In the April 2024 Atlantic Monthly ARIEL SABAR revives the controversies arising from Morton Smith’s The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mar in which Smith claimed to have found in a monastery in Jerusalem a passage refledcting “a secret” gospel” of Mark with shocking implications concerning Jesus’ sexuality . Many scholars have taken Smith’s claims seriously; a few have suspected a hoax.
In either case it’s good to look back to Paul Coleman-Norton’s 1950 article “An Amusing Agraphon” in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly ( Vol. 12, No. 4 (October, 1950), pp. 439-449 ) reporting the discovery in a North African library of an otherwise unattested addition to the ending of the 24th chapter of the gospel of Matthew. Immediately following Jesus’ assertion that there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” the newly discovered manuscript has Simon Peter asks the Lord, “What if they have no teeth?” To which Jesus replies, “Teeth shall be provided unto them.” Coleman-Norton presented his alleged discovery in impeccable scholarly fashion, with countless parallels drawn from other New Testament passages, citations of eminent German and other biblical scholars, and many footnotes (including a reference to a parallel in Lewis Copeland's The World's Best Jokes (Garden City, N. Y., 1941), p. 221).
The article was, of course, itself a joke, a spoof, and a hoax, as Coleman-Norton eventually acknowledged. It was all good fun, though the journal and Coleman-Norton’s Princeton colleagues were not amused.
Did Morton Smith, meticulous scholar that he was, know of this episode when he decided to publish a report of a discovery in another hard to access library of another short passage of Greek with surprising implications? I don’t know, but publish he did. Smith, to be sure, does not seem to have had a playful sense of humor. On the contrary, as best I can tell -- I never met him - he seems to have been very much tied up by the miseries of his own psyche. If there is a hoax involved in the story of the “secret gospel,”, he may have been the victim rather than the perpetrator.
What can we learn from Coleman-Norton’s article and Smith’s book? Texts that cannot be examined by independent scholars must, surely be used only with great caution, or at least with a twinkle in the eye.
In either case it’s good to look back to Paul Coleman-Norton’s 1950 article “An Amusing Agraphon” in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly ( Vol. 12, No. 4 (October, 1950), pp. 439-449 ) reporting the discovery in a North African library of an otherwise unattested addition to the ending of the 24th chapter of the gospel of Matthew. Immediately following Jesus’ assertion that there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” the newly discovered manuscript has Simon Peter asks the Lord, “What if they have no teeth?” To which Jesus replies, “Teeth shall be provided unto them.” Coleman-Norton presented his alleged discovery in impeccable scholarly fashion, with countless parallels drawn from other New Testament passages, citations of eminent German and other biblical scholars, and many footnotes (including a reference to a parallel in Lewis Copeland's The World's Best Jokes (Garden City, N. Y., 1941), p. 221).
The article was, of course, itself a joke, a spoof, and a hoax, as Coleman-Norton eventually acknowledged. It was all good fun, though the journal and Coleman-Norton’s Princeton colleagues were not amused.
Did Morton Smith, meticulous scholar that he was, know of this episode when he decided to publish a report of a discovery in another hard to access library of another short passage of Greek with surprising implications? I don’t know, but publish he did. Smith, to be sure, does not seem to have had a playful sense of humor. On the contrary, as best I can tell -- I never met him - he seems to have been very much tied up by the miseries of his own psyche. If there is a hoax involved in the story of the “secret gospel,”, he may have been the victim rather than the perpetrator.
What can we learn from Coleman-Norton’s article and Smith’s book? Texts that cannot be examined by independent scholars must, surely be used only with great caution, or at least with a twinkle in the eye.