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  • The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery
  • Nicole Kelley
Peter Jeffery. The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 340.

Ever since its mid-twentieth-century discovery by Morton Smith, the Secret Gospel of Mark has been the subject of endless debate and speculation among scholars of ancient Christianity. These debates have centered not just on the importance of the Secret Gospel, but also on questions of authenticity. Is the Gospel a forgery, and if so, was this forgery perpetrated by Morton Smith himself? Peter Jeffery’s The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled is the latest addition to this ongoing discussion. Jeffery, a Princeton musicologist, approaches the Secret Gospel through the history of Christian liturgy and (sometimes less successfully) through a kind of forensic analysis of Smith’s writings and life history.

The book consists of eleven chapters and an appendix containing Smith’s translation of the Clementine letter from Mar Saba. The chapters, each of which contains a helpful summary of the author’s argument, cover a wide range of topics. In Chapter 1, Jeffery offers “a careful reading” of Smith’s two visits to the Mar Saba monastery, as chronicled in his 1973 book The Secret Gospel. Chapter 2 covers major issues in the ongoing scholarly discussion of the Secret Gospel of Mark, including the authenticity of the manuscript, the attribution of the letter to Clement of Alexandria, the historical value of the Secret Gospel, and the validity of Smith’s claim that the Gospel fragment depicts a Jesus who engaged in ritualized homosexual activities.

Chapters 3 and 4 best reflect Jeffery’s expertise in musicology and liturgiology. Chapter 3 argues that the Secret Gospel does not accurately reflect early Christian worship. The baptismal theology evident in Secret Mark resembles twentieth-century Anglican theories about early church practices, but it does not resemble the baptismal theology of the Alexandrian church, which was based upon Jesus’s baptism by John rather than resurrection symbolism. Chapter 4 addresses the claim that the Secret Gospel was read during secret [End Page 114] initiation rites in the Alexandrian church. Jeffery argues that this is implausible given the Egyptian preference for the Fourth Gospel. He also demonstrates that Secret Mark does not fit with the Lenten baptismal theology, the pattern for Epiphany celebrations, or the liturgical cycle known to us from Egypt and Alexandria in particular. Chapter 5 argues that the Secret Gospel is a pastiche of New Testament Gospel materials, designed to suggest that Jesus engaged in homosexual practices. This same cut-and-paste technique is evident in both the Mar Saba letter of Clement and in Smith’s scholarly work on the Secret Gospel, which suggests that all three texts were authored by the same person.

Chapters 6 and 7 contain a psychologizing approach that represents one of the weaker aspects of the book. In Chapter 6, Jeffery questions Smith’s assertion that his participation in the Mar Saba Byzantine liturgy gave him a new understanding of worship that shaped his understanding of Jesus’s actions in Secret Mark. According to Jeffery, Smith’s interpretation of the Byzantine liturgy is disingenuous, a poor fit with traditional understandings of the Orthodox liturgy, and uninformed by contemporary scholarship. Chapter 7 explores Smith’s career as an Anglican priest, focusing particularly on one of Smith’s early articles. According to Jeffery, this piece reveals that Smith held rather rigid ethical and moral positions, and suggests that Smith was experiencing “some kind of psychological crisis of his own relating to his abandonment of the priesthood the following year” (p. 184). Moreover, the essay shows that Smith understood Christian morality as a universal consensus that involved suppression of dissent, just as Clement’s letter attempts to suppress the views of the Carpocratians.

Chapters 8 and 9 examine homosexuality and homosexual culture in two very different contexts. In Chapter 8, Jeffery explores ancient Greek homosexuality and suggests that it can be used fruitfully to provide a context for the New Testament Gospel stories about Jesus’s interactions...

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