with them and find homoerotic connotations wherever they exist and in many places where they do not. But the absurdity of their own theory merely vindicates Smith, who at least did not resort to hilariously speculative overcomplications.

Why have so many scholars refused to take this letter of Clement at face value and contrive so many ridiculous theories to explain it away? Because it points to something much more disturbing to contemporary New Testament scholars than mere homosexuality, which in any event they understand. It is evidence of an early initiatic Christianity that has been almost completely lost to memory, and which scholars do not understand.

Indeed the fact that the young man comes “wearing a linen cloth over his naked body” is evidence for this initiatic element, because that was the garment worn for initiation into the mysteries, as we see, for example, in Apuleius’s Golden Ass. Linen, being a vegetable rather than an animal product, was believed to be purer than wool.

The possibility of an authentic secret Gospel disturbs contemporary scholarship, because it would mean that everything they know of early Christianity is preliminary material only, “milk, and not . . . strong meat” (Hebrews 5:12). All memory of this initiatic Christianity would have been lost or more likely suppressed, although a few vague hints were permitted to survive in the New Testament, such as “we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7).

But “the mystery of the kingdom of God” did not survive in any apparent way, as will be obvious to anyone who reads the clownish attempts of New Testament scholars to explain what the “kingdom of God” actually is. This hidden wisdom was probably not identical with Gnosticism as known in the second century, although arguably it was close enough that it was swept away when the proto-catholic church in the second and third centuries purged itself of Gnostic elements.

Clement, then, living around the turn of the third century, would be a transitional figure: more than almost anyone else (even the Gnostics themselves), in his authenticated works he speaks of the “Gnostic” (gnostikos) and claims that the true Christian is also a true Gnostic. But as the Letter to Theodore indicates, he was committed to keeping this wisdom hidden: “One must never . . . concede that the Secret Gospel is from Mark, but even deny it with an oath. For not all true things are said to all people.”

We can speculate about this hidden wisdom, which Clement in this letter says “is veiled seven times.” But in the absence of better evidence, these will remain as speculations only. At any rate, Smith’s scholarly instincts—superior to those of his critics—were receptive to the possibility of this frustratingly lost Christianity.

This book will not shake your religious faith, if that is a concern to you. But it will do a rough job on your trust in New Testament scholarship.

Richard Smoley

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Old Age

Helen M. Luke
Parabola Books, New York, 1987; hardcover, 112 pages.

This is a beautiful little book with a title which does somewhat less than attract one to pick it up and read it. The subject of aging is one which is largely ignored by our present culture in the hope, apparently, that if no attention is given to it, it will not happen. This youth worship, which so permeates society, stops us from considering the wonderful opportunities we all have for reaping the benefits of our lives and preparing for an easy and even exciting transition beyond the physical.

Helen Luke, herself in her eighties, presents us with two alternatives: to grow old or to slip into disintegration. Her presentation of the growing process which should continue in all of us is very thought-provoking. While we obviously must give up some of the activities of youth and respect the aging processes of our physical vehicles, emotionally and mentally we have much to experience and evaluate no matter what our chronological years may be.

Interpretations given by the author to four passages from literary classics really demonstrate the endless possibilities for growth when an individual's prime seems to have passed. Odysseus' final inland journey after completing the Odyssey as foretold by Teiresias, Lear's speech to his daughter Cordelia near the end of King Lear, Prospero's freeing of Ariel and his farewell in the Tempest, and a selection by T. S. Eliot from "Little Gidding" are all used to demonstrate the insight which their authors saw as coming to characters who had not always acted admirably during their earlier lives.

The book and its stories provide the realization that in the end it is the release from our attachments, whether to people, things or power, which will provide the ultimate feeling of having learned something from this lifetime on earth.

One final point from this little collection of essays is the author's suggestion that it is not necessary to reach old age before considering this method of viewing life. The earlier we learn the value of detachment, the more meaningful the remainder of our lives can be and the simpler and more beautiful our transitions when the time arrives to put aside our physical bodies.

-Willamay Pym

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The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, by Marilyn Ferguson; Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1987 edition; paperback, 460 pages.

The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher, by Martin Gardner; Prometheus Books, Buffalo, N.Y.; hardcover, 273 pages.

Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times, by Carol Zaleski; Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford; hardcover, 275 pages.

Channeling: Investigations on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources, by Jon Klimo; Jeremy P. Tarcher, Los Angeles; paper back, 384 pages.

One of the "new age classics"-Marilyn Ferguson's The Aquarian Conspiracy- has recently been reissued in a new edition with a new foreword by John Naisbitt and a new afterword by the author. It remains probably the most comprehensive introduction to the ideas, images, and metaphors of the new age.

Ferguson believes there are signs all about us of a cultural renaissance, which in her after- word she presents in the form of "breaking stories of the 1980s and 1990s." One of these stories has to do with cultural self-awareness and the discovery that simply knowing that something is wrong is the start toward making things right. Another is the growing awareness of "the reality of the whole," that everything is interrelated.

Other aspects of Ferguson's description are the discovery that chaos is an inevitable part of change; the rise of a Pacific culture, perhaps pointing a way toward a global culture; the increasing interest in metaphysical/spiritual news; the rediscovery of body/mind connections; the rediscovery of myth and metaphor as reshapers of social purpose; and the discovery that there are a wealth of solutions to social problems.

Ferguson offers a decidedly optimistic approach to our experience of crisis in our times, and this is a characteristic of much of what gets included in the "new age." It also is probably the weak point of the whole movement (if movement this is). New age critics cite this unbridled optimism and naiveté as a central problem with new age ideas.

Ferguson became the focus of the anti-"new age" crowd when her book first came out in 1980, in large part because of that scarifying title, unsettling to the conspiracy-fearing.

In his The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher, science writer Martin Gardner has collected together a generous selection of his columns from Skeptical Inquirer and other magazines.

Gardner is a leading debunker of a wide range of purveyors of what he calls pseudo-science, including Rupert Sheldrake, Shirley Machine, L. Ron Hubbard, the psychic surgeons of the Philippines, and of course the "trance-channelers," Ramtha, nee J. Z. Knight, in particular. "Prime-time preachers" also take it on the chin from Gardner.

Gardner is a lot of fun to read, and one often finds oneself agreeing with him. But like political cartoonists he is unfair, even vicious. One should not expect anything like a dispassionate scientist when reading Gardner. But devastating critique one can expect. Of course we love it when Gardner's sarcasm is directed at someone we do not respect, and hate it when it is directed against someone we do respect.

Gardner is much taken by the idea that magicians make the best debunkers of pseudo-science. I find this a bit puzzling, because it is difficult to imagine how a magician's ability to create an illusion constitutes proof that another person has created an illusion. That doesn't sound scientific to me.

Psychism of course has in no way been proved scientifically, though one might well question why scientific proof ought to be the measure. Extraordinary abilities of human beings don't lend themselves to laboratory method, first because they are human and therefore anomalous, second because laboratory method inevitably changes the activity or event to be measured because it is created by anomalous humans.

Nevertheless, those of us who are intrigued by "the new science" of folks like David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake ought to welcome the presence of tough skeptics like Gardner, to help us keep a balance between what we might hope would be the case but should also consider might not be so.

Carol Zaleski's Otherworld Journeys is not strictly speaking about the new age, though it does deal with accounts of near-death experiences which certainly are related to "new age" interests. Indeed Zaleski mentions Gardner and the other skeptics of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claim of the Paranormal (CSICOP) for their debunking of observations that shed light on the conditions of near-death experience.

The most extreme example of this reductionism can be found in the writings of astronomer and champion skeptic Carl Sagan. . . Sagan makes short shrift of the entire history of religious conceptions of death and rebirth, paradise and the fall, penance and baptism, deities and demigods. This vast range of experience and lore might derive, Sagan suggests, from shadowy memories of the four perinatal estates of man: our Edenic intrauterine bliss, its disruption by seismic contractions, our delivery from darkness into light, and our postnatal swaddling.

Sagan, Gardner, Isaac Asimov and others of CSICOP, in their attack on "the vast Castle of Pseudoscience," have the effect, Zaleski says, of polarizing the opposition: "...fringe causes tend to cluster together, and their champions begin to speak a common language, even when they have little in common beyond the fact of being labeled fringe."

Zaleski's excellent book presents a thorough survey of accounts of near-death experience, from medieval times to the present day accounts such as Raymond Moody's Life After Life. In her evaluation of near-death testimony, she suggests "a middle path between reductionism and naiveté."

Religious experiences, she says, are invariably social and invariably individual. "Religious traditions reflect and promote social order and, in many cultures, tend to value the group over the individual." Yet "Religious experience is invariably individual" and "human beings are essentially alone in the experience of death and in the encounter with transcendent values."

The narrative integrity of near-death visions derives not merely from the fact that a story is told but, mote importantly, from the fact that the story bas an aim. What seems at first glance to be a visionary travelogue describing for the curious the sights of an exotic supernatural realm turns out to be the story of a conversion experience; and, as we have seen, its main purpose is to communicate to others the new insights gained by the convert.

Finally, Zaleski notes,

Whatever the study of near-death visions might reveal about the experience of death, it reaches us just as much about ourselves as image-making and image-bound beings. To admit this is no concession to the debunkers; on the contrary, by recognizing the imaginative character of otherworld visions, we move beyond the merely defensive posture of arguing against reductionism.

A fourth book relevant to "the new age" is Jon Klimo's Channeling: Investigations on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources.

Klimo attempts to provide a thorough study of the channeling phenomenon. He de- scribes the various channelers, such as Jane Roberts (Seth), J. Z. Knight (Ramtha), Jach Pursel (Lazaris) and a number of others, and analyzes channeling both as a modem phenomenon and a historical phenomenon.

He discusses the content of "channeled" information, the purported sources, the channels themselves, and then offers a variety of possible explanations, including psychological and biological. Finally Klimo leaves it up to the reader to make the judgments, but he is fundamentally a sympathetic analyst, saying everything lies just ahead of us. Such a theory would have to include not only an integration of the various forces of Nature known to physicists but an integration of those forces with the dimensions of mind, heart, and spirit as well.

He also challenges "the double standard which holds that the beliefs and practices of organized religion are acceptable, while belief systems and practices outside organized religion-such as channeling with its claim to communication from nonphysical and spiritual realms-are not." It is striking that the mainline religious traditions all have their examples of "channeling," even though they haven't called it that. Indeed he notes that channeling phenomena are found in the roots of all the world's great religions.

Klimo examines a variety of "possible explanations" for the channeling phenomenon -psychological, biological, and physical. Brain/mind research is in truth at a rather primitive stage, and we really know very little about how the brain/mind works. Indeed, science (not unlike poetry) deals in metaphors, and Klimo offers what he calls "a concluding metaphor" at the end of his chapters on psychology and biology/physics as his own way of understanding channeling. It is, he says, a metaphor that "can be entertained by the atheistic materialist and the devoutly spiritual person alike."

In the first stage of the metaphor, each of us is an individuation out of the one universal physical energy ground of Being (physicalizing the mental), or out of the one Universal Mind or spirit (mentalizing the physical) depending on your perspective. Or, in a third, dualist, view, the entire physical energy universe is like one universal Brain/Body, and the consciousness that exists dependent on and in interaction with it is the one Universal Mind. Yet in any of these three accounts, each of us is an episode of individuation temporarily welled up into local, seemingly separate being. And we each appear to be surrounded by a semi permeable membrane that marks us off from the stuff that seems to be not us (including one another). These membranes may be molecule of skin, electromagnetic force fields, ego boundaries, or any other material or immaterial stuff derived from the same basal substance that one sees as being subdivided by such membranes in the first place.

This seeming separateness is not ultimately true, Klimo says, because the larger unity is what is true. That unity of every "thing" is Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Oversoul." It is the Gaia hypothesis (see Walter Schaer's article in this issue). It is the holographic model of the universe (see Renee Weber in this issue). It is what has often been referred to as "the interdependent web of all existence." As a "possible metaphor," Klimo's proposition points in the direction of the "Grand Unified Theory" that scientists seek.

It seems likely that claims of channelers are often (but not always) fraudulent, or at least self-deluded. And certainly much of so-called channeled information is pretty mediocre stuff. Still there are so many things we do not begin to understand about the human potential that foolishness can be found in abundance both among the "true believers" of "the new age" and among the proof-demanding scientists.

What is one to do? Observe life. Observe oneself. Observe oneself in interaction with others. Read widely. Think. And be willing to change one's mind.

-William Metzger

Winter 1988

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THE NAG HAMMADI LIBRARY IN ENGLISH

Third, Completely Revised Edition
James M. Robinson, general editor
Harper & Row, New York, 1988; hardcover, 549 pages.

The story of the study of the Gnostic tradition is the story of important archaeological discoveries. The Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi in Egypt take their place alongside the Bruce Codex, Berlin Codex, Askew Codex, and for that matter the Dead Sea Scrolls, as among the finds that have altered accepted views of Jewish and Christian heterodox traditions of the early centuries A.D. Until the discovery and translation of such original writings of the representatives of Gnostic heterodoxy, scholars and lay persons were forced to rely on the fragmentary and biased accounts concerning Gnostics contained in the writings of the Church fathers Irenaeus (c.a. 185), Clement (c.a. 199-200), Hippolytus (c.a. 200-2251, and others of like ilk. It was rather like trying to form an accurate picture of Jewish customs and character on the basis of the pronouncements of Goebbels and Hitler!

The publication in 1977 of the entire Nag Hammadi find, in an affordable and readable English translation, was an event that will be remembered and appreciated by countless interested persons for decades to come. The updated and to some minor extent retranslated and newly annotated edition of The Nag Hammadi Library in English ten years later is living proof of the continuing, and indeed mounting interest of the public in the writings of the Gnostics, whose teachings G. R. S. Mead early in this century called “a faith forgotten.” Largely due to the persistence and enthusiasm of Dr. James M. Robinson, director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at Claremont Graduate School in California, this precious collection of original Gnostic documents (the most extensive to have appeared in all of history) has been available to the public without ever being out of print for any length of time since its first publication. The opportunities afforded contemporary students by this are considerable. For the first time Gnostic works of varying orientation can be read side by side; works of the thoroughly Christian school of Valentinus alternate with writings of the Sethian Gnostics and with initiation discourses of a Hermetic character. No wonder that the Gnostic Gospels have arrested the interest of people including scholars, science fiction writers, journalists, and feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem!

The new edition of this seminal work is in most respects a worthy successor to the earlier ones. For the most part the translations of the best known scriptures remain without major changes, though speculative readings of missing and damaged portions have diminished somewhat. Some of the lesser-known scriptures have been translated anew, and the introductions to the various tractates have been amended in many instances.

The most radical, and potentially the most controversial change from the earlier editions is the omission of the highly useful index of names and its replacement by an eighteen-page essay by one Richard Smith, whose credentials seem to be confined to his title of “managing editor” of the new edition, and whose contribution is a poor substitute for the missing index of Gnostic names. The essay, named an afterword and entitled “The Modern Relevance of Gnosticism,” suggests an appreciation of this value for today's persons of the Gnostic approach to spirituality, but in fact is nothing of the sort. Mr. Smith appears to have the attitude that anyone anywhere at anytime who has shown a positive interest in Gnosticism was either misinformed or mendacious. Edward Gibbon is judged guilty of a “mischievous lie” because he praised the Gnostics. Voltaire was dishonest when nourishing similar sentiments, and William Blake’s great sin was that he “worshipped his own creative imagination” and this personal aberration led him to Gnosticism (p. 534). The considerable attention devoted by Smith to H. P. Blavatsky (pp. 537-538) is also predominantly negative. This great esotericist is egregiously belittled because she advanced the notion of an ongoing secret tradition in history that in part goes back to the Gnostics. That noted contemporary scholars such as Mircea Eliade and Robert Ellwood agree with Blavatsky on this point seems to have escapes Mr. Smith.

One of the more peculiar comments made by Richard Smith concerns C. G. Jung, who, we are informed, “wrote so much about the Gnostics simply because he liked them” (p. 538). One wonders whether and why it might have been preferable for him to write about people whom he did not like? The essay offers no positive conclusions, and the reader is left wondering whether the impressive list of creative figures of Western culture who possessed leanings toward Gnosticism, and who are all damned with faint praise, ought to be viewed as a sort of passenger list of a ship of illustrious fools sailing along under a flag which they consistently misunderstand.

Be that as it may, the new edition of The Nag Hammadi Library, even with its peculiar afterword, testifies eloquently in favor of the proposition that Gnosticism can no longer be relegated to the realm of antiquarian curiosities. A vital tradition, vibrant with contemporary relevance and imminent possibilities, has surfaced in our view. Whatever the critics may say, the spirit of the Gnostics has returned, and it appears more than likely that this time it is here to stay.

-STEPHAN A. HOELLER

Autumn 1989

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