Bruce Chilton writes on Secret Mark
Bruce Chilton contributed a length article to The New York Sun back in October focusing on the controversy over Secret Mark. The title is “Unmasking a False Gospel.” Here is an excerpt from the conclusion to the article:
No literature has suffered more from this problem than that of the second century of Christianity. In the case of "the Secret Gospel," a modern researcher ( Morton Smith himself, or someone whose forgery duped Smith) has made up a Gnostic document up in the attempt to manipulate scholarly discussion and public perception. The fact that this attempt succeeded for so long stands as an indictment of American scholarship, which prides itself on skepticism in regard to the canonical Gospels, but then turns credulous, and even neo-Gnostic, when non-canonical texts are concerned.