Volume 20, Number 13 · August 9, 1973
A New Jesus?
By W.H.C. Frend
The Secret Gospel
by Morton Smith
Harper & Row, 148 pp., $5.95
Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark
by Morton Smith
Harvard, 452 pp., $30.00
Chance finds have played a significant part in revolutionizing the study of New Testament origins and the early Church. It was the German scholar Karl Holl, for instance, who in 1933 discovered the first manuscript texts within the Roman Empire of the sayings of the Persian heresiarch Manichaeus among the stock-in-trade of a Cairo antique dealer. Holl had been correcting proofs of an edition of the Church father Epiphanius, and he had just reached the latter's description of the tenets of the Manichaeans the night before. He spotted the key phrase, 'And now the Illuminator said…' on the top line of a discolored and waterlogged papyrus which the dealer brought out for his inspection. He bought the papyrus. From now on, the Manichaean sect to whom St. Augustine had adhered for nearly ten years could speak for themselves and not through the mouths of their opponents.
Review, 2490 words
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