I do enjoy it when one of these pitched academic battles bubbles up from arcane scholarship to the media surface.
In the new Jan 26/09 edition of The Nation, Anthony Grafton’s review of a 2008 academic-press volume—Morton Smith and Gershom Scholem: Correspondence, 1945-1982, by Guy G. Stroumsa, ed.—takes one more crack at the gay-Jesus/Secret Mark controversy, but with rather tentative conclusions:
I believe that Smith really found his letter, and that Scholem gave him the framework into which he inserted it. But that’s just what I think. Many will disagree. This time, the professor is the Cheshire cat. He smiles and is gone.
For one academic insider’s view of this story, check out these postings on Secret Mark, from Apocryphicity.
