Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery

Scott G. Brown is a biblical scholar, and this Wilfrid Laurier University Press book is his scholarly reassessment of Morton Smith's disputed discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark, a text known only through Smith's own 1958 report of a manuscript that has since disappeared. Its strength is that Brown engages directly and critically with the substantial scholarly controversy over whether Smith's discovery was genuine or a modern forgery, arguing for its authenticity through close textual analysis rather than assuming either conclusion. Its limit is that the underlying manuscript's disappearance means the debate itself remains genuinely unresolved in the wider field, so a claim about the Secret Gospel's authenticity should be read as one scholar's argued position within an active dispute, not as settled fact.