By Robert Conner
I’ve been writing about early Christian belief since 2006, not professionally or as a side hustle, but more as a hobby. While the serious hobbyist must remain cognizant of academic opinion and have sufficient knowledge to navigate the relevant professional literature, as a dedicated dilettante I was free to explore the byways, guided principally by my language aptitude and interest.
After following the twists and turns of the “secret Mark” controversy for a number of years, I wrote The “Secret” Gospel of Mark: Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria, and Four Decades of Academic Burlesque, released in 2015 by a niche publisher in the UK. Although Morton Smith had written both scholarly and popular books describing his discovery and interpretation of extra-canonical passages attributed to Mark, it could be safely assumed that exeedingly few people outside the area of New Testament textual studies were even aware of Smith’s claims or had followed the tortuous progression of the ensuing debate over the authenticity of his find. I assumed the teapot tempest triggered by Smith’s work would blow over soon enough and be forgotten, but discovered quite by accident that my translation of Clement’s letter to Theodore had been used by historian Donald Ostrowski in his 2020 book, Who Wrote That? Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov. Who knew?
Debunking Christianity
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