Second Epistle of Clement
The Second Epistle of Clement referred to as 2 Clement, is an early Christian writing. It is considered canon by the Coptic Orthodox Church. 2 Clement was traditionally believed to have been an epistle to the Christian Church in Corinth written by Clement of Rome sometime in the late 1st century. However, 4th-century bishop Eusebius, in his historical work, says that there was one recognized epistle of Clement, he expresses doubt about the authenticity of a second epistle. Modern scholars believe that Second Clement is a sermon written around 95–140 CE by an anonymous author, one, neither the author of 1 Clement nor Clement of Rome. Nonetheless, scholars still refer to the work by its traditional name "Second Clement". 2 Clement appears to be a transcript of a homily or sermon, delivered orally at a Christian worship service. For example, in ch. 19 the speaker announces that he will read aloud from scripture – something one would only expect to find in a transcript of an oral sermon. Whereas an epistle would begin by introducing the sender and recipient, 2 Clement starts with by addressing "Brethren", proceeding directly to the sermon.
If it is a sermon, 2 Clement would be the earliest surviving Christian sermon. Like many early Christian texts, 2 Clement was written in Greek, the common language of the Hellenized Mediterranean area; the earliest external reference to 2 Clement is found in Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History written in the early 4th century: But it must be observed that there is said to be a second epistle of Clement. But we do not know that this is recognized like the former, for we do not find that the ancients have made any use of it, and certain men have brought forward other wordy and lengthy writings under his name, containing dialogues of Peter and Apion. But no mention has been made of these by the ancients. Rather than trying to convert others to Christianity, 2 Clement appears to be directed at an audience of Christians who had converted from Paganism. 2 Clement seems to reference a history of idolatry: " we were maimed in our understanding - we were worshipping stones and pieces of wood, gold and silver and copper - all of them made by humans".
Despite their pagan background, the speaker and audience in 2 Clement appear to consider the Jewish texts to be scripture - the speaker quotes from the Book of Isaiah and interprets the text. The speaker regards the words of Jesus as scripture - for example, 2 Clement 2:4 mentions a saying of Jesus as "scripture":Και ετερα δε γραφη λεγει, οτι "ουκ ηλθον καλεσαι δικαιους, αλλα αμαρτωλους". Again another scripture saith, I sinners. In addition to the canonical literature, the author of 2 Clement appears to have had access to Christian writings or oral tradition aside from those found in the New Testament; some quotes attributed to Jesus are found only here, e.g. 4:5. Δια τουτο ταυτα υμων πρασσοντων, ειπεν ο κυριος· "Εαν ητε μετ' εμου συνηγμενοι εν τω κολπω μου και μη ποιητε τας εντολας μου, αποβαλω υμας και ερω υμιν· Υπαγετε απ΄εμου, ουκ οιδα υμας, ποθεν εστε, εργαται ανομιας". For this cause, if ye do these things, the Lord said, Though ye be gathered together with Me in My bosom, do not My commandments, I will cast you away and will say unto you, Depart from Me, I know you not whence ye are, ye workers of iniquity΄΄.
In 2 Clement 5:2-4, the author quotes a saying of Jesus, found in the New Testament, but the version quoted in 2 Clement is longer than the version found in the New Testament. Λεγει γαρ ο κυριος· "Εσεσθε ως αρνια εν μεσω λυκων". Αποκριθεις δε ο Πετρος αυτω λεγει· "Εαν ουν διασπαραξωσιν οι λυκοι τα αρωια. For the Lord saith, Ye shall be as lambs in the midst of wolves, but Peter answered and said unto Him, What if the wolves should tear the lambs? Jesus said unto Peter. In the 20th century, a manuscript fragment was discovered that suggests this saying is a quote from the Gospel of Peter, much of, lost. 2 Clement 12:2 says: επερωτηθεις γαρ αυτος ο κυριος υπο τινος, ποτε ηξει αυτου η βασιλεια, ειπεν Οταν εσται τα δυο εν, και το εξω ως το εσω, και το αρσεν μετα της θηλειας ουτε αρσεν ουτε θηλυ. For the Lord Himself, being asked by a certain person when his kingdom would come, When the two shall be one, the outside as the inside, the male with the female, neither male or female, he goes on to give interpretations of these metaphors.
The saying was ascribed to Cassianus and to the Greek Gospel of the Egyptians by Clement of Alexandria. A version of the saying is found in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, lost until the mid-20th century: Jesus saw children that were being suckled, he said to his disciples: These children being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom. They said to him, If we are children, shall we enter the kingdom? Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, make the inside like the outside
Acts of Philip
The Greek Acts of Philip is an unorthodox episodic apocryphal book of acts from the mid-to-late fourth century in fifteen separate acta, that gives an accounting of the miraculous acts performed by the Apostle Philip, with overtones of the heroic romance. Some of these episodes are identifiable as belonging to more related "cycles". Two episodes recounting events of Philip's commission have survived in both shorter and longer versions. There is no commission narrative in the surviving texts: Philip's authority rests on the prayers and benediction of Peter and John and is explicitly bolstered by a divine epiphany, in which the voice of Jesus urges "Hurry Philip! Behold, my angel is with you, do not neglect your task" and "Jesus is secretly walking with him".. The Acts of Philip is most represented by a text discovered in 1974 by François Bovon and Bertrand Bouvier in the library of Xenophontos monastery on Mount Athos in Greece; the manuscript dates from the fourteenth century but its language identifies it as a copy of a fourth-century original.
Many of the narratives in the manuscript were known from other sources, but some were hitherto unknown. The narrative recounts; the followers were Philip, and— a leading figure in the second half of the text— a woman named Mariamne, identified in the text as Philip's sister, who Bovon at first suggested may be identical to Mary Magdalene. However, following the Discovery Channel's popularized speculations in The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Bovon publicly distanced himself from its claims, withdrawing his published assertion that the Mariamne of the Talpiot tomb discussed in The Lost Tomb of Jesus is the same person, writing in an open letter to the Society of Biblical Literature: the Mariamne of the Acts of Philip is part of the apostolic team with Philip and Bartholomew. In the beginning, her faith is stronger than Philip's faith; this portrayal of Mariamne fits well with the portrayal of Mary of Magdala in the Manichean Psalms, the Gospel of Mary, Pistis Sophia. My interest on the level of literary traditions.
I have suggested this identification in 1984 in an article of New Testament Studies. The text discovered by Bovon described a community that practised vegetarianism and celibacy. Women in the community wore men's clothes and held positions of authority comparable to men, serving as priests and deacons; the community used a form of the eucharist where vegetables and water were consumed in place of bread and wine. Among lesser miraculous accomplishments of the group were the conversion of a talking leopard and a talking goat, as well as the slaying of a dragon. "Speaking animals as helpers of the apostles are familiar figures in the apostolic Acts". New translations of the full text as discovered by Bovon have been published in French, 1996, in English in 2012. Previous English translations, such as that in M. R. James, are based on the collections of fragments. Bovon, F. B. Bouvier, F. Amsler, Acta Philippi: Textus. Amsler, F. Acta Philippi: Commentarius. F. Amsler et A. Frey, Concordantia Actorum Philippi.
F. Bovon, B. Bouvier, F. Amsler, Actes de l'apôtre Philippe: Introduction, notes et traductions, Turnhout: Brepols 1996. ISBN 978-2-503-50422-3. François Bovon and Christopher R. Matthews, The Acts of Philip: a new translation, Baylor University Press, 2012. ISBN 9781602586550. De Santos Otero, "Acta Philippi," in W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha. Vol. II, 468–473. Bovon, F. B. Bouvier, F. Amsler, Actes de l'apôtre Philippe. Bovon, F. "Mary Magdalene in the Acts of Philip", in F. Stanley Jones, Which Mary? 2002, 75–89. Bovon, F. "Women Priestesses in the Apocryphal Acts of Philip," in S. Matthews, C. Briggs Kittredge and M. Johnson-DeBaufre, Walk in the Ways of Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 109–121. M. R. James, in The Apocryphal New Testament 1924. Text of the Acts of Philip, based on sources available before the Mount Athos discovery. Peter H. Desmond, "Fourth-Century Church Tales: Women priests and summer dresses", Harvard Magazine on-line edition Women Priests, Vegetarianism – An Early Christian Manuscript Holds Some Surprises – from the Harvard University Gazette.
Bovon's letter to the Society of Biblical Literature
Gospel of Philip
The Gospel of Philip is one of the Gnostic Gospels, a text of New Testament apocrypha, dated to around the 3rd century but lost in modern times until an Egyptian man rediscovered it by accident, buried in a cave near Nag Hammadi, in 1945. The text is not related to the canonical gospels and is not accepted as canonical by the Christian church. Although it may seem similar to the Gospel of Thomas, scholars are divided as to whether it is a single discourse or a collection of Valentinian sayings. Sacraments, in particular the sacrament of marriage, are a major theme; as in the other gnostic texts, the Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip defends the tradition that gives Mary Magdalene special insight into Jesus' teaching, but does not support "twenty-first-century inventions concerning Mary Magdalene as Jesus' wife and mother of his offspring."Nevertheless, novels such as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code have encouraged the popular theory that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
The Ancient Greek manuscript describes Jesus as Mary's "koinonos", or "companion", which may sometimes imply a sexual relationship, but is always used as "a metaphor for a deeper, spiritual partnership". The gospel's title appears at the end of the Coptic manuscript in a colophon; the text proper makes no claim to be from Philip, though the four New Testament gospels make no explicit claim of authorship. The Gospel of Philip was written between 150 AD and 350 AD, while Philip himself lived in the first century, making it unlikely to be his writing. Most scholars hold a 3rd-century date of composition. A single manuscript of the Gospel of Philip, in Coptic, was found in the Nag Hammadi library, a cache of documents, secreted in a jar and buried in the Egyptian desert at the end of the 4th century; the text was bound in the same codex. From the mix of aphorisms, brief polemics, narrative dialogue, biblical exegesis, dogmatic propositions, Wesley T. Isenberg, the editor and translator of the text, has attributed seventeen sayings to Jesus, nine of which Isenberg characterizes as citations and interpretations of those found in the canonical gospels The new sayings, "identified by the formula introducing them are brief and enigmatic and are best interpreted from a gnostic perspective," Isenberg has written in his Introduction to the text.
Much of the Gospel of Philip is concerned with Gnostic views of the origin and nature of mankind and the sacraments of baptism and marriage. The Gospel emphasizes the sacramental nature of the embrace between man and woman in the nuptial chamber, an archetype of spiritual unity, which entails the indissoluble nature of marriage Many of the sayings are identifiably Gnostic, appear quite mysterious and enigmatic: The Lord said, "Blessed is he, before he came into being. For he who is, has been and shall be." He who has knowledge of the truth is a free man, but the free man does not sin, for "He who sins is the slave of sin". Truth is knowledge the father. Echamoth is Echmoth, another. Echamoth is Wisdom but Echmoth is the Wisdom of death, the one who knows death, called "the little Wisdom"; those who say they will die first and rise are in error. If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they will receive nothing. Jesus came to crucify the world. Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not appear as he was, but in the manner in which they would be able to see him.
He appeared to them all. He appeared to the great as great, he appeared to the small as small. He appeared to the angels as an angel, to men as a man, it is not possible for anyone to see anything of the things that exist unless he becomes like them... You saw the Spirit, you became spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ. You saw the Father, you shall become Father. So in this place you see everything and do not see yourself, but in that place you do see yourself - and what you see you shall become. Adam came into being from the Spirit and from the virgin earth. Christ therefore, was born from a virgin to rectify the Fall which occurred in the beginning. One saying in particular appears to identify the levels of initiation in gnosticism, although what the bridal chamber represented in gnostic thought is a matter of great debate: The Lord did everything in a mystery, a baptism and a chrism and a eucharist and a redemption and a bridal chamber. One possibility is that the bridal chamber refers symbolically to the relationship of trust and singular devotion that should exist between God and mankind – just as the marriage relationship implies a devotion of husband and wife to each other, expected to exclude all other parties.
This symbolic meaning is found for example in the Parable of the Ten Virgins –, "Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, went forth to meet the bridegroom". Another interpretation of the Gospel of Philip finds Jesus as the central focus of the text; this view is supported by Marvin W. Meyer. Evidence for this belief can be found in the following selection of quotations from the gospel: Those who produce the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
The Shepherd of Hermas
The Shepherd of Hermas is a Christian literary work of the late first half of the second century, considered a valuable book by many Christians, considered canonical scripture by some of the early Church fathers such as Irenaeus. The Shepherd was popular amongst Christians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, it is part of the Codex Sinaiticus, it is listed between the Acts of the Apostles and the Acts of Paul in the stichometrical list of the Codex Claromontanus. The work comprises five visions, twelve mandates, ten parables, it relies on allegory and pays special attention to the Church, calling the faithful to repent of the sins that have harmed it. The book was written in Rome, in the Greek language, but a first Latin translation, the Vulgata, was made shortly afterwards. A second Latin translation, the Palatina, was made at the beginning of the fifth century. Of the Greek version, the last fifth or so is missing; the shepherd is one of the meanings, attached to some figurines of the Good Shepherd as well as an epithet of Christ, or a traditional pagan kriophoros.
The book consists of five visions granted to a former slave. This is followed by twelve mandates or commandments, ten similitudes, or parables, it commences abruptly in the first person: "He who brought me up sold me to a certain Rhoda, at Rome. After many years I met her again, began to love her as a sister." As Hermas is on the road to Cumae, he has a vision of Rhoda. She tells him that she is his accuser in heaven, on account of an unchaste thought the narrator had once had concerning her, though only in passing, he is to pray for forgiveness for all his house. He is consoled by a vision of the Church in the form of an aged woman and helpless from the sins of the faithful, who tells him to do penance and to correct the sins of his children. Subsequently, he sees; this allegorical language continues through the other parts of the work. In the second vision she gives Hermas a book; the fifth vision, represented as taking place 20 days after the fourth, introduces "the Angel of repentance" in the guise of a shepherd, from whom the whole work takes its name.
He delivers to Hermas a series of precepts, which form an interesting development of early Christian ethics. One point which deserves special mention is the depiction of a husband's obligation to take back an adulterous wife on her repentance; the eleventh mandate, on humility, is concerned with false prophets who desire to occupy the first seats. Some have seen here a reference to Marcion, who came to Rome c. 140 and desired to be admitted among the priests. After the mandates come ten similitudes in the form of visions, which are explained by the angel; the longest of these is an elaboration of the parable of the building of a tower, which had formed the matter of the third vision. The tower is the Church, the stones of which it is built are the faithful, but in the third vision it looked. In spite of the grave subjects, the book is written in a optimistic and hopeful tone, like most early Christian works. In parable 5, the author mentions a Son of God, as a virtuous man filled with a holy "pre-existent spirit" and adopted as the Son.
In the 2nd century, adoptionism was one of two competing doctrines about Jesus' true nature, the other being that he pre-existed as the Word or only-begotten Son of God and is to be identified as such from his conception. Bogdan G. Bucur says the document was accepted among "orthodox" Christians, yet was not criticized for exhibiting an adoptionistic Christology, he says that the passage in question should be understood as Jesus making his dwelling within those who submit to his spirit, so that the adoption that takes place is not of Jesus, but of his followers. Textual criticism, the nature of the theology, the author's apparent familiarity with the Book of Revelation and other Johannine texts are thought to set the date of composition in the 2nd century. However, several ancient witnesses support an early dating and there is internal evidence for the place and date of this work in the language and theology of the work; the reference to an unknown Clement is presumed by some to be Clement of Rome.
Since Paul sent greetings to a Hermas, a Christian of Rome, a minority have followed Origen of Alexandria's opinion that he was the author of this religious allegory. Three ancient witnesses, one of whom claims to be contemporary, declare that Hermas was the brother of Pope Pius I, whose pontificate was not earlier than 140–155 AD, which corresponds to the date range offered by J. B. Lightfoot; these authorities may be citing the same source Hegesippus, whose lost history of the early Church provided material for Eusebius of Caesarea. The
Gospel of James
The Gospel of James known as the Infancy Gospel of James, the Book of James, the Protoevangelium of James, is an apocryphal gospel written about AD 145, which expands backward in time the infancy stories contained in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, presents a narrative concerning the birth and upbringing of Mary herself. It is the oldest source outside the New Testament to assert the virginity of Mary not only prior to, but during the birth of Jesus; the ancient manuscripts that preserve the book have different titles, including "The Birth of Mary", "The Story of the Birth of Saint Mary, Mother of God," and "The Birth of Mary. The document presents itself as written by James: "I, wrote this history in Jerusalem." The purported author is thus James, the brother of Jesus, but scholars have concluded that the work was not written by the person to whom it is attributed, but was composed some time in the mid- to late 2nd century. That conclusion is based on the style of the language and that the author describes certain activities as contemporary Jewish customs that did not exist.
For example, the work suggests there were consecrated temple virgins in Judaism, similar to the Vestal Virgins in pagan Rome, but, never directly stated to have been a practice in mainstream Judaism. The consensus is that it was composed in the latter half of the 2nd century; the first mention of it is in the early 3rd century by Origen of Alexandria, who says the text, like that of a Gospel of Peter, was of dubious, recent appearance and shared with that book the claim that the "brethren of the Lord" were sons of Joseph by a former wife. Although a number of Church councils condemned it as an inauthentic writing of the New Testament, this did little to diminish its popularity. Pope Innocent I condemned this Gospel of James in his third epistle ad Exuperium in 405 AD, the so-called Gelasian Decree excluded it as canonical around 500 AD. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae, rejects the Protevangelium of James teaching that midwives were present at Christ's birth, invokes Jerome as contending that the words of the canonical gospels show that Mary was both mother and midwife, that she wrapped up the child with swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.
And thus concludes, "These words prove the falseness of the apocryphal ravings." The Gospel of James is one of several surviving Infancy Gospels that give an idea of the miracle literature, created to satisfy the hunger of early Christians for more detail about the early life of their Saviour. In Greek such an infancy gospel was termed a protevangelion, a "pre-Gospel" narrating events of Jesus' life before those recorded in the four canonical gospels; such a work was intended to be "apologetic, doctrinal, or to satisfy one's curiosity". The literary genre that these works represent shows stylistic features that suggest dates in the 2nd century and later. Other infancy gospels in this tradition include The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the so-called Arabic Infancy Gospel; some indication of the popularity of the Infancy Gospel of James may be drawn from the fact that over 150 Greek manuscripts containing it have survived. The Gospel of James was translated into Syriac, Coptic, Old Slavonic, Arabic and Latin.
Though no early Latin versions are known, it was relegated to the apocrypha in the Gelasian decretal, so it must have been known in the West by the fifth century though the vast majority of the manuscripts come from the 10th century or later. The earliest known manuscript of the text, a papyrus dating to the third or early 4th century, was found in 1958. Of the surviving Greek manuscripts, the fullest text is a 10th-century codex in the Bibliothèque Nationale, The Gospel of James is in three equal parts, of eight chapters each: The first contains the story of the miraculous birth of Mary to Anna, infertile, Mary's childhood and dedication to the temple; the second starts when she is 12 years old, through the direction of an angel, Joseph is selected to become her husband. The third relates the Nativity of Jesus, with the visit of midwives, hiding of Jesus from Herod the Great in a feeding trough and the parallel hiding in the hills of John the Baptist and his mother from Herod Antipas. One of the work's high points is the Lament of Anna.
A primary theme is the work and grace of God in Mary's life, Mary's personal purity, her perpetual virginity before and after the birth of Jesus, as confirmed by the midwife after she gave birth, tested by Salome, intended to be Salome the disciple of Jesus, mentioned in the Gospel of Mark as being one of the women at the crucifixion. The check of Mary's virginity by Salome is the first written record of a gynecological examination. In theme with Mary's perpetual virginity, Salome's hand catches on fire as punishment for attempting to touch the Virgin Mary; this is the earliest text that explicitly claims that Joseph was a widower, with children, at the time that Mary is entrusted to his care. This feature is mentioned in the text of Origen, who adduces it to demonstrate that the'brethren of the Lord' were sons of Joseph by a former wife. Among further traditions not present in the four canonical gospels are the birth of Jesus in a cave, the martyrdom of John the Baptist's father Zechariah during the Massacre of the Innocents and Joseph's being elderly when Jesus was born.
The Nativity reported as taking place in a cave remained in the popular i
Secret Gospel of Mark
The Secret Gospel of Mark or the Mystic Gospel of Mark the Longer Gospel of Mark, is a putative longer and secret or mystic version of the Gospel of Mark. The gospel is mentioned in the Mar Saba letter, a document of disputed authenticity, said to be written by the Alexandrian Church Father Clement; this letter, in turn, is preserved only in photographs of a Greek handwritten copy transcribed in the eighteenth century into the endpapers of a seventeenth-century printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch. In 1958, Morton Smith, a professor of ancient history at Columbia University, found a unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria in the monastery of Mar Saba situated 20 kilometers south-east of Jerusalem, he made a formal announcement of the discovery in 1960 and published his study of the text in 1973. The original manuscript was subsequently transferred to the library of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, sometime after 1990, it was lost. Further research has relied including those made by Smith himself.
In the letter, addressed to one otherwise unknown Theodore, Clement says that “when Peter died a martyr, Mark came over to Alexandria, bringing both his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book the things suitable to whatever makes for progress toward knowledge.” He further says that Mark left this extended version, known today as the Secret Gospel of Mark, “to the church in Alexandria, where it yet is most guarded, being read only to those who are being initiated into the great mysteries.” Clement quotes two passages from this Secret Gospel of Mark, where Jesus in the longer passage is said to have raised a rich young man from the dead in Bethany. The revelation of the letter caused a sensation at the time but was soon met with accusations of forgery and misrepresentation. Although most patristic Clement scholars have accepted the letter as genuine, there is no consensus on the authenticity among Biblical scholars, the opinion is split; as the text is made up of two texts, both may be inauthentic or both may be authentic, or maybe one is authentic and the other inauthentic.
Those who think the letter is a forgery think it is a modern forgery, with its discoverer, Morton Smith, being the most denounced perpetrator. If the letter is a modern forgery the excerpts from the Secret Gospel of Mark would be forgeries; some accept the letter as genuine but do not believe in Clement's account, instead argue that the gospel is a second century pastiche. Others think Clement's information is accurate and that the secret gospel is a second edition of the Gospel of Mark expanded by Mark himself. Still others see the Secret Gospel of Mark as the original gospel which predates the canonical Gospel of Mark, where canonical Mark is the result of the Secret Mark passages quoted by Clement and other passages being removed, either by Mark himself or by someone else at a stage. There is an ongoing controversy surrounding the authenticity of the Mar Saba letter; the scholarly community is divided as to the authenticity and the studies of Secret Mark is in a state of stalemate, but the debate continues.
During a trip to Jordan, Israel and Greece in the summer of 1958 “hunting for collections of manuscripts”, Morton Smith visited the Greek Orthodox monastery of Mar Saba situated between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. He had been granted permission by the Patriarch Benedict I of Jerusalem to stay there for three weeks and study its manuscripts, it was while cataloging documents in the tower library of Mar Saba, he reported, that he discovered a unknown letter written by Clement of Alexandria in which Clement quoted two passages from a previously unknown longer version of the Gospel of Mark, by Smith named the “Secret Gospel of Mark”. The text of the letter was handwritten into the endpapers of Isaac Vossius’ 1646 printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch; this letter is referred to by many names, including the Mar Saba letter, the Clement letter, the Letter to Theodore and Clement's letter to Theodore. As the book was “the property of the Greek Patriarchate”, Smith just took some black-and-white photographs of the letter and left the book where he had found it, in the tower library.
Smith realized, that if he were to authenticate the letter, he needed to share its contents with other scholars. In December 1958, to ensure that no one would reveal its content premature, he submitted a transcription of the letter with a preliminary translation to the Library of Congress. After having spent two years comparing the style and ideas of Clement's letter to Theodore with the undisputed writings of Clement of Alexandria and having consulted a number of paleographic experts who dated the handwriting to the eighteenth century, Smith felt confident enough about its authenticity and so announced his discovery at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in December 1960. In the following years, he made a thorough study of Mark and the letter's background and relationship to early Christianity, during which time he consulted many experts in the relevant fields. In 1966 he had completed his study but the result in the form of the scholarly book Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark was not published until 1973 due to seven years of delay “in the production stage”.
In the book, Smith published a set of black-and-white photographs of the text. The same year he published a se
Reid, George (1913). . In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
Reid, George (1913). 
