Pantuck and Brown vs. Carlson on Secret Mark

Allan Pantuck passed along to me an article he wrote with Scott Brown challenging one of the claims made by Stephen Carlson in support of his position that Secret Mark is a hoax perpetrated by Morton Smith. Brown, long a supporter of the authenticity of the text, has chipped away at several of Carlson’s claims now, and this one is quite devestating to Carlson’s argument. Here is the abstract for the article: 

Allan J. Pantuck and Scott G. Brown, “Morton Smith as M. Madiotes: Stephen Carlson’s Attribution of Secret Mark to a Bald Swindler,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 6 (2008): 106-125.

In 1960, Morton Smith announced that he had discovered in the Mar Saba monastery tower library a fragment of a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria containing excerpts from a longer version of the Gospel of Mark that Smith called the ‘Secret Gospel of Mark’. Controversial since its publication in 1973, this discovery has recently been criticized in print as both an academic hoax and a malicious forgery. This paper uses newly discovered manuscript photographs and archived documents to refute a claim found in Stephen C. Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax, namely that Smith invented a pseudomymous twentieth-centuty individual named ‘M. Madiotes’ as an elaborate and deliberate clue that he himself had forged the letter of Clement.