Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark

Morton Smith's Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark reports Smith's own 1958 discovery at Mar Saba monastery of a letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria quoting an otherwise unknown expanded version of Mark's Gospel, and this source sits at the center of one of biblical scholarship's most sustained authenticity disputes. For decades the letter's ancient authenticity was broadly accepted even as scholars debated its interpretation, but forensic and stylistic studies since the mid-2000s, notably by Stephen Carlson and Peter Jeffery, have persuaded a growing number of senior scholars, including Bart Ehrman, that Smith himself likely forged the document, a conclusion other specialists, including contributors to Biblical Archaeology Review, continue to dispute. The manuscript itself has since gone missing, which forecloses further direct physical testing, so this source should be presented as a genuinely unresolved forgery controversy, not as an established ancient text.