Table Of ContentCLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
AND A SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
AND A
SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK
Morton Smith
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
I973
© Copyright 1973 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 72-148938
SBN 674-13490-7
Printed in the United States of America
This book was written for
Arthur Darby Nock and is
dedicated to his memory
Contents
PREFACE ix
ONE. THE MANUSCRIPT I
TWO. THE LETTER 5
THREE. THE SECRET GOSPEL 87
FOUR. THE BACKGROUND 195
FIVE. THE HISTORY OF THE TEXT 279
APPENDICES
A. Palaeographic Peculiarities 293
B. The Evidence Concerning Carpocrates 295
C. Clausulae 351
D. Clement's Quotations from Mark 353
E. Gospel Phrases and Their Parallels 357
F. Clement's Quotation of Mark 10.17-31 368
G. Type, Frequency, and Distribution of Parallels 370
INDICES
I. The Vocabulary of the Text 380
II. Quotations and Reminiscences in the Letter 390
III. Ancient Works and Passages Discussed 392
IV. Greek Words and Phrases Discussed 409
V. Notabilia varia 412
ABBREVIATIONS AND WORKS CITED 423
THE FRAGMENT: PLATES, TRANSLATION, TRANSCRIPTION, AND PHOTOGRAPHS 445
vii
Preface
The Monastery of Mar Saba is located in the Judean desert, a few miles southeast
of Jerusalem. In its tower library there are a number of Greek manuscripts and early
printed books containing manuscript supplements. When I visited Jerusalem in the
summer of 1958 His Beatitude Benedict, Patriarch of Jerusalem, kindly gave me
permission to spend a fortnight at the monastery, study this material, and publish it.
Let me begin this book with my sincere thanks to His Beatitude, to Archimandrite
Seraphim, the Hegoumenos of Mar Saba, and to the brothers of the monastery. My
greatest debt of thanks, to the late Custodian of the Holy Sepulchre, Archimandrite
Kyriakos, is one which can no longer be paid.
The manuscripts of Mar Saba proved, on examination, to be mostly modern. This
was no surprise, since it was well known that the rich collection of ancient manuscripts,
for which the monastery was famous in the early nineteenth century, had been
transferred to Jerusalem for safekeeping in the eighteen-sixties. Little seems to have
been left behind at that time except scraps and printed books. But in subsequent
years there has been a gradual accumulation of other manuscript material, both new
and old. During my stay I was able to examine, label, and describe some seventy
items. Besides these there were some twenty distinct manuscripts and two large
folders full of scraps which I did not have time to study. My notes on the collection
have been printed in an article, "'Ελληνικά χειρόγραφα eV τ-rj Movfj του αγίου Σάββα,"
translated by Archimandrite Constantine Michaelides, in the periodical of the
Patriarchate of Jerusalem, ME Α ΣΙΩΝ 52 (i960) 11 off, 245fr. To this article readers
must be referred for a description of the manuscript material as a whole.
Among the items examined was one, number 65 in my published notes, of which
the manuscript element consisted of two and a half pages of writing at the back of an
old printed book. The writing begins with the cross which Greek monastic scribes
commonly set down first of all. Then comes a heading, "From the letters of the most
holy Clement, the author of the Stromateis; to Theodore." Then comes the text of
part of a letter, certainly not complete, since it breaks off in the middle of a sentence.
The content of this text is so surprising that if Clement (who wrote at the end of the
second century) really was its author the consequences for the history of the early
Christian Church and for New Testament criticism are revolutionary.
The present book is an attempt to describe this document and to set forth the major
ix
χ PREFACE
elements which must be considered in judging it. The first chapter describes the
manuscript. The second studies the relation of the letter to the commonly ac-
knowledged works of Clement. The similarities and differences are examined in a
word-by-word commentary; then the results thus attained are summed up and other,
general, considerations added. This examination leads to the conclusion that the
letter is correctly attributed to Clement, and this conclusion is made the point of
departure for the third chapter, which studies the letter's quotations from a secret
Gospel it attributes to Mark. After considering the external evidence relevant to this
Gospel, the study proceeds, by way of a detailed commentary on the quoted texts,
to establish, first, their stylistic, then, their structural relations to the canonical
Gospels. The fourth chapter deals with the historical value of both letter and Gospel,
especially with their importance as evidence concerning the secret side of early
Christianity. A final chapter presents what little evidence can be found concerning
the history of the text of both Gospel and letter, and indicates some of the hypotheses
with which this evidence may plausibly be filled out. Important bodies of evidence,
too large for presentation in the text, have been added in a series of appendices.
Appendix B, in particular, contains the complete dossier of Carpocrates and his
followers, who played an important role in the history of the new Gospel material.
For convenience of reference, the photographs of the manuscript, with facing trans-
criptions and translations, have been placed at the very end of the volume.
My thanks are due to the Columbia University Council for Research in the Social
Sciences and to the Department of History of Columbia University for grants which
helped me in the preparation of the present work. Mr. Stanley Isser verified the
references throughout the first four hundred pages of the manuscript, Mr. Levon
Avdoyan gave me much help in the preparation of the indices, and Professor
Jacob Neusner of Brown University read the entire text and made many corrections;
I sincerely thank them all. Many different scholars have helped me in different
aspects of the work; my indebtedness to them is recorded and my thanks are offered
at the beginnings of the chapters with which they have been concerned. I thank Mrs.
Elisabeth J. Munck, Professor Zeph Stewart, and Mrs. Mailice Wifstrand for per-
mission to publish quotations from the letters of the late Professors Johannes Munck,
A. D. Nock, and Albert Wifstrand. I am grateful to the Akademie Verlag, the
British Museum, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and Usines Brepols for per-
missions to reprint sections of their publications. Finally, I am indebted to the Harvard
University Press for its consent to publish and care in publishing this difficult
manuscript.
I shall of course want to follow the discussion of this text; I therefore hope that
scholars who write about it will be so kind as to send copies of their publications to
me at the Department of History, Columbia University, N.Y. 10027, U.S.A.
Morton Smith
New York, 1970
