Was Jesus Gay? No, But Morton Smith Thought So.
Friday, May 18, 2007
By Jeffrey Hart
i.
Of course you hear all the time that unlikely people were gay, Abraham Lincoln, of course, and—didn’t you know?—Dwight Eisenhower and also Joe Louis. But this, about Jesus, was different. Life at a great university is a wondrous thing, rare birds on every branch, creatures of spectacular plumage and varied song. After leaving Columbia in 1963 to teach at Dartmouth I had almost forgotten Morton Smith, but not quite. Occasionally you do remember things for no reason at all, and sometimes there would drift into my mind the times we sat on a Persian carpet in the living room of his apartment near Columbia and drank a lot of strong tea. Yes, on the carpet. Pillows on the carpet were his only furniture. That must have been around 1960. Smith was bald, had a high forehead, large ears, and a mischievous look. He was immensely learned and, I gathered, had been an Orthodox monk. That was wrong, but we’ll see why I thought so. Smith’s Hebrew and ancient Greek were expert. I read recently that in fact he had been an Episcopal priest. Sitting cross-legged on his Persian carpet we discussed ancient history, his field, and of course much else, including some crazy theories he had, at least I thought they were crazy, about Jesus, herbal intoxication, and homosexual rites. “Oh, come on,” I thought to myself. And forgot about it. Little did I imagine that opening before me was the bottomless chasm of New Testament interpretation.
I first made Smith’s acquaintance when we were both teaching the famous Humanities 1-2 course at Columbia. I came to that course from the English Department, he from History. Humanities 1-2, required of all Columbia freshmen, began in the Fall with Homer and the Hebrew Bible and ended in the Spring with a modern work, usually Crime and Punishment, but sometimes with Yeats or Nietzsche. Probably I met Smith at one of the weekly Humanities lunches at the Faculty Club, where all those teaching the course gathered both for lunch and to hear a faculty expert on one or another work talk about how he approached it with freshmen, Moses Hadas on Greek tragedy, for example, Donald Frame on Montaigne, Mark Van Doren on King Lear. These talks were immensely useful to me. Without the one by a man from the Philosophy Department about Spinoza’s Ethics I don’t know what I could have done with it in class. Humanities 1-2, always voted by Columbia alumni the most valuable course they had taken at the College, educated not only the students but the faculty as well.
ii
The other day Morton Smith jumped out at me from a Peter Steinfels New York Times “Beliefs” column with the title “Was It a Hoax? Debate on a ‘Secret Mark’ Gospel Resumes.” The new “secret gospel of Mark,” Steinfels says, was discovered—or fabricated? —by Professor Morton Smith of Columbia.
I had not noticed myself that in 1973 he had published two books on Mark’s “Secret Gospel,” one dense with scholarship and published by the Harvard University Press, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark; along with that a popular version, The Secret Gospel (Harper and Row). These made headlines at the time. The upshot, to use Sidney’s Hook’s expression, is that Jesus initiated his disciples with a nocturnal, hallucinatory homosexual rite.
That was what Morton Smith was telling me as we sat on his rugs drinking strong tea almost fifty years ago. Then I had dismissed it as obvious nonsense and dropped it into my mental circular file.
Today, had he not died in 1993, he’d be huge, probably on the cover of Time and Newsweek, maybe with his version of Jesus coming soon to a movie near you. Jesus has risen again, this time in popular culture. We’ve had Jesus’ Family Tomb. We’ve had the uber best-seller The Da Vinci Code, which maintains that we see in the famous Last Supper painting Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ wife, and much more, about the secrets of the Holy Grail. And we have the Judas Gospel, undoubtedly authentic, recently discovered as a damaged papyrus in the sands of Egypt. Judas now makes a big comeback, the biggest comeback in history, as a hero. Jesus, we read here, revealed to Judas the secrets of the Kingdom and wanted Judas to betray him so that through death he would be relieved from the encumbrance of his body and rejoin God in eternity.
Judas said to Jesus:
“Look, what will those baptized in your name do?” Jesus said, “Truly I say [to you] this baptism [ ] my name [ ] to me. Truly [I] say to you, Judas, [those who] offer sacrifices to Saklas* . . . everything that is evil. But you will excel all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.
Already your horn has been raised
your wrath has been kindled,
your star has shown brightly
and your heart has [ ]
Truly [ ] your last [ ] become [ ] since he will be destroyed. And then the image of the great generation of Adam will be exalted, for prior to heaven, earth, and the angels, that generation, which is from the eternal realms, exists. Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light that is within it, and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star. Judas lifted up his eyes and saw the luminous cloud and entered it. Those on the ground heard a voice coming from the cloud [ ] saying [ ] great generation [ ] ...
* According to a footnote Saklas may refer to the ineffable Yaweh, to whom sacrifices are made in the Temple at Jerusalem.
So, following directions, Judas turns Jesus in to “sacrifice the man that clothes me.”
That, clearly, is a Gnostic interpretation of Jesus’ life and death. One rejects the Judaism of the Temple and achieves salvation through secret knowledge; the body is mere clothing and must be cast aside in order for the soul to reach eternal life. Various forms of gnosticism (Greek: gnosis, knowledge) existed in the ancient world, and the interest of the Judas Gospel is that the fascinating figure of Judas Iscariot emerges as a hero.
The Judas Gospel is new to us, as I say only recently discovered, and its very existence, let alone with its account of Jesus, has been a shock to the reading public. It would have been less surprising if people had been aware of how many very early narratives about Jesus had already been known to scholars beyond the four canonical gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Surviving, at least in part, are the Gospel of Truth and the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Philip, Mary, the Ebionites, the Nazoreans, the Hebrews, and the Egyptians. These interpret the life of Jesus for different communities of belief, most of them dating from the first century or a bit later.
The term “gospel” designates a theological not a literary from, meaning “news of salvation.” Thus we refer to “the gospel according to Mark,” the gospel according to John,” and so on.
The Gospel of Thomas, for example, argues with the canonical Gospel of John, where “doubting Thomas” gets some bad press. The issue between Thomas and John is whether Jesus’ resurrection was bodily or of the soul alone. The Gospel of Thomas agrees with the Gospel of Judas that the resurrection was not bodily. With all of this most people are not at all acquainted, the four canonical narratives bring the only ones they know, or, at least should know. Mark composed around 70, Matthew and Luke 80-90, John latest between 90 and 100, with some passages perhaps earlier.
This proliferation of interpretations, it should be emphasized, does not undermine the attempts at accuracy by the familiar canon, consolidated by a process that went on for almost a century, beginning with Irenaeus writing around 180. The earliest and undoubtedly most reliable compass to steer by is Paul, whose epistles are earlier than any of the four narratives we know, and who may have heard Jesus preach in the synagogue at Tarsus (see Arthur Darby Knox, St. Paul). Paul was beheaded in Rome around 65 AD.
iii
Now, today, according to Mr. Steinfels in the New York Times, Morton Smith’s hypothesis has important defenders. They include Professor Scott G. Brown, of the University of Toronto, who argues in Mark’s Other Gospel (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005) the secret Mark is genuine, was in fact the New Testament’s Mark and not a fabrication by Professor Smith, who was certainly erudite enough to cook this up himself. But Smith also has doubters, especially Prof. Peter Jeffrey in The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled (Yale University Press, 2005), which argues that Professor Smith is way off as regards Church practices in the time of Clement.
So what is it Smith came up with?
In his two 1973 books Smith claims that he found a manuscript in a Greek Orthodox monastery south of Jerusalem. (That’s why I thought he had been an Orthodox monk.) This manuscript had been used as a reinforcement for the binding of an 18th century copy of an otherwise unknown “letter to Theodore” from Clement of Alexandria. Clement claims that there were three versions of the Gospel of Mark which were being circulated then among Christian groups around Alexandria in Egypt. Two of them are pertinent here: 1) an abbreviated Gospel written by Mark and intended for recent converts; 2) A Secret Gospel, “more spiritual,” also by Mark, for those more advanced in the faith. He added this to the abbreviated version, coming directly after 10:34. It describes an event similar to the raising of the dead in John 11, in this case about a man in Bethany who has died. His sister begged Jesus to help. Jesus entered the tomb and raised up her brother. Then we read:
The young man looked at Jesus, loved him, and began to beg him to be with him. . . . Six days later, Jesus gave him an order; and when evening had come, the young man went to him, dressed only in a linen cloth. He spent the night with him, because Jesus taught him the mysteries of the kingdom of God.
In the letter from Clement to Theodore, discovered by Morton Smith, Clement demanded that he deny the existence of this secret version of Mark. Some scholars believe that the young man was prepared for an initiation ritual and appropriately clad. But Morton Smith’s books raised a furious debate among scholars. It does not help that the original Clement manuscript and the 18th century book have disappeared and all we have are Smith’s photographs of them. Some scholars deny that the passage implies homosexuality. Professor Brown charges, according to Peter Steinfels, that the homosexual imputation is in the minds only of Smith’s critics who depend upon “academic folklore.”
I can add that it isn’t folklore. Morton Smith did not conceal his “sexual orientation.” Several Columbia students complained to me about his aggressive behavior, and one student, a particularly handsome young man in the preppy genre, told me he had even dropped one of Smith’s courses on that account.
Furthermore, if Smith were to fabricate the whole thing, is it likely that he would be telling me about it a dozen years before he published it in his two 1973 books? Still, the fact that Smith did not preserve the original (and immensely valuable) manuscript of Clement’s letter is suspicious. He produced only a photographic copy.
My own guess is that the manuscript existed and was genuine but that the Secret Gospel was ancient Gnostic fiction—“Didn’t you know that Jesus was gay?”—and that Clement, knowing that, demanded that Theodore, whoever he was, keep quiet about it. I also think that Morton Smith was delighted to have it thought that Jesus, like Morton, was gay—along with Eisenhower and Joe Louis.
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