CLEMENT 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