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

Hardcover 354 pages.
Publisher: Yale University Press, 2007

Used – Very Good. A copy that has been read but remains in excellent condition. Pages are intact and are not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

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. Is the text authentic, or a hoax? Did Jesus really practice magic, or homosexuality? And if the letter is a forgery. . . why? 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 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.