The Secret Gospel

The orthodox view of Christianity is that Jesus preached the same doctrine to all men--there was no inner circle of "initiates" with special knowledge, as in Gnosticism and the mystery religions. The minority, which holds that Christianity was originally esoteric, with secret teachings hidden from the masses of the faithful, received some surprising support last week from a meticulous scholar, Dr. Morton Smith, assistant professor of history at Manhattan's Columbia University and a specialist in ancient religions. Professor Smith read a paper to the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis describing his discovery of evidence that the author of the earliest Gospel, Mark, also wrote a secret Gospel that was to be shown only to initiates.

Unknown Theodore. Professor Smith had been browsing through the libraries of the 5th century monastery of Mar Saba in the wilderness a dozen miles southeast of Jerusalem when he came upon a 2 1/2-page text written into the back of a book published in 1646. It was not uncommon, in times when paper was scarce, for monks to copy into contemporary volumes items of interest they might find in the odd pages of ancient, disintegrated books that floated around the library before being thrown out or used as bindings. Smith checked the handwriting with nine of the world's leading paleographers, who agreed that it must have been written in the 17th or 18th century.

The writing was a quotation from a letter written by one of the most important of the church fathers--Clement of Alexandria, who lived in the late 2nd century. The letter, to an unknown Theodore, corresponds in vocabulary and style to known writings of Clement. It refers to a "secret Gospel" of Mark--so secret, in fact, that Clement enjoins Theodore to deny knowledge of it even on oath.

Behind Seven Veils. According to Clement, Mark, while he was with Peter in Rome, wrote ''an account of the Lord's doings" that presumably was the basis of his Gospel as it is now known. But he withheld those "doings" which only the initiated should have knowledge of and did not even hint ''at the ones pertaining to the mysteries." After Peter's death, writes Clement, Mark went to Alexandria with Peter's notes on Jesus, from which he "transferred to his former book the things suitable to progress toward knowledge." Even in this "secret Gospel" Mark left out "the things which are not to be uttered." He did not set down "the hierophantic [i.e., priestly esoteric] teaching of the Lord" but used sayings and doings that "would lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of that truth which is hidden behind seven veils." One of these, apparently, is the miracle of the raising of Lazarus, which does not appear in the Biblical Gospel of Mark but only in the Gospel of John. According to Clement, Mark left his secret Gospel to the church in Alexandria, where it was carefully guarded and "read only to those who are being initiated into the great mysteries."

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