Dr. Smith was a dodgy character!
Was HE gay, or do we just want to 'read' him that way? He
was always scheming, too...
(well, it
would explain alot, right? If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, swims like a duck, etc.)
I read
Peter Steinfels' NYT article "Was It a Hoax? Debate on a ‘Secret Mark’ Gospel Resumes" way back in 2007, but I have not investigated this controversy any further. My own opinion is loose, still undecided, but I'm doubtful.
In many ways, the books are complementary. Mr. Carlson, a lawyer, wields forensic science, the kind of handwriting analysis and word usage used to expose forgeries. Professor Jeffery, a musicologist at Princeton expert in the history of Christian liturgy, looks to the content of the Clement-Mark passages, arguing that its assumptions about Christian worship and initiation rites reflect ideas about early church practices popular half a century ago in the world Professor Smith inhabited rather than what is now known about the world of Clement of Alexandria.
The two authors converge on the point that the understanding of same-sex relations informing the Clement letter is in fact a modern understanding and unlike anything in the Hellenistic world.
And both authors insist that Professor Smith planted double entendres and teasing hints of his own authorship.
But this raises the question of what could have possibly motivated an eminent professor to devise such an elaborate fake and then spend from 1958 to 1973 bolstering it with every scholarly reference at his disposal. Mr. Carlson leans heavily on the category of “hoax,” a virtuoso’s one-upmanship of his academic colleagues, a notion that implies that proper recognition of Professor Smith’s skills would require the eventual exposure of his fakery.
Professor Jeffery seems to waver in his view of Professor Smith, sometimes portraying him as an embittered survivor of his few years as an Episcopal priest. Yet Professor Jeffery also calls the fabrication of the Marcan text “an astoundingly daring act of creative rebellion” aimed at giving homosexuality a Christian foundation.
Actually, the advertisement/promotion (of his supposed earlier discovery) was deeply suspicious to colleagues back in 1973 also.
https://jamestabor.com/morton-smith-and ... l-of-mark/
Personally I would like 'Secret Mark' to be true - MUCH MORE interesting - but I'm persuaded by the experts Against/Hoax camp. Smith's almost lurid fascination with gay & occult themes is a given, I think. Too fishy? The publication (of the earlier discovery) was wildly controversial in 1973 (Year of Stonewall, late coming in the 1960s wave of revolutions), and primed for a sensational publishing bonanza: there's your pecuniary motive box, checked. So Morton Smith as a conflicted/closeted 'gay' man - and narcissist/psychopath - would neatly answer almost every question. (A 'beard' marriage is laughably irrelevant, also.) No, I'm not saying it's proven - it just makes the most sense ...
Unfortunately, some leading experts also have a propensity to be con artists. 'Where there's smoke, there's fire' (typically), so I'm genuinely curious about Smith's psychological profile (and academic fraudsters generally: NPD!):
Piero Anversa Case:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/ ... esearcher/
Marc Hauser Case:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05 ... t-released
Etc.
My own side interest in this: Morton Smith was involved with
translating Hans Lewy's
Chaldaean Oracles (1956), and there was criticism long ago - by scholars who examined the German original - that Smith (c.1943?) had taken liberties. That was a red flag to me; I'm carefully examining another Lewy work,
Sobria Ebrietas, right now.