The Exodus Quest

II

Augustin walked down the front steps of Kostas's building in something of a daze. A portrait of Jesus Christ. So Peterson's sermonizing wasn't a metaphor. He was after the real thing. He straddled his bike, rocked it off its stand, intending to head back to the police station, but then he finally remembered why the Carpocratians had been familiar. He parked once more and strode angrily back inside. 'The Secret Gospel of Mark!' he cried, when Kostas answered his front door. 'Why didn't you tell me about the Secret Gospel of Mark?'

'Because there's no such thing,' replied Kostas.

'What are you talking about? How can I have heard of it if it doesn't exist?'

'You've heard of unicorns, haven't you?'

'That's not the same.'

'It's exactly the same,' said Kostas. 'The Secret Gospel is a fantasy, an invention of greed and malice. It never existed. It can't possibly have anything to do with this.'

'You don't know that. Not for sure.'

'I've dedicated my life to the truth,' said Kostas angrily. 'Forgeries are a cancer. Talking about them at all, even to dismiss them, gives them a legitimacy they don't deserve.'

'Even so,' said Augustin. 'You should have told me. Our friend's in trouble. I need to know everything.'

Kostas's scowl persisted for a few seconds, but then he sighed and relented. 'Very well, then,' he said, leading Augustin back through to his library. 'How much do you know?'

'Not much,' shrugged Augustin. 'Some American woman was over here a couple of years ago, researching a book on the evangelists. Maria, I think her name was.'

'Oh, yes,' nodded Kostas. 'I remember her. Didn't you and she…?'

'We went out a couple of times,' he nodded. 'She told me that Mark had actually written two gospels. One for the uneducated masses, the other only for his inner circle. This second one was called the Secret Gospel of Mark, and it contained arcane and controversial teachings, and it had something to do with the Carpocratians. But that's all I've got.'

Kostas sighed. 'First of all, there never was such a second gospel.'

'So you say.'

'Yes. So I say. The reason you've heard of it is because back in the nineteen fifties, a young American academic called Morton Smith was doing research in the Monastery of Mar Saba. He claimed to have found a letter copied out into the blank endpapers of a seventeenth-century volume of the letters of Saint Ignatius. That's not so unusual. It was a common enough practice, what with the scarcity and value of paper. It was just that this letter was previously unknown, had purportedly been written by Clement of Alexandria, and had explosive subject-matter, all of which turned it into such a major find that it made Morton Smith's name and career. What's more, by a remarkable coincidence, it happened to validate a pet theory of his, for which there was precious little other evidence.'

'How convenient.'

'He wrote two books about it,' nodded Kostas. 'One for the general public, the other for experts.'

'Like the Gospel of Mark itself.'

'Exactly,' agreed Kostas. 'One of his little hoax jokes, no doubt.'

'Hoax jokes?'

Kostas grimaced. 'To academic historians, there's all the difference in the world between a forgery and a hoax. Hoaxes are designed to show so-called experts up as gullible fools, and the perpetrator usually exposes them himself once he's had his fun. But a forgery is designed to deceive forever, and to make money for its perpetrator too. The first is mischievous and intensely irritating, but at least it keeps people on their toes. The second is unforgivable. Which presents any potential hoaxer with quite a problem. What if his hoax is exposed by someone else before he can expose it himself, and he's consequently denounced as a forger? He'll be ruined, perhaps even prosecuted. So hoaxers often take precautions against this. For example, they might tell a trusted third party what they're about to do, with instructions to reveal the truth on a specified day. Or they might incorporate telltale clues into their work. An anachronism of some kind, say, like the Roman soldier wearing a wristwatch in the movie. Not that obvious, naturally. But you get the idea.'

Augustin nodded. 'And what you're implying is, if someone wants to pull off a forgery, but is worried about being caught, there's a lot to be said for putting in one or two of these clues so that they can laugh it off as a failed hoax if they're rumbled?'

'Exactly. And that's precisely what Morton Smith did. He used a metaphor about salt, for example, that only makes sense with modern salt, not the rock crystal of Clement's time. And Morton is, after all, about the world's most famous brand of salt.'

'That's pretty tenuous.'

'Yes, but then he didn't want to be discovered, remember. He only wanted an alibi in case he was.'

'And was he?'

Kostas shrugged. 'Most academics immediately dismissed the letter as a forgery, but they were too kind or too timid to point the finger at Morton Smith. They claimed that it was most likely a seventeenth-or eighteenth-century forgery, though why anyone back then would have wanted to forge such a thing and just put it away in the shelves… Anyway, even that won't hold any more. Everything about the letter has been analysed with modern techniques. Handwriting, vocabulary, phraseology. Nothing stands up. There's only one possible conclusion. It's a modern forgery, and it was perpetrated by Morton Smith.'

Hard experience had taught Augustin that every time an academic controversy seemed settled, some new piece of evidence would come along to kick it all off again. But he kept his expression impassive; he needed Kostas to carry on talking. 'Very well,' he said. 'This letter is a contemptible scam. Now what exactly does it say?'