Morton Smith was indeed a prolific author, with an impressive knowledge of ancient languages and of the texts he worked on, including the Greek magical papyri, the Mishnah, and the New Testament. On the other hand, he knew almost nothing about ritual, liturgy, shamanism, and other phenomena that he frequently wrote about, which he unreflectively assumed to be sub-categories of "magic." He usually ignored and occasionally denigrated the many publications that were available to him on these topics, so that his work stands well outside the context of the scholarly discussions that were taking place at the time. That is a very serious flaw in his work, which he should have been called out on decades ago. The fact that he was not points to a significant problem in New Testament studies itself: To minimize quarrelling between Christian sects, Biblical scholars have adopted a kind of "Don't ask, don't tell" policy on the subject of early Christian ritual, so that they do not have to face the probability that no modern Christian denomination worships as the early church did, even though all of them claim to do so. The price to be paid for that is that most New Testament scholars are poorly equipped to deal with the ritual aspects of texts and textual transmission, a loophole that Smith massively exploited, largely undetected. None of that can be blamed on me.
But why would such a renowned scholar take the risk of ruining his career by forging such a thing? Isn't that completely implausible?
See the next question.
Your book is full of innuendos and suggestions that Morton Smith was mentally ill. Aren't you simply resorting to ad hominem attacks that are inappropriate in a scholarly publication?
First of all, Smith frequently made uninformed and irresponsible remarks about mental illness and psychiatry, so it was not I who introduced this topic into the Secret Gospel discussion. Second, everyone exhibits psychiatric symptoms to some degree. Everyone is a little narcissistic, a little paranoid, a little psychotic, a little bipolar, etc. These characteristics are classified as mental illnesses only when they become so pronounced that they interfere with normal functioning, though it is also true that some very ill people are capable of extraordinary productivity. It is therefore appropriate to note such tendencies in any discussion of any historical figure, and doing so need not be tantamount to an allegation of mental illness.
I have had training and years of experience working as a counselor on a telephone suicide hotline, and also as a student peer counselor. In addition I have some significantly impaired individuals in my own family. I don't believe anyone with experience listening to mentally ill people could possibly read Smith's The Secret Gospel (Harper) memoir without wondering about Smith's personal issues. The book is, in fact, the weirdest publication I ever read, full of many of the kinds of things we are trained to look for: sudden and extreme changes of mood that seem like excessive reactions to the events that provoked them, an exaggerated sense of self-importance, memory lapses at key points, hostility disguised as humor, bizarre theories about what constitutes truth, sanity, or reality. The fact that some of these also appear in the Mar Saba letter of Clement, as well as in Smith's own voice, is surely relevant.
It is true, of course, that my experience does not qualify me as a mental health professional. That is why I avoided writing as if I were one. I did not, for example, engage in "armchair psychoanalysis" (p. 35); on the contrary I refrained from publishing my opinion on what Smith's most likely diagnoses were. I simply noted the many curious symptoms so that readers could draw their own conclusions. I can see why some readers may find this unsatisfying. But I hope that, now that I have called attention to the question, some better-qualified people may investigate for themselves, and some more competent discussions will be published in the future.
I knew Morton Smith very well, and the man I knew was not at all like the one you portray in your book. How can you write that way about someone you never even met?
With any historical figure, the testimony of people who knew him constitutes an important category of evidence regarding his character, personality, life history, etc. But the person's writings make up another important category of evidence. One cannot say a priori that either personal reminiscences or a person's writings should be considered the most reliable evidence. In Morton Smith's case, the people who knew him well offer a wide range of opinions as to what kind of person he was--all the more reason to take the evidence of his writings seriously. I decided not to publish any of the many remarkable tales I have been told, since I cannot verify most of them, and some of the people who confided in me would not want to be identified. Thus I deliberately confined myself to already-published
evidence, and I still believe this was the most responsible course.
In any case, it is possible to know a person extremely well and still be unaware of major facts about him or aspects of his personality. There is, in fact, such a case in the news right now. John Robison was a revered and much-loved professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts. Yet the book A Wolf at the Table by his son, who has taken the name Augusten Burroughs, reveals that Robison was also a violent alcoholic who treated his family with sadistic cruelty. Most of his academic colleagues had absolutely no idea what was going on in Robison's home. I don't want to press this comparison too far: I have seen and heard absolutely nothing to suggest that Morton Smith had any kind of substance abuse problem or ever physically abused anyone. The point of my analogy is simply that most professors and students who worked with Robison for years were completely unaware that there was another, very troubled, side to his personality. People who think they knew
Morton Smith well may actually be in a similar situation. It is not uncommon for prominent individuals to lead double lives or have hidden secrets, as ex-governors Spitzer of New York and McGreevey of New Jersey have demonstrated recently. Here are some links about the Robison case:
Patricia Cohen, "A Son Peers at His Father and Finds a Sociopath," New York Times (24 April 2008) E1, E7, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/books/24burr.html?scp=1&sq=robison&st=nyt
Janet Maslin, "Returning to the Past and Finding the Bogeyman Is Still There," New York Times (1 May 2008) E1, E7, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/books/01maslin.html?scp=2&sq=bogeyman&st=nyt
Augusten Burroughs' blog
Isn't it unfair to accuse Morton Smith of forgery when he's not around to defend himself?
To begin with, there has never been an accepted principle that, when a scholar dies, his publications become off-limits to criticism. Indeed there cannot be, because research must go on. Every publication by everyone has flaws that eventually become evident as scholarship progresses. It is absolutely appropriate, indeed essential, to continue evaluating the work of scholars who have passed on. Anyone who wishes to defend a deceased author is free to do so.
In this case, moreover, Smith's publications were frequently questioned while he was alive, so we know how he went about defending himself. He did it mostly through efforts at intimidation: acting extremely offended, shunning his critics, name-calling ("liar" and so on), attributing self-interested motives, threatening lawsuits--and asserting, like the Mar Saba Clement, that his opponents were blinded to the truth by their religious or scholarly orthodoxies. Thus the fact that we no longer have to confront Morton Smith personally actually makes it easier to discuss his contributions in a calm, thoughtful, more objective manner--not that all of Smith's defenders have made the most of this opportunity, I am sorry to say. For more information consult the review of my book by Columbia professor and former Smith colleague W. B. Harris, author of an award-winning book on anger management, of all things.
Isn't it true that, because you are a practicing Catholic, you cannot abide the possibility that an ancient document might contradict your church's doctrinal stance? Isn't that your real reason for going after Smith's discovery?
As I wrote in my book (Chapter 2), there are many ancient documents that present unorthodox views of Jesus, and no modern Christian leaders or scholars have been calling for suppressing them. No leaders of any church are campaigning to have the Gospel of Judas declared a forgery, for instance. Nor am I a knee-jerk crusader for official positions: some of my publications have been quite critical of the Catholic hierarchy on issues that fall within my area of expertise (see my books Translating Tradition and A New Commandment). The question could just as well work the other way: Isn't it true that the Mar Saba text seems to support your own worldview in some way, so that any threat to its legitimacy is personally unsettling, something you
are inclined to resist? The more so if you've defended its authenticity in past publications?
But your book consistently denigrates Smith for not believing as you do, beginning from the acknowledgements: "I pray for the late Morton Smith--may God rest his anguished soul." You seem to write throughout from a position of contemptuous superiority.
Christians are supposed to pray for everybody, including their opponents. A fraud like the Secret Gospel ought to be exposed and condemned in the harshest terms, along with the numerous misrepresentations of evidence and history that Smith wrote to support it. But one should still pray for the man who perpetrated the fraud, especially since it was clearly an expression of his own personal and spiritual difficulties in dealing with the Christianity of his time. I think it entirely appropriate that, having exposed the deceptions at length and in detail, I should also make a personal commitment to praying for their author, and I can't help but wonder how many of Smith's supporters have ever done as much.
The statement you quote above is actually an expression of empathy. This would be clear to anyone who recognizes the literary allusion that you evidently missed. It is to St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul 2.6.2. Commenting on the feelings of desolation that David describes in Psalm 88:5-8, St. John describes the Dark Night experience this way:
'That which the anguished soul feels most deeply is the conviction that God has abandoned it, of which it has no doubt; that He has cast it away into darkness as an abominable thing . . . . The shadow of death and the pains and torments of hell are most acutely felt, and this comes from the sense of being abandoned by God . . . . It has also the same sense of abandonment with respect to all creatures, and that it is an object of contempt to all, especially to its friends."
This is a universal experience among those who seek God by the Christian path, when they come to realize that the Creator cannot be controlled by prayer or any other human activity, and that the beatific vision we seek is something much more profound than ordinary experiences of conventional happiness or well-being. It seems to me perfectly reasonable to assume that Smith, finding himself unable to live as a homosexual Christian within the structures available at the time, experienced such a "dark night." And with no competent spiritual guidance (as his 1949 article demonstrates), the most honest step he could take was an angry rejection of Christianity itself, at least as he knew it. Since I have listened to many other people who, though desiring to be faithful Christians or Jews, find themselves quite unable to conform to conventional Judeo-Christian patterns of heterosexuality, I believe I have a good sense of what Smith was experiencing. Even if I am wrong about this, however, it should be clear that what I was expressing was not contempt or a sense of superiority, but rather a sense of familiarity, understanding, and equality before God.
At the same time, if I seem eager to correct Smith's misstatements about Christianity (in general or the "high-church" kind he was involved with), that is just the same rigor that every scholar should be held to. Everyone has the right to criticize every religion for what it teaches or advocates. But no one should be criticizing distorted versions of any religion that are not fair representations of what the religion is actually like. The standard I use for myself and my students is: only when you can defend a religion in terms that its adherents find acceptable do you know enough about it to criticize it fairly.
Why not just have the manuscript scientifically tested? The jury will be out until that happens.
I'm all for it, but the MS cannot be tested right now because it cannot be located. The text was written on two back flyleaves of a book published in 1646. In 1976 or 1977, this book was removed from the monastery where Smith identified it, and taken to the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem for safekeeping. There the two pages containing the text were removed from the back of the book and photographed. Though the apparent intent was to safeguard this unique material, in fact the two pages promptly disappeared. Some suspect they were destroyed by Greek Orthodox clergy who were offended by the implication that Jesus was a homosexual. But it is also possible they were stolen by someone with a profit motive. I have heard rumors about shadowy figures suggesting that the two pages could reappear for the right price. How many millions would you or your
library be willing to pay? The sad story of the Gospel of Judas MS shows that antiquities thieves often have wildly unreasonable expectations as to how much their booty is really worth, and what non-profit libraries can afford to pay.
In any case, scientific testing would not necessarily answer the question definitively. The flyleaves are almost certainly pieces of genuine 17th-century paper, so the only thing testable is the ink. Forensic ink analysis would probably require destroying a small portion of the manuscript, but perhaps it would be worth it to get incontestable results. If the testing reveals that the ink contains chemicals that were invented in the 19th or 20th centuries, then obviously the text was written some time after that kind of ink became available. However, if the ink contains only the ingredients that were typical of the 17th and 18th centuries, that will prove nothing. Manufacturing the kind of iron-gall ink that was in use before the Industrial Revolution is a "low tech" process that almost anyone can duplicate. A twentieth-century forger could easily have done it. There are recipes available all over the Internet, for example:
http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/ink/
http://realscience.breckschool.org/upper/fruen/files/Enrichmentarticles/files/IronGallInk/IronGallInk.html,
http://home.att.net/~numericana/answer/chemistry.htm#ink
If the Mar Saba text was written in the kind of iron-gall ink that was used before the nineteenth century, then the issue will be how to determine when the ink was applied to the seventeenth-century paper. However there is no generally agreed-upon way to do this. It could have been any time between 1646 (when the book was printed) and 1958 (when Smith discovered it). Naturally, there are scientists who think they can date such ink, and they may be right. But any result they announce will be open to challenge by others. Besides, any attempt to do a comparative study, involving ink samples taken from other MSS of the Mar Saba library, would probably require destroying small portions of those manuscripts, a difficult thing to negotiate with either the monks of Mar Saba or the librarians of the Greek Patriarchate. Here are two recent books on the subject of ink testing and forensic document examination:
Richard L. Brunelle, and Kenneth R. Crawford, Advances in the Forensic Analysis and Dating of Writing Ink (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 2003), see http://www.ccthomas.com/details.cfm?P_ISBN13=9780398073466
David Ellen, Scientific Examination of Documents: Methods and Techniques, 3rd ed. (Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis, 2006), partly available at http://books.google.com/books?id=_BVScIJGV2wC&pg=PT7&lpg=PT9&dq=forensic+examination+ink+paper&sig=KODfeN-J9TlcjC2Wj0z5DLCkJQ4; a review at http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/fsc/backissu/july2007/review/2007_07_review01.htm.
Now that the MS has disappeared, there is a further problem: Suppose the two pages did re-emerge, were scientifically tested, and were discovered to have been written in 20th-century ink. Die-hard believers could plausibly claim that these were not, in fact, the very papers Morton Smith held in his hands, but a sophisticated modern forgery of them, reproduced from the photographs onto flyleaves excised from yet another copy of the same 1646 book. Since we do not know where Smith's pages have gone, the continuity of ownership has been broken, and it may not be possible to verify that any rediscovered pages are indeed the same physical specimens that Smith saw. Thus we should not assume that scientific testing of the manuscript will produce either consensus or an irrefutable solution. Though I favor such testing, it might not resolve the issue at all.
Peter Jeffery
Scheide Professor of Music History
Princeton University
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