The gospel Hoax

Stephen C. Carlson

The Gospel Hoax

I first heard of the Secret Gospel of Mark as a teenager in the
mid 1980s when I read an extract of it quoted in the Holy
Blood, Holy Grail series—a sensationalistic exposition of the
supposed bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, which
has just resurfaced in the public’s imagination as the background
for the fictional thriller, The Da Vinci Code. Even
though I was not very familiar with the New Testament back
then, the extract from Secret Mark, with its sentences beginning
with “and straightaway,” appeared to me exactly like I
expected the author of the Gospel of Mark to have written.
Secret Mark did not make much of an impression on me, however,
and I missed the homoerotic intimation at the end of the
passage. Perhaps I was a bit too young to notice it, but the
authors of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail series did not call attention
to it presumably because it would have contradicted their
central premise. Rather, they focused on what Clement of
Alexandria, the person who supposedly quoted Secret Mark,
had to say about suppressing heretical gospels.