THE SECRET GOSPEL

A Columbia history professor claimed that he discovered a sacred text with shocking details about the life of Jesus. Was it real?

- ARIEL SABAR

In the summer of 1958, Morton Smith, a newly hired Columbia University historian, traveled to an ancient monastery outside Jerusalem. In its library, he found what he said was a lost gospel. His announcement made international headlines. Scholars of the Bible would spend years debating the discovery's significance for the history of Christianity. But in 1975, one of Smith's colleagues went public with an extraordinary suggestion: The gospel was a fake. Its forger, the colleague believed, was Smith himself.

The manuscript, in handwritten Greek, ran two and a half pages, but one passage drew outsize attention. It depicted Jesus spending the night with a young man he'd raised from the dead. "The youth, looking upon [Jesus], loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him," it read. "And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God." To devout Christians, the homoerotic subtext was obvious blasphemy. But Smith argued the opposite: His discovery, he believed, was part of an unknown, longer version of the Gospel of Mark, containing lost stories from about 50 C.E., making them the oldest known account of Jesus's life and, in Smith's view, the truest.

Smith theorized that "Secret Mark," as the text came to be called, portrayed a private baptism that Jesus reserved for his closest disciples: One by one and at night, he contended, Jesus hypnotized male followers into believing they'd risen to heaven and been freed from the laws of Moses.