The Secret Gospel of Mark After All? Solving the Secret Mark Dilemma, By James Bean
How to reconcile verses of Secret Mark that seem to fit nicely into the regular Gospel of Mark and are rather intriguing, this despite the fact that the story of the now inaccessible Clement document seems rather suspect (according to most scholars)? I wonder if perhaps there could be some middle ground with Secret Mark. It sounds a bit both-sides-ish (a "Marcion" type position that goes half way, unsatisfying to Gnostics and Orthodox alike!), but perhaps there's some ancient origin of the verses of Secret Mark after all, even though Morton Smith placed (or found) them in a problematic document attributed to Clement of Alexandria. I wonder if Smith discovered the verses somewhere, maybe in a "heretical" book and saw them as legitimate, but for whatever reason decided they would never be taken seriously unless given a better venue, so he created a document attributed to an early church father to serve as a more effective means of sharing the verses?
Another possibility is, that Smith was honest in his reporting about the Clement letter, and it was the work of a scribe copying manuscripts long ago that placed these verses of Secret Mark into a forged letter attributed to Clement. Why would some monk who lived many centuries ago do such a thing? The verses might have originated in a gospel deemed by his tradition to be from a heretical source. I will say this. I have seen Orthodox authors in the Philokalia, a collection of mystical writings, quote saints that fell out of favor, were eventually declared to be heretics. Certain Syriac Christian writers have resorted to this maneuver as well. Some mystics valued these kinds of not-so-orthodox passages and wished to quote them anyway, so they gave the sources new names, invented fake names or attributed the quotes to someone more palatable like "Saint Neilos" as a way to get away with quoting material that otherwise would have been off-limits!
For background on Secret Mark, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Gospel_of_Mark
