The Secret Gospel as Related to Mark and John (original) (raw)

The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Public Domain Interlinear and Translation

2024

"The Secret Gospel of Mark" is cited in a letter attributed (pseudepigraphically) to Clement of Alexandria which was discovered in 1958 by Morton Smith at the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem. The letter describes a version of the Gospel of Mark that contains additional esoteric material.

Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark: Exploring the Grounds for Doubt

This paper appeared in Tony Burke (ed.), Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate (Eugene OR: Cascade Books, 2013) 75–100. It argues, as do Stephen Carlson, Peter Jeffery, and Pierluigi Piovanelli, that the Mar Saba Clementine letter, which quotes and discusses a longer version of the Gospel of Mark, is probably a modern forgery that the late Morton Smith composed.

Re-examination of Some Salient Issues on the Authorship and Recipient of Mark's Gospel

African Journal of Kingdom Education , 2023

Although previous scholars have discussed and come to widely accepted conclusions about the background to the gospel of Mark in terms of authorship, purpose, characteristics, structure, date, settings, and recipients of Mark's gospel, its genre as well as Sources of Mark's Gospel; which is a fact that this paper does not dispute. Yet, the essence of this paper is to reexamine some salient issues regarding the background of the gospel of Mark in terms of the author and recipient. John Mark is widely regarded as the author of the fourth gospel, but not so for the reason stated here in this paper. Although the recipient of the book is attributed to Galilee, Syria, the Decapolis and Rome; this research supports a Rome possibility because of the universality of the place and the influence of Paul on John Mark. This is the gap that we are filling here.

The Historical Character of the Gospel of Mark

The American Journal of Theology

In the spring of 1910o I published a little work called The Earliest Sources for the Life of Jesus, forming one of the series called "Modern Religious Problems" edited by Dr. A. W. Vernon. In a work of 131 small pages much must be assumed rather than proved, and I am very grateful for the opportunity afforded me by the editors of the American Journal of Theology to explain more at length and in detail the view of the Gospel according to Mark which I sketched in my little book. I am inclined to believe in the traditional authorship of this gospel, and that a chief source of the information possessed by the author consisted of what he had heard from Simon Peter. Now-a-days such an opinion calls for some detailed defense. At the present moment there is going on in Germany a prolonged controversy about the general historicity of the New Testament under the title "Hat Jesus gelebt ?" ("Did Jesus ever live?"). The leading skeptics are Professor Jensen, the Assyriologist, and Professor Arthur Drews; the defenders are "liberals" such as Professors Jiilicher and Weinel. I do not propose to follow this controversy here, but I mention it to show that an investigation of the historicity of the Gospel according to Mark is not out of place.' ' See on this controversy the article by Professor Case in the last number of this Journal, pp. 20-42. i6g 'Ata0ois, or something similar. In any case, "the parts of Dalmanutha" do not belong to real geography. s "Banereem filii tonitrui, quod conrupte Boanerges usus optinuit" (Lagarde, O S, 669). 6 According to Eusebius (O S, 282:83), this is ; Macye&dhn, a then known locality in the neighborhood of Gerasa. That it does not quite fit the context only shows that Matthew's emendation was not based on authentic tradition. 7 So the Greek minuscule numbered 28 (sic) and the Sinai Palimpsest (Syr. S). This piece of Greek evidence is fatal to Wellhausen's conjecture that N'1. in Syr. S does not mean "the hill" (Wellhausen's Marcus, ed. 2, p. 6i).

Behind the Seven Veils, II: Assessing Clement of Alexandria's Knowledge of the Mystic Gospel of Mark

Tony Burke, ed., Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha, 2017

We first learned of a letter of Clement of Alexandria “to Theodore” and of the “mystic” Gospel of Mark that it quotes in 1958, when Morton Smith catalogued a manuscript (Mar Saba 65) that constitutes the only extant evidence for both these works. The lack of external corroboration for this gospel has made the spectre of forgery particularly hard to dispel. Fortunately, indirect evidence bearing on Clement’s knowledge of this gospel exists but has been mostly overlooked. Given the letter’s premise that the gospel pericope which it quotes has a “true interpretation” of a mystical (i.e., allegorical) nature, we might expect that aspects of this interpretation would appear in Clement’s undisputed writings in the various places where he expounds equivalent phrases (e.g., “for he had many possessions” in Mark 10:22; “the mystery of the kingdom of God” in Mark 4:11) and themes (e.g., Jesus raising a person from the dead, a period of seven days, wearing a single linen garment) in other texts. The present paper asks, what would happen if we apply those allegorical expositions of other texts to the mystic gospel’s story about Jesus and the young man? Certainly if the letter isn’t by Clement, and he did not actually know this gospel story, we wouldn’t expect these scattered expositions to make much sense when brought together, and we most certainly wouldn’t expect them to combine into a consistent allegorical interpretation that could constitute the “true interpretation” promised at the point where the letter breaks off. Yet that is precisely what happens. The conspicuous parallels in Clement’s expositions of other texts all concern aspects of his path to perfection through the church, and they combine in their proper order and with remarkable detail to represent Jesus leading the young man through this entire progression. Hence we can conclude that he indeed knew this gospel and wrote this letter.