" Another, less flamboyant example of this tendency was Dr. Morton Smith of Columbia University. One of the great powerhouses of biblical criticism in the second half of the twentieth century and a mentor to many of today’s top scholars, Dr. Smith was rummaging in the library of Mar Saba Monastery in Israel in 1958 when he found an eighteenth-century scrap of paper containing what purported to be a copy of a “secret” version of the Gospel of Mark. Around the scant twenty lines of text, which feature a certain naked youth whom Jesus raises from the dead and who then “remained with [Jesus] that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God,”1 Smith wove an elaborate theory: that Jesus’ free-love society amounted to a homosexual ecstasy cult. This was too outrageous even to become scandalous, and many scholars dismissed the idea outright, but Smith clung to it and continued to develop it until his death in 1990. "
― Russell Shorto , Gospel Truth
![Russell Shorto quote : Another, less flamboyant example of this tendency was Dr. Morton Smith of Columbia University. One of the great powerhouses of biblical criticism in the second half of the twentieth century and a mentor to many of today’s top scholars, Dr. Smith was rummaging in the library of Mar Saba Monastery in Israel in 1958 when he found an eighteenth-century scrap of paper containing what purported to be a copy of a “secret” version of the Gospel of Mark. Around the scant twenty lines of text, which feature a certain naked youth whom Jesus raises from the dead and who then “remained with [Jesus] that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God,”1 Smith wove an elaborate theory: that Jesus’ free-love society amounted to a homosexual ecstasy cult. This was too outrageous even to become scandalous, and many scholars dismissed the idea outright, but Smith clung to it and continued to develop it until his death in 1990.](/image/795438.jpg)