[ Morton H. Smith (1915-1991) was Professor of Ancient History
at Columbia University and author of The Secret Gospel and
Jesus the Magician, among other books.
Laughing Man editor Saniel Bonder met with Dr. Smith at Columbia
to talk about the responses he has received
to his unorthodox scholarly view of the life and work of Jesus.
This interview was published in Laughing Man Vol 2. No. 2, 1981]
 

THE LAUGHING MAN: Could you tell us a little about how you came to be involved in New Testament studies and how you came to write The Secret Gospel?

PROF. SMITH: I went to Harvard Divinity School and got into New Testament work there. Then I received a traveling fellowship for work in Palestine where I wrote a thesis on the relations between the Gospels and other ancient literature. Then I came back to the United States and got into Old Testament studies and eventually found myself teaching the whole range of ancient history here.

I hadn't intended to go on with New Testament Studies. In 1958 I went out to Jerusalem, and I was making a catalogue of the books and manuscripts in an old monastery, Mar Saba. This was part of my work on "patristics," or at least I thought it was going to be part of my work on patristics—patristics being the study of the works of the Church Fathers.

One of the things you have to do is try and find out what manuscripts of their works are extant and where the manuscripts are. So I was cataloguing the manuscripts in this monastery down in the Judean desert and came across this letter by Clement of Alexandria. The letter led me to the theory that Jesus had been administering some sort of initiation in connection with the baptismal rite. The necessity of defending that intuition led me into an investigation of magic. And the more I saw of ancient magic, the more parallels I saw to the New Testament, so my new book, Jesus the Magician, grew out of this work. I should mention that, beside The Secret Gospel, I have published a scholarly rendition of the same material in a book called Clement of Alexandria and the Secret Gospel of Mark. It is the scholarly version of the second half of The Secret Gospel of which the first half gives an account of how the discovery occurred.

THE LAUGHING MAN: Since you point out that you have published a more scholarly version of the text, I assume that TheSecret Gospel was intended for a general, lay readership. What was the response, both professional and lay, to the findings and your interpretation of them?

PROF. SMITH: Well, the professional response was largely abusive and mostly uncomprehending. There were a few good reviews. Cyril Richardson, who was a professor of patristics at Union Theology Seminary, wrote an excellent review in Theology Today. There were a number of other good reviews by fairly exceptional people, but the rank and file of New Testament scholarship produced reviews that varied from contemptuous dismissal to violent attack! The reviews in lay journals, however, were very friendly and some of them quite enthusiastic. So, I think the book performed its purpose.

The other book, the scholarly book, is selling slowly but making its way in the academic world. One professor at Harvard has been studying the text very closely and is going to give a report at the coming meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature to a special group interested in synoptic criticism. Out on the Pacific Coast the Theological Union in San Francisco held a conference on the text at which I spoke. A number of people from the West Coast were there. So there are professionals who took the work seriously. But there was a general attempt, led by the editor of one of the principal journals of biblical literature, to dismiss both the book and the finds as irresponsible sensationalism. His principal complaint was that this did not agree with what he thought about Jesus.

THE LAUGHING MAN: One of the scholars you mentioned in The Secret Gospel said that the most interesting thing about the letter is that it reveals that there was an esoteric side to early Christian religion. Is this what people find offensive, or is there something else?

PROF. SMITH: Well, this one fellow wrote a whole article attacking The Secret Gospel. The article was deliberately misrepresentative, because he knew that the work was not sensationalism and he knew that the facts were very carefully documented. He is perfectly capable of reading Greek, is a well-trained linguist, and he had the Harvard edition with all the research in front of him. He mentioned that edition in his article, so he had evidently studied it.

But he nevertheless wrote this article maintaining that I had not discovered a secret Gospel, and that the book I had written was irresponsible sensationalism and particularly dangerous because it represented Jesus as performing secret rites leading to visionary experiences, setting the initiates free from the law with possible homosexual overtones, etc. All this was just, he must have thought, simply oil in the fire, the fire being the visionary-mystical ferment of the late 60s, which was still not entirely quenched in 1973 when the book came out. So his was a "Legion of Decency" reaction.

This article set the tone of a great many theological reviews in the United States. People copied it or said the same things in only slightly varied words. As editor of a major theological journal, this person also solicited some of his contributors to insert attacks on the book in their articles. I don't know in how many instances he was successful, but I know he was doing so because in one instance not only did he 'fail, but the person reported the attempt to me. That was how I learned what was going on.

So, that's what you're up against. The professional organizations are dominated by people from theological schools, and the people from theological schools tend to defend the accepted positions.

THE LAUGHING MAN: Which suppress any intimations of the esoteric?

PROF. SMITH: Yes, intimations that they are not willing to consider. But they are going to have to. The facts are there. The manuscript exists and is now in Jerusalem. The photographs of it fortunately are here, so there is no doubt about its existence, there are also no doubts about the parallels to magical material. A team of good scholars is now doing a complete translation of the magical papyri, and will also do a couple of volumes of commentary on the parallels between the papyri and the New Testament. This material will be out within two or three years. The translation is at present complete in first draft form, so it is going to come out, and the field will just have to face the facts. Of course they will face them by minimizing, drawing distinctions; any theologian worth his salt always distinguishes between what happens in any other religion and what happens in the "One True Religion." So there will be distinctions, and there will be contemptuous retorts also, but when all these reactions are over, the material will be generally accepted and treated as part of the evidence of the field. It will gradually make its way in after the initial sneering dies down.

THE LAUGHING MAN: Have you or anyone else found any other texts alluding to a secret Gospel? In other words, at the sort of archaeological level, has any more information come forth that relates to a secret tradition of some kind?

PROF. SMITH: Not directly. A man down at General Seminary has some very interesting evidence from the ritual calendar of the Egyptian Church year about the placing of the annual baptism in the ancient Church. You didn't just take a child around and baptize it at random. There was a great annual baptism, fixed at one time in the year, when the whole crop of children born that year were brought in to be baptized. This practice gradually died out in the fifth century and later, but down to about that time this was the general practice. This man has been studying the place of the baptismal rite in the Egyptian Church and has some data about the shifting of that date which he thinks is explicable and remains as the result of a tradition derived from the secret Gospel.

Another scholar has done a very interesting thing. He has compared all the
passages that are in Mark but are not in either Matthew or Luke. The Gospel of Mark, you see, is supposed to have been used by Matthew and Luke in the creation of their own accounts. Now most of Mark is in both Matthew and Luke, and most of what is left is in either Matthew or Luke, but there is nevertheless a small (in relation to the whole bulk of the Gospels) but still pretty considerable final remainder in Mark that is neither in Matthew nor in Luke.

The man I spoke of has made a study of this exclusively Markan material and has found it has an unusually high proportion of linguistic and stylistic relations to the material in the fragment of Clement's letter in The Secret Gospel. His conclusion, if I understand it correctly, is that the original Mark was the Mark used by Matthew and Luke and that what we have now is a Mark that was expanded by the person who put in both the secret gospel material and the other things not in the text used by Matthew and Luke. All these were parts of the secret Gospel he made from the original Mark. Later somebody else came along and cut down the expanded Gospel by taking out the most dangerous passages, like the passage related to this initiatory ritual.

You see, what is really dangerous is the question of how you get into the kingdom of God. Once you get into the kingdom of God you are free from the law, and once you are free from the law, then depending on your personality and the way you want to interpret your freedom, all sorts of things can happen.

THE LAUGHING MAN: In relation to dietary matters, sexuality, and so forth? The old Judaic laws were of course very strict and explicit.

PROF. SMITH: Ask anyone who claims to be spiritually free—once you're free, what do you do? Freedom presents a critical problem and anybody who claims it has to face the question, what do I really want to do?

All sorts of answers can be given to this question, depending on the personal inclinations and social traditions of the person who has decided that he is free. The essential question, the dangerous question in Jesus' day was, how do you get into the kingdom, because that question, restated in modern terms, is how do you become free? Therefore, passages referring to that secret initiatory ritual would probably have been the material cut out of the official Gospels. Thus, one scholar proposes that what we have in the present Gospel of Mark is not the old original Gospel that was used by Matthew and Luke, but an expanded version that was done by the man who wrote the secret Gospel but which was then censored by somebody else. You have a sort of three-stage transition in the text. This is as much as I know of corroborating material.

THE LAUGHING MAN: One of the most impressive observations to which both of these books lead is a recognition of just what a hodgepodge of legends, rumors, and later interpolations the books of the New Testament seem to represent. Does most New Testament scholarship acknowledge some of these points about how these books were created? Lay Christianity has very little sense of anything remotely like this.

PROF. SMITH: Yes. In this matter I represent, on the whole, the common opinion of the scholarly community, even to a great extent the Roman Catholic scholarly community. For Protestant scholarly opinion, I am actually too far on the conservative side. One of the main objections to my work among Protestant New Testament scholars is that I take the gospel stories too seriously as evidence of what actually happened and do not realize or do not make sufficient allowance for the secondary, legendary developments that must have taken place between Jesus' life and the writing of the Gospels. Jesus was crucified around 30 A.D. The Gospels were written in the neighborhood of 75 to 100 A.D.; they were spread out in that quarter of a century. Contemporary scholarly criticism, both Protestant and Catholic, makes a great deal of the development of all traditions during the years from 30 to 100 A.D., leading to the recognition that the gospel stories have been very much reworked, developed, expanded, and modified. The different branches of the tradition have been put together by people who got stories from a great many different sources and put them together to make the Gospels. Of course, most scholars and preachers nevertheless presume that there must be a reliable kernel of truth in these summaries, and then you proceed to find that the kernel of truth is just what you want for the purpose of your Sunday sermon.

THE LAUGHING MAN: I wonder if you have considered other possible interpretations of the esoteric aspect of Jesus' work by drawing upon other yogic and mystical terminologies and traditions of practice. It seems one could go in any number of directions from that last great phrase in Clement's letter, "and the true explanation is . . ."

PROF. SMITH: I didn't go into that question in the book because I wasn't writing about how Clement interpreted it, but Clement has an extensively studied and pretty wellknown theology. You can be sure that Clement is going to interpret the material to fit his theology. Actually it is not so far from the original secret tradition, if I interpret that original tradition correctly. It is a technique of spiritual ascent into the heavens and when you have finally achieved this ascent you become a god, or you join the other gods, as Clement actually says. He is probably talking about the stars, which, like most ancient people, he thinks are gods who are in the realm of pure bliss circling the highest god.

THE LAUGHING MAN: Some spiritual investigators suggest that the matter of spiritual ascent refers to a process that goes on psychophysically in the body-mind and yields an awakening or regeneration of this ninety-five percent of the brain that the scientists tell us is still essentially unused. You speak of Jesus as a magician. What do you think of the possibility that Jesus functioned in the tradition of mystical or yogic adepts? Could his baptism by fire, for instance, perhaps be compared with kundalini yoga, which talks of a similarly fiery kind of phenomenon overtaking one's nervous system? And perhaps this matter of "Spirit baptism" was not so much a matter of being taken over by a spirit—an entity or discarnate force—but by what you might call the Spirit.

PROF. SMITH: Precisely, of course, what the Christians thought! Discussion of the Spirit actually gets into the Trinity—Father, Son, Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit. This similarity of mystical experiences all over the world is well known, has been much explored. Huxley wrote a book—The Perennial Philosophy—on mystical experience, in which he argued from the analogous reports of mystical experience all over the world that this was actually experience of some objective reality. I'm much more sympathetic to the point of view that this is not experience of a reality external to the body but is experience of the consequences of the structure of what you call the body-mind.

The question is whether large numbers of human beings behave in pretty much the same way and have similar visions and ecstatic experiences under different circumstances (but circumstances that have a number of recognizable similarities) so that you can speak of a certain type of human response that appeared pretty frequently all over the world. It seems very likely that Jesus' technique for "entering the Kingdom" might have been among other things a means for inducing that sort of response. In other words, he might have been a practicing mystic with a technique of inducing this what you might call a "standard mystical reaction"—if you recognize that the term "standard" covers a great many different particular varieties.

That, however, would not settle the question as to whether or not he was a magician in terms of his society, because magic is a socially defined term. The essential argument of 1esus fee Magrcran is that he was doing the sorts of things that were done by persons in his society who were called magicians. He was using for his own purposes the patterns of behavior then described as"magical" and was consequently described as "a magician" by his contemporaries. I think that conclusion is very hard to avoid.

THE LAUGHING MAN: Well, your documentation is certainly impressive. My question and my speculation is, was there something that he was doing in secret that was beyond the common magical rites of that time?

PROF. SMITH: You mustn't sell the common magical rites short. How do you know that the other magicians weren't also inducing mystical responses? You don't get a universal Catholic church every time you induce a mystical response. You may just get one private individual to come and follow you, or you may get a small group, or you may get a worldwide organization. Jesus was one of the two or three or half dozen in history who really got worldwide organizations. Not that I think that he expected one. Presumably he would have been at least as surprised by the second Vatican Council as he was by the crucifixion! Neither of these things, I think, fell within his plans, but that was what happened.

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