BOOK REVIEWS Peter Jeffery, the Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled

BOOK REVIEWS Peter Jeffery, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled. Imagined Rituals Of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xi + 340 pp. Near the end of this enriching and erudite monograph, Peter Jeffery remarks that its organization proved a challenge: “Almost every section of the book as it now stands was somewhere else in an earlier draft” (p. 241). He came to peace with that problem, however, concluding that, because the subject of the book is itself “an act of deception, it was bound to keep collapsing in on itself.” One might compare scholarly discussion of the alleged Secret Gospel of Mark to a shell game that has successfully hidden its pea since Morton Smith claimed in 1960 that he had found a letter quoting Secret Mark in the monastic library at Mar Saba. The shells are individually well wrought, and they are shifted around deftly. The letter was written on the end pages of a seventeenth century Latin volume, but it purports to be from the second century theologian, Clement of Alexandria. This “Clement” speaks of secret teaching that Mark promulgated in Alexandra after Peter’s death in Rome, but he also and forcefully attacks the version of this Secret Gospel advocated by a group called the Carpocratians. Stephen Carlson, who made a case in a legal style that Secret Mark should be considered a hoax on epigraphic grounds, has discussed an additional shell. (I reviewed his book in the Review of Rabbinic Judaism Vol. 10, No. 1. (2007), pp. 122–128.) Since Carlson wrote, controversy has continued, to a large extent because discussion of the physical evidence must be conducted on the basis of photographs. The original pages were removed to the Jerusalem Patriarchate in 1976 or 1977 and remain unavailable. Shells over shells, as if they were Russian dolls. For all these layers of uncertainty, Peter Jeffery keeps his eye on the pea. What exactly are the shells designed to hide? If we don’t know that, we must always be defeated at the game, because we won’t even know when we have found what is intended to be concealed. Jeffery is convinced that Secret Mark is a forgery and makes a clear although not watertight case that Morton Smith is the forger. But his achievement is much greater than a point-by-point refutation of Smith’s claims, © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 Review of Rabbinic Judaism 13.2 Also available online – brill.nl/rrj DOI: 10.1163/157007010X536357 296 book reviews although Jeffery’s study is detailed. On the basis of the literary shape of Secret Mark as quoted by the alleged letter of Clement, Jeffery shows what the forgery is trying to conceal from us. The position of “Carpocrates” that is attacked provides the key. “Carpocrates” speaks of a secret initiation between Jesus and a young male disciple who loved him and whom Jesus had raised from the dead, during which they spend the night together naked. Smith himself observed with laconic prurience that the extent of their physical union could only be surmised, although it “certainly occurred in many forms of gnostic Christianity” (pp. 100, 106). Certainty in this case, as Jeffery remarks, comes less from evidence than from “celestial hallucination,” the same realm that gave us Secret Mark. The pea, that is to say, is liturgical homoeroticism. “Clement” attacks “Carpocrates” for adding references to nakedness, while admitting that the basic initiation is part and parcel of Secret Mark. Morton Smith contended that the ultimate source of the story was in Aramaic from around the year 50 C.E. (p. 29), and that the practice was indeed Jesus’. All the other related topics of contention—including the handwriting of the letter, the conditions of its discovery, whether Clement and Carpocrotes are accurately represented, and the relationship between Secret Mark and canonical Mark—are shells that distract from one basic issue. Is this picture of liturgical homoeroticism, as presented, plausible within the time the letter allegedly refers to and stems from, or is it a picture that a modern forger would more likely think up? Jeffery relentlessly pursues the cultural environment of early Judaism and Christianity, Hellenistic homosexuality, the ritual history of early Christianity, the Victorian predilection for what he calls the “Uranian Venus,” as well as Morton Smith’s writings, in order to insist that the liturgical homoeroticism of Secret Mark is a thoroughly modern con- struct. Particularly, he sees the unmotivated rejection of the disciple’s sister in Secret Mark as an example of a dedicated homosexuality that put a premium on physical intercourse between males and rejected intercourse with females, unlike the norms of Hellenistic homosexuality (pp. 121, 195, 211, 235). In addition, the parity of Jesus with the disciple is most unlike the Platonic expectations of erastes and eromenos (pp. 188–206). Jeffery sees in the text allusions to the seven veils of Salome as portrayed by Oscar Wilde and believes that the vesture of the young man corresponds, not to liturgical patterns within the ancient church, but to theories of liturgical renewal that circulated in Anglican circles during the mid-twentieth century. The alleged ceremony is remi- niscent of “the Piltdown hoax” (pp. 62, 67, 70, 77). Another Piltdownian .

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