Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau, "The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity" (Yale UP, 2023)

(upbeat music) - Fall is a vibe. So what's yours? Do you go wild or get a little nostalgic? Do you like to cozy up indoors or kick it outdoors? Whatever you fall for, get shoes that get you. We've got the trend. You bring the vibes. - D.S.W. Let us surprise you. - Welcome to the new books network. - Hello, welcome to the new books network. I'm David Kinsman and I will be your host for today. I have the pleasure of having two guests today, Jeffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Lando, to talk about their newest book, the Seeker Gospel of Mark, a controversial scholar, a scandalous gospel of Jesus and the fierce debate over its authenticity, published by Yale University Press in 2023. Jeffrey S. Smith is an associate professor of fellow at the Louise Farmer Boyer Chair in Biblical Studies. In the director of the institute for the study of antiquity and Christian origins in the religious studies department of the University of Texas at Austin. And Brent C. Lando is an associate professor of instruction in religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin. I hope you enjoy the interview for today. So we usually like to start out interviews by asking our guests just about their current background and how do they come to write their current work? So Brent and Jeff, how did you come to write to the Seeker Gospel of Mark? - Yeah, this is Brent. I think I can probably address this. So both Jeff and I are specialists in early Christian apocryphal literature, writings that were not included in the New Testament. And we also had a longstanding interest, mutual interest in manuscript studies going back to graduate work that we both did at Harvard where we learned some of the ins and outs of manuscripts. And so this was sort of in the background for a while and then I was teaching a graduate seminar at UT Austin on Christian apocrypha and invited Jeff to come down because we were talking about the Seeker Gospel of Mark that day and it's a pretty interesting and controversial text and invited him to join the conversation. And one of the things that Jeff noticed based on one of the books that I had brought in was he had never actually seen a picture of the manuscript before. And the manuscript, if I don't know if there's any way that here can have access to photographs or anything like that. But the manuscript itself is very, very intricate Greek cursive of the 18th century. Basically it's the sort of thing that would be really, really hard to forge. And once we sort of came to grasps with the fact that this is a very, very difficult product to for anyone to have forged, especially someone who's command of Greek writing wasn't perfect, then it was all of a sudden a question of, well, maybe this text isn't a 20th century forgery. Maybe we need to come up with another explanation for where it comes from. - Yeah, and so I would say that the, you know, while we have had interest in manuscripts and apocryphal literature in the past, our interest in the secret gospel of Mark really was born out of sort of teaching, in this case, Brent's teaching. And I was very happy that he invited me to come down 'cause the secret gospel of Mark is a text. I'd been sort of meaning to look into but I also knew on the basis of some hallway conversations and graduate school that there were some interesting kind of ideas surrounding the text and maybe I should avoid it in my own publications, but I thought, hey, let's talk about the text. And as Brent said, I was absolutely shocked. Once I saw a picture of that manuscript 'cause prior to that, I probably had just assumed Mortem Smith forged it and after seeing a picture of the manuscript, I thought there is no possible way that he could have executed a hand like that. - So at the beginning of the book, you draw out the scene that happened in 1960 at the SBL meeting in New York, I believe. Mortem Smith gave the announcement of his discovery. Could you just, I guess just expand upon that? - Yeah, sure. So Smith actually discovers the manuscripts, the Tower Library, Marseille, about two years earlier, in 1958 and he has some sort of quiet consultations with other scholars over the course of the two years before he finally releases, debuts the manuscript and his interpretation of it. So there was only a handful of people that knew that this thing existed when, and I believe it was December of 1960, Mortem Smith gives a talk in the Horace Man Auditorium which seats several hundred people and introduces this text to the world. Now he also had arranged to have at the same time an announcement of the manuscript of its discovery on the front page of the New York Times and he also invited media to the event as well, which was not unprecedented but certainly unusual for a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature for there to be media there. And he, we interviewed a couple people who were there and we also read some notes from some people who were actually there for that 1960 meeting and it's clear from that that Smith is presenting the manuscript to the world for the first time in an even-handed way and doing some fairly detailed linguistic analysis of the text but that he's also making jokes or intimations that would, that really ruffled the feathers of a lot of the people in attendance that day and who were largely conservative white male academics who were also religious members of the clergy or prominent members of their own churches. - So I guess this question goes to Brent for people that are not initiated, what is the secret gospel of Mark? Is it an actual gospel like we see like in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or is it consistent in a different form? - Yeah, so the secret gospel of Mark as we have it is basically what we would refer to as a fragment, meaning that we've only got a small segment of what is supposedly the secret gospel of Mark. Now, one of the questions that we address in our book is how much more than the secret, than what we have of the secret gospel of Mark, how extensive was this text? At least the way it is presented in the letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria where we get the text quoted, it's supposedly a text that's as long as the gospel of Mark, but as Clement says in that letter, it's a sort of alternate version of the gospel of Mark, something that was basically designed and produced by Mark himself for only the most spiritually sophisticated Christians in Alexandria. So it's almost as if the regular version of Mark that shows up in everybody's new testament, that would be sort of the dumb down version that most people would have had access to, but then there was this secret version that was for the more spiritually sophisticated Christians. And according to the excerpt that is in this letter of Clement, it is a story about Jesus raising a young man from the dead. It sounds quite similar to the story of the raising of Lazarus from John chapter 11. And but in this text when Jesus brings the young man back to life, the young man is said to look at Jesus and love him and begs to be with him. And Jesus seems to accept these overtures because he goes and stays in the young man's house for a week. We also learned that the young man was wealthy, which is probably how he has a house of his own. Then after staying together in the same house for six days, Jesus gives the young man some instructions and apparently in response to these instructions, the young man comes to Jesus at night time wearing nothing but a linen cloth, like a bed sheet over his naked body. And the fragment then says that they stayed up all night and Jesus taught him the mysteries of the kingdom of God. So it's a very intriguing, very suggestive and potentially explosive fragment. So yeah, that's essentially what is in the secret gospel. And this is as Jeff was saying, Morton Smith, when he introduced this text to the world in 1960, he didn't shy away from making cracks about the seemingly obvious sexual nature of the text. - So I guess my next question is that raises the question. Did Morton Smith think the secret gospel of Mark was authentic for purely linguistic or textual reasons or was it or did he have other reasons why he thought it might have been authentic to climate? - Yeah, that's a difficult question to answer. His process seems to have been that he started by trying to authenticate the letter of climate because as Brent said, these excerpts from the secret gospel are embedded or quoted within this letter that Clement of Alexandria allegedly wrote to a otherwise unknown guy named Theodore. And so what he did and what he largely presents in 1960 is his analysis of the letter of Clement to Theodore. And on the basis of some tools that he had at his disposal which allowed him to compare the language of the letter with the language of Clement and writings that are known to have been written by him, he comes to conclude that Clement did in fact compose this letter. Now Clement of Alexandria is active in the late second century. So if Clement wrote the letter, the gospel fragments could have been written by Mark or they could have been written later but it still would be relatively early in the history of Christianity. And so I think once Morton Smith came to see the letter of Clement as authentic, he became more likely that he was going to locate it at the sort of tail end of the first century and with Mark the evangelist himself. - You did mention that Morton Smith consulted experts of the Greek language while he was conducting his analysis. And I get they differed in their opinion about the dating. Why did Morton Smith, I guess push back or go against the experts he consulted? - I mean, I think actually in the case of, in the case of the handwriting experts and Morton Smith was, you know, he had expertise in manuscripts but he wasn't, you know, he wasn't well versed in really, really late Greek hands. You know, there was some difference of opinion based on the experts in Greek handwriting that he talked to but really not very much, you know, the difference was, oh, you know, somebody might wanna say it's late 17th century and another person, another expert might, you know, favor the early 18th century, something like that. So actually, and, you know, you get that sort of, you know, kind of disagreement or diversity for pretty much any manuscript that, you know, that we're familiar with from our studies in Christianity. So it's not as if there wasn't, you know, unanimity among the handwriting experts. I think where there, where there was some pushback was that you did have several very, very bright scholars and people who were quite close to Morton Smith who, you know, had some serious doubts about whether this was really a letter of climate. A couple of them, Arthur Darby Knock, who was one of Smith's mentors at Harvard. He felt like this was probably a fifth century text. It seemed to him to be a sort of relatively late composition. You also had a scholar, I believe, oh gosh, I don't remember where Johannes Monk taught. I wanted to say a Piscopal Divinity School but that might be wrong. Johannes Monk also looked at it and said, you know, yeah, this says it's by Clement but it's got things like the Mark and Alexandria tradition which we don't know from other sources earlier than Eusebius whose fourth century. So there were some dissenting voices about saying that this was an authentic letter of climate but yes, Smith seems to in those cases, even though he valued their opinions and speaks very respectfully of them. He preferred to just plow ahead and say that this was an authentic letter of climate and I think in part of why he was, you know, so drawn to it being as early as possible is, I mean, a couple different reasons. One, that's oftentimes what scholars who have studied the Christian apocrypha have tried to do as a way of sort of making a statement about the importance of these texts is to kind of come up with the earliest dates possible for these things, even, you know, well into the first century. So I think part of why he, you know, posited an early date was that sort of temptation but he also felt like Jesus was more of a sort of esoteric, weird teacher than and not just sort of, kind of, you know, a teacher of counter-cultural wisdom as an AmeriCorps worker as the Gospels portrayed him. Smith was, you know, we seem pretty confident that Jesus was weirder than that sort of more traditional portrait that comes out of the Gospels. - Right, and just to sort of restate something that Brent said is that when it comes to the dating of late Greek handwriting, Morton Smith is not an expert and he knew that and so he consulted experts. When it comes to early Christian literature, Morton Smith is, you know, was an expert, was a leading expert and still can, you know, decided to consult other leading experts in the field and he did still decide to kind of push his own argument because, you know, he's completely entitled to do that as a leading expert in the field of early Christianity. But I will say that to his credit, he repeatedly reports in presentations but also in print the views of those who disagreed with him. And so if you go and read the Harvard monograph, for example, you can see in parentheses and sometimes in brackets, the views of people that disagreed with him on key points along with their initials so that you can, you know, scholars later can say, "Okay, well, you know, monk disagreed with him on this." So I think that is something that is definitely to his credit. - And something that we, you know, it's pretty rare to see that level of transparency, you know, even today, you know, yeah, there might be some, you know, in scholarship, there might be some vague illusions to, you know, some people who may disagree, but I mean, Smith was very, very open about the fact that his interpretation of this didn't match up completely with the thoughts of a number of other people whose opinions he, you know, greatly respected. - And did his model of the historical Jesus inform his interpretation of the serial gospel of Mark or was, or was it the other way around it, his reading of the serial gospel of Mark inform his model of the historical Jesus? - I think, yeah, go ahead, Jeff. - Yeah, this is a tricky one. I think it's a bit of a dialectic, but I do think that he already had these pre-existing questions that he was looking for answers to. And we know this because Morton Smith actually wrote an entire book on Mark that he never published as a book. He may have parted out pieces of it in later articles, but he had written this book, and this was in the 1950s, he had written it, given it to his mentor to review a art book he had written it, given it to his mentor Arthur Darby knock and knock was not persuaded. And so then typical Morton Smith, he dug his heels in and decided to try to make the case even stronger to prove Arthur Darby knock wrong. Now when he finds the secret gospel of Mark, he's already at the tail end of this prior work on Mark. And we don't know what his thesis was, but what he was hunting for in that book certainly informed his understanding of the secret gospel. He also seemed to have been fixated on this question of mysticism, of this sort of mystical tradition that is very, very prominent in Judaism, particularly in medieval Jewish texts like the Hakealode and the Zohar and the Kabbalah. But it also shows up in early Christian sources as well, like say the books of J or some of the apocalyptic, apocalyptic ascent literature. And what he wanted to find was that nexus, that moment in the historical Jesus' ministry in his lifetime, where you could find the origins of that mysticism. And and and lo and behold that nocturnal ritual that Brent alluded to, that sounds to most readers fairly erotic and suggestive to Morton Smith, at least in print, he argued that this was the sort of birth of Christian mysticism. Now I think he probably modified some of his views through the years he dedicated to studying the secret gospel of Mark. But there's no doubt that he had these prior assumptions that allowed him, in our opinion, to overinterpret the text at times. So another school of thought in the scholarship of the secret gospel of Mark is that actually it was a 20th century forgery by Morton Smith himself, and you go over this in your skeptic chapter. And one of the, I guess one of the main proponents of this was Quentin Quiznell. Could you please expand like why Quisnell thought that Morton Smith forged the secret gospel of Mark himself? Yeah, so with with Quentin Quiznell, certainly he is a major player in what I would call what we would call the pro forgery camp of the secret gospel of Mark, basically people who think that this was a modern forgery that was perpetrated by Morton Smith. The first scholar we know of who makes that argument that Smith has forged it was Quentin Quiznell. He was a Roman Catholic priest. I think at the time that, so he had been teaching at Marquette University, and then he had changed, moved to Smith College in Massachusetts, and he wrote Morton Smith and asked him for more information about the manuscript that Smith had discovered at Marisaba because Smith had published his data about this manuscript and other manuscripts from Marisaba in a catalog. That the catalog was only in a few libraries, and it was quite hard to find back then. So Quisnell was basically asking for Smith's help in kind of tracking down a couple questions he had. And so then as often happens, Morton Smith had a lot of kind of extensive correspondence with different scholars, and he and Quisnell went back and forth in Quisnell's letters to Smith to my knowledge. I don't think he ever articulated his suspicion that it was a forgery, but he sort of asked Smith about, well why didn't you take it out of the monastery or why didn't you have scientific testing done or things like that? And basically Smith's answer to all of these, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? Questions from Quisnell was, well, it wasn't my manuscript. There weren't actually good places to do scientific testing. I mean, this monastery is in the middle of the desert, south of Jerusalem. And so they basically had this exchange. And then Quisnell comes out about a year later with an article in Catholic Biblical quarterly. So one of the main scholarly journals of academic biblical studies. And he basically accuses Morton Smith of not providing enough documentation about his find so that everybody could determine that it was authentic and says, you know, until Morton Smith gives us more information about his discovery and the circumstances under which he found it, we have to allow for the possibility that this is a forgery. And Smith replied, wrote an official response to Quisnell's article. And you would have thought that Smith, because he was a pretty cantankerous guy, that he would have been much more combative and much more offended by these forgery allegations. But they just sort of rolled off of him. And he made a defense of it, basically, kind of disputing several of Quisnell's points. But maybe didn't, you know, didn't stick up for himself enough. And so then one other factor that came to light with Quisnell was even though he had said, oh, I've just got questions about, you know, kind of the finding of the manuscript. And it seems a little sketchy and stuff. And Smith had said to him, well, your problem is clearly with the content of the text, you don't like the fact that this is, you know, Jesus being depicted in a homoerotic relationship. And, and Quisnell denied this to Smith, said, no, that's, I don't care about that. But Quisnell had also written, right about the same time, for National Catholic Reporter, which is more of a popular journal periodical, he had written a review of Smith's book. And in that book or in that review, Quisnell essentially says, okay, this is, this is a fun game that scholars like to play where they come up with some wacky text and wacky idea. And you know, give it the most scandalous, most offensive spin they possibly could on it. And so when you read that review by Quisnell and the National Catholic Reporter, it becomes pretty clear that he was, he was offended. So in conclusion about the role of Quentin Quisnell in this controversy, I, we think that Quentin Quisnell was maybe rather disingenuous about what his objections to the secret gospel of Mark were. And in terms of his criticisms that Morton Smith didn't do enough to, you know, kind of safeguard the manuscript, we don't actually think that his arguments had a lot of merit to it. He certainly alerted the authorities at Marsaba to the fact that he had found something interesting, but it was again not something that he, it was not his property to take out. So we feel like the, the criticisms raised by Quisnell about Smith's handling of it were, were not very fair, but ultimately what they led to was other, you know, other voices coming into the picture, coming into the debate and raising, you know, and framing them matter even more provocatively than Quisnell did. Quisnell never actually came right out and said that he thought Smith forged it. Although if you read between the lines in his publications, it's clear that he thinks that Smith was the author of it. But I think what Quisnell's contribution to the debate was that it sort of emboldened people who were really troubled by the content of the secret gospel of Mark to, to, to really come up with even more, you know, sort of even more provocative theories and explanations for how and why Morton Smith might have forged something like this. The next two figures that you take out in the book are Metzger and Irman. Jeff, could you tell the listeners their contributions to this debate? Yeah, I'll actually pass that torch off to Brent, since he was the one who did the, the line share of the research on this part of the book. Mm-hmm, sure, yeah, I can, I can, I can take that on. So what, what was going on? The reason that Metzger and Irman came into the picture was, was because of a, one of the things that I was trying to do. was to document sort of the history of the forgery accusations, and I had certain kind of, you know, certain mile markers along my journey, where it was like, okay, well, there's quiz now in 1974, 1975, then the forgery accusations tend to die down for a little while, and then you get some claims in the early 1990s, right about the time of Smith's death by his former student, Jacob Newsner, Newsner argues that Smith pulled off a forgery, but then the next sort of major sort of stop is that in, you know, 2003, 2004, 2005, there are a couple books that come out, one by Stephen Carlson and one by Peter Jeffrey, and both of these books in their own ways make an argument that Smith forged the document. And so what I was trying to do was figure out, okay, well, how did they get this idea? How did they come up with, you know, this this this theory that Smith had done this, and they both were coming up with it at about the same time, and they hadn't they didn't really seem to have had, you know, been in conversation with each other. And in looking through Carlson and Jeffrey's books, what I realized was that they were part of the missing piece there was Bart Airman. So Bart Airman is, you know, probably known to many of your listeners, Airman is one of the most prominent biblical scholars in the world. Certainly has has done, done amazing work, popularizing the the sorts of work that that scholars do. And, you know, has has written a number of New York Times best sellers, like misquoting Jesus and Jesus interrupted and some other books like that that basically explore these ideas. And Airman is often thought of as a pretty liberal biblical scholar. He's, you know, he's not a conservative, even though he comes from a conservative background. But what I realized in reading carefully through Airman's publications was that even though he tends to sort of come down on more liberal positions for a lot of the issues that that he cares about in biblical scholarship, his remarks about the secret gospel of Mark, particularly in his book Lost Christianity, which came out, I believe, in the year 2000. He seemed very skeptical of of the secret gospel of Mark and very open, much more open than I would have expected from Airman about the possibility that Morton Smith had actually forged it. And I was thinking, okay, well, what's what's motivating Airman, this doesn't really seem to be very much in character. But then as as I read, you know, his discussion of it, I realized how how often he was citing the views of his doctoral dissertation advisor, a guy named Bruce Metzger at Princeton Theological Seminary. And Bruce Metzger was much more conservative than Bart Airman is today. And I think that in large part, if you if you look at Metzger, what Metzger has said about, you know, the secret gospel of Mark and questions about its authenticity, if you look at that, and then you juxtapose that next to what Bart Airman has said, there's not a lot of daylight between them. I think this was a, you know, kind of an interesting instance of Airman, even though he has parted ways with his with his doctoral advisor on so many different in so many different directions, this seemed to be something where he kind of uncritically repeated allegations made by Metzger. So when you Brent and Jeff decide to take up the secret gospel of Mark, what was your process on trying to look at this afresh and not being, I guess, tied to certain previous schools of thought? Yeah, so if we had, I would say an initial starting point, it was the manuscript. As Brent said, when we sat in that seminar together, we saw the picture of the manuscript, started talking about how difficult it would be for a non-native Greek writer to execute something like this. And beyond that, somebody who was not formally trained in Greek calligraphy from a certain generation or two in modern Greek history, once we realized that that could not have been more than Smith, then we just started considering other possibilities. Now, we did think that the language was suggestive. There's some who don't see any erotic undertones or overtones in the text, and we disagree with that. I think it's clear that there's something going on there. But for us, it was difficult to tell what kind of a discourse Jesus's interaction with the young man participated in. Where in history are people talking like this about same-sex relationships? So what we did is we started at the beginning, and we wanted to determine if we thought that Clement of Alexandria actually composed this letter. And after a careful review of the language of the text, we did see the similarities that Morton Smith pointed out between Clement's genuine writings and this letter to Theodore, but we also saw some of different affinities. We saw some really interesting, some striking parallels with the language of Eusebius in the ecclesiastical history. And as Brent has mentioned before, Eusebius was a fourth century writer, and his ecclesiastical history was a sort of universal history of the church, and it was very, very influential in antiquity, as it remains today in certain communities. And once we saw those similarities between this so-called letter of Clement in Eusebius' ecclesiastical history, it seemed to us that actually whoever penned this letter knew Eusebius. And if that's the case, it could not have been authentic, an authentic letter of Clement. Clement died well before Eusebius wrote his ecclesiastical history. So that enabled us to kind of push it post-fourth century, like late fourth century or later. At the same time, we contacted experts in Greek handwriting, a whole new crop of experts, and there seemed to have been a consensus that the handwriting was not, you know, 20th century, it was actually a fairly well executed 18th century hand. So that gave us a terminus post-quem, the fourth century, the terminus antiquem of the 18th century. So then we just started reading wildly within that massive time period to try and figure out if we could come up with a place and a time in which a text like this would make sense. And ultimately, we settled on late antique Palestinian monasticism as the place and the time where this makes the most sense as a text. And if I can just jump in there, you know, late antique Palestinian monasticism was not sort of an out-of-left field theory because, you know, we talked about starting with the with the manuscript and starting our inquiries with the data from the manuscript. And that's definitely what we did. And part of that data is where where was this thing? Where was this thing hanging out? Where's it been residing? And, you know, it seems to have been residing in Marisaba, which is one of the oldest continuously occupied Christian monasteries in the world. So once we, you know, once we were trying to come up with a plausible time and place, we started with, well, this is where it was found. Maybe this is actually where it was composed. So since your since this book came out in your contribution or your your theory about the secret gospel, Mark gave you received any response from the scholarly community? I'd say the initial responses are starting to roll in. We we've heard from several people that they find our solution to this quandary plausible. And I think for us, given the nature of the data and the nature of the controversy, we would consider that a victory. But we also have heard from some who are fairly entrenched in their positions and they've been writing on this text, you know, since before we started. And they are not persuaded. And I and I think Brent and I are expecting that. It seems to be that there's sort of 10% of the scholarly world who think it's an alternative version of the secret of the Gospel of Mark written by Mark himself and 10% who think Morton Smith forged it and 80% who just don't want to get involved. And what we see this book as is an invitation for that 80% particularly those who are interested in the history of sexuality and those who are interested in late antiquity and the study of monasticism to get involved because we think if there's going to be progress made even beyond what we've done it's going to be made by scholars who are experts in those areas. So you would recommend this field of study I guess to you up and coming students that are interested. Yes definitely I mean I think this is this is one of those texts that unfortunately and and it's it's probably the most shining example of a text like this that has become you know has has had such a cloud of suspicion that has developed over it that it has it has essentially become radioactive and that very few scholars want to take it on and you know part of what I had to do in in the book one of my main tasks as a co-author was to go through the arguments for forgery and essentially you know offer my take on whether or not that any of them were really compelling and what I ultimately had to you know conclude is that even though there were a lot of different arguments made for forgery and a lot of really ingenious arguments like that Smith embedded you know references to Morton salt and to him being bald and all sorts of other like hidden treasures in in the secret gospel of Mark ultimately I had to come to the conclusion that you know even there even though there were theoretically a lot of arguments being made that pretty much none of them had really compelling substance to them they were all rather conspiratorial in the way that they thought about it and so I think that the secret gospel of Mark is still very much you know even though we've got our you know theory that we like very much about where it came from I would say that secret the secret gospel of Mark is still very much an unsolved mystery in the field of biblical studies and more people need to pay attention to it I think that my my hope would be that you know we've we've managed to at least get you know hopefully some of that 80% to to realize that you know the idea that Morton Smith forged this just doesn't hold a lot of water and that we've still got a weird text that we need to figure out where it came from yeah I would add to that too that I don't think it's come up so far but the manuscript has disappeared so the the last time it was seen I believe was 1983 by Quentin Quasnell himself at least the last time it was documented that it was seen now there's a lot of conspiracy theories as to where the manuscript went we do have pretty good photos of it that we can work off of but we would like to find a manuscript and we're you know we in the course of our investigation we we really have no reason to believe that it's anywhere but in the library of the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem and we think that it's almost certainly there but what we're not sure of is whether it was lost at some point or whether it's being kept back from the public and so our hope you know another hope of our book is that whoever knows where this manuscript is will come forward and make it available to scholars and even perhaps to scientists who can subject it to scientific testing. This current book that both the U of Ritz and the Seeker Gospel of Mark is more of a popular presentation of your theory for students that are interested I guess in the more technical details you have you have any peer-reviewed articles that you could say that for people that interested I guess going into that not really you know this is this is one of those interesting cases where you know we you know as opposed to the way that scholars often do things where you know they'll write a number of articles about something and you know and you you know sort of build up a book build up a monograph based on that we actually did it the other way around and I think part of it was that you know we felt like we had a pretty you know interesting idea about where this text might have come from and we didn't want to necessarily you know steal our books thunder by publishing publishing some articles in you know in academic journals that that already sort of gave away our thesis so we're we're actually at the point where we have not we have not done you know kind of this this book has been peer-reviewed by anonymous scholars for Yale University Press so it is definitely peer-reviewed but it's not it it has not been the subject of of any articles thus far what I would encourage I would actually direct potentially interested scholars to a couple of volumes that have already been published one of which is an edited volume by Tony Burke and it's called ancient gospel or modern forgery and it's basically the conference proceedings of a of a symposium on the secret gospel of Mark and questions about its authenticity that took place at York University in Toronto so so Tony Burke's conference volume ancient gospel or modern forgery I would also direct students and interested scholars to the book by Scott Brown it's called Mark's other gospel Scott Brown wrote his dissertation at the University of Toronto on the secret gospel of Mark and Scott Brown has done a lot of work in terms of arguing against the you know various permutations of the forgery hypothesis so if somebody really wants to get into this and and really wants to get into the you know scholarly heavy list lifting and minutia I would say that the the Burke edited volume and Scott Brown's dissertation are the places to start so I believe that's all the time we have for today but before we go we usually like to ask our guests about their current projects and what they're working on yeah so I'm currently working on a project that deals with what I guess we we would call the archaeology of early of early Christian manuscripts and so there's this archaeological site called oxy rinkus which is named after the fish that swims in the Nile tributary near the town it's a fish with a sharp nose and so the city of oxy rinkus was a decent size ancient city but it happens to be where two archaeologists named Grenfell and Hunt excavated about 500,000 papyrus fragments in the late 1800s and early 1900s and these fragments are some of our earliest copies of things like Homer and Sappho and even New Testament and apocryphal writings like the gospel atomis but there's all kinds of other material in there as well even mundane tax receipts and letters and magical texts and so my project is trying to see what what we can determine about the archaeological context of these manuscripts that were discovered and the book that I am currently working on and revising is a book on what I would call alternative reconstructions of the historical Jesus so what I'm interested in here this is a historical Jesus book but it's a historical Jesus book almost in reverse that it kind of takes as its starting point some really provocative claims that have been made you know both in recent times and much earlier about the historical Jesus so if you've ever heard people say you know Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene or that Jesus had another love interest or that Jesus went to India or that Jesus never existed or anything like that these are exactly those sorts of alternative historical reconstructions that I get into in in that book so yeah I'm excited about about it's seeing the light of day sometime soon right and Jeff thank you so much for the interview thank you very much thank you David You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? 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