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For decades, discussion of the “secret” gospel has been dominated by two notions: It is a highly dubious document. It is the predecessor of the canonical gospel. Not surprisingly, to the degree that liberal scholars endorse the latter idea, conservative scholars invoke the former. But suspicions about forgery are hardly limited to conservatives, who are more apt to declare longer Mark a worthless second-century pastiche. Scholars of all theological persuasions are drawn to the forgery debate, albeit mostly as a diversion. So who does reject the authenticity of this letter? If you were to consult the two scholars who have spoken most confidently on this subject—a Professor of Judaica named Jacob Neusner and a Professor of Irish History named Donald Harman Akenson—you would learn either that practically no one was duped into taking Smith’s discovery seriously (Neusner) or that “a veritable Who’s Who of top biblical scholars have been hoodwinked by a fraudulent secret gospel that implies Jesus was a homosexual” (Akenson).1 You would learn, in other words, that it is better to concentrate on the published arguments of people who might actually know the difference between an authentic and an inauthentic work of Clement. Should you do that, you would find at least eleven well-informed scholars who have given reasons to deny Clement’s authorship of the Letter to Theodore: J. Munck, W . Völker, A.D. Nock, H. Musurillo, Q. Quesnell, W . Kümmel, C.E. Murgia, P . Beskow, E. Osborn, A.H. Criddle, and A. Jakab. This list might be overstated, since Musurillo admitted that the letter “sounds marvelously like Clement,” gave no reasons why Clement could not have written it, and concentrated instead on conceivable motives and persons capable of producing a perfect forgery of Clement (which begs the question);2 likewise, Quesnell did not claim that the text is a forgery or that Clement could not have written it—only that we Notes to chapter 2 start on page 243 23 2 The Question of the Authenticity of the Letter to Theodore brown_02.qxd 2005/04/26 12:22 PM Page 23 cannot draw a positive conclusion without first examining the physical manuscript ;3 and Nock could not formulate his objection to authenticity more concretely than “intuition”; apparently, he thought the discovery was too good to be true.4 Three of these scholars offered their opinions in the 1960s while Smith was preparing his commentary (Munck, Völker, Nock), another four, in the three years following the publication of that book in 1973 (Musurillo, Quesnell, Kümmel, Murgia). Since then, to the best of my knowledge, only four reasonably well-informed scholars elaborated arguments against Clement’s authorship in the secondary literature: Per Beskow, Eric Osborn, and Attila Jakab, who are patristic scholars, and Andrew Criddle, an independent researcher who carefully studied the letter. So the number of experts who have contested the authenticity of this letter in print is relatively small and has been growing disproportionately slowly compared to the number of experts who have come to accept the document as authentic or possibly authentic. However, in the long drought of serious study of this question, the popular conception that longer Mark might be a forgery has become quite strong, to the point of obscuring the reality that most scholars who have actually studied the letter and written on the subject are inclined to believe that it was written by Clement. What really matters, though, is not the number of scholars in either camp or even their proficiency in the relevant subjects, but the arguments themselves, most of which have not been critically examined. The allegations of forgery have taken two main forms. Some scholars have proposed that Smith’s document is indeed an eighteenth-century copy of an earlier manuscript, but that the original letter was an ancient forgery produced within a few centuries of Clement. The alternative is that the pages Smith photographed are themselves a forgery that was produced sometime within the last two hundred years. These scenarios have different implications for the authenticity of the gospel quotations. The most plausible motive for an ancient forgery would be to use Clement’s authority to validate a different version of Mark’s gospel.5 Thus an ancient forgery would most likely contain authentic excerpts from a lost version of Mark. A modern forgery, on the other hand, would contain nothing but prevarication, so that possibility has much graver implications for the authenticity of the gospel...

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