The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery

Peter Jeffery

ISBN 10: 0300117604 / ISBN 13: 9780300117608

Published by Yale University Press, 2006

About this Item

Cloth, dj. Minor shelf-wear.

Seller Inventory # 1733175

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300117604
• ISBN 13: 9780300117608
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Used-Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Theology

About this title

Synopsis

In 1958, Bible scholar Morton Smith announced the discovery of a sensational manuscript–a second-century letter written by St. Clement of Alexandria, who quotes an unknown, longer version of the Gospel of Mark. When Smith published the letter in 1973, he set off a firestorm of controversy that has raged ever since. Is the text authentic, or a hoax? Is Smith’s interpretation correct? Did Jesus really practice magic, or homosexuality? And if the letter is a forgery . . . why?
Through close examination of the “discovered” manuscript’s text, Peter Jeffery unravels the answers to the mystery and tells the tragic tale of an estranged Episcopalian priest who forged an ancient gospel and fooled many of the best biblical scholars of his time. Jeffery shows convincingly that Smith’s Secret Gospel is steeped in anachronisms and that its construction was influenced by Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, twentieth-century misunderstandings of early Christian liturgy, and Smith’s personal struggles with Christian sexual morality.

About the Author

Peter Jeffery is Scheide Professor of Music History, Princeton University, and a Benedictine Oblate of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.