Sabar's New Morton Smith Article

[Secret Alias]

Seems to prove Smith was gay. No smoking gun though. At least as far as I can see.

[Secret Alias]

Claims to identify his lover

Atanas Todor Madjoucoff was a handsome Arabic interpreter, born in Palestine to Greek Orthodox parents. He and Smith had met in Jerusalem, apparently in the 1940s, and reunited in 1951, when Smith took a year’s research leave from Brown. Madjoucoff accompanied Smith to monastery libraries around Greece, and in August 1952, according to passenger manifests, they boarded the SS Excambion together, in Piraeus, for an 18-day voyage to Boston

[Secret Alias]

More

In Providence, Smith found Madjoucoff an apartment around the corner from his. But shortly after Brown told Smith that his time there was up, Madjoucoff changed his last name, married a woman he’d met through his church, and moved to the suburbs.

In the 1950s, nothing was going the way Smith wanted it to. He’d failed at the priesthood, and now he was failing at academia. Off campus, gay and lesbian people faced a brutal new wave of persecution, with President Dwight Eisenhower effectively banning them from government employment and a U.S. Senate subcommittee calling “homosexuals and other sex perverts” security risks who “must be treated as transgressors and dealt with accordingly.”

Smith floundered for three years before a job offer came from Columbia. It wasn’t in religion—the field he’d long aspired to join—but in ancient history. Smith accepted, and used his very first summer there, in 1958, to return to Mar Saba. He waited more than two years—until Columbia gave him tenure—to announce his “accidental discovery,” as he called it, of a surreptitiously gay Jesus.

[Secret Alias]

This guy was married with many kids. Just friends as far as I could figure out. I buy AirB&Bs for 20 black men this month alone. Must be fucking all of them.

[Giuseppe]

This doesn't give the entire NT a good name. If even a so recent person can indulge in forgery for a banal gay agenda, how much more could the ancient people indulge in the same practice for their well more strong theological agendas?

[StephenGoranson]

The citation apparently:
THE ‘SECRET’ GOSPEL AND A SCANDALOUS NEW EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF JESUS
A Columbia historian said he’d discovered a sacred text with clues to Jesus’s sexuality. Was it real?
By Ariel Sabar
Photo-illustrations by Pacifico Silano
The Atlantic
April, 2024

online non-subscriber preview MARCH 8, 2024, 7 AM ET

[StephenGoranson]

There's also a recent review by Andrew Jacobs of the G. Smith and B. Landau book on M. Smith at Ancient Jew Review online.
Nothing much new there, except the reluctance shown in:
"....At one point I told Professor Cohen I was finding a lot of reviews for two books not on the list: Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark and The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel according to Mark (both from 1973). He told me just to stick to the books on the list....." etc.

[Secret Alias]

The article is well written. Not surprisingly. It's like Gospel Hoax 2.0 without all the Da Vinci Code wannabe effort. I haven't been able to read it without having my phone ring off the hook. But he tries to establish patterns in Smith's life that resemble the reading of the letter before Tselikas proved that there is no homosexuality in the letter. He arranged for a married companion with lots of children (not sure he was married then) to have an apartment in New York. Left him a substantial sum of money. "Came out" against anti-LGBQT policies at the university late in his life. Why does any of this matter when Tselikas shows there is no gay reference in the letter? It's nice to read well written papers. Should have included a copy of the "coming out" letter as he does produce other primary documents. My guess is the context doesn't support his angle. That's why he didn't reproduce it. But Sabar updated Gospel Hoax for a modern audience. Again. Not sure Smith was gay even after reading this article. But I haven't spent the time to really scrutinize it. Matters little when Clement references a group of "nakeds" according to the only expert that matters not "naked man with naked man." Would have been a powerful argument twenty years ago. I showed Sabar Tselikas doubling down on the "nakeds with naked" rather than "naked man with naked man." Can't stop a runaway train. The modern age is filled with ambitious people going through stop signs to get where they think they should be a few seconds earlier. It doesn't say "naked man with naked man." I showed him this from Tselikas:



Even if he had a picture with Smith a cock in his mouth what does it matter? Look at the iotas. So now (a) he doesn't have a picture of Smith with a cock in his mouth and (b) there is no gay reference in the letter to Theodore by Clement. Maybe we can make a case that Smith was gay and his homosexual soul read the letter "as if" it were referring to "naked men with naked men" when in fact it is the standard old diatribe from Hegesippus, Irenaeus, Epiphanius, which now Clement uses i.e. the Carpocratians engage in orgies with men and women. This TikTok world we live in. Everything is two minute bits. But he's very good writer and a real "go getter" so ambitious that he ignored the world' leading authority on this type of handwriting saying there is no gay reference in the letter.

[Secret Alias]

I honestly don't understand it. I can't say that I haven't shaven a few corners in my business. You know that I haven't noticed that I am "pushing the envelope." Maybe the article was already with the Atlantic when I showed Tselikas's doubling down on the no gay reference. I am sure I haven't always turned down a contract when I wasn't sure I could pull off what the client was asking for. Maybe it's human nature to push the boundaries. I don't know. Certainly I don't expect someone to give up their livelihood. But there's no gay reference in the letter. So any attack on Morton Smith after Tselikas's conclusion is now just a pure ad hominem. The document can still be a fake. Tselikas thinks its a fake. But gay and bathhouse raids and spending the night together and the nonsense that's been generated over the years has nothing to do with it.

Just look at the fucking iotas. Look at them lined up there. It's not me who says this is γυμνοὶ. It's THE expert on handwriting from this period. And it's not just Sabar who ignores Tselikas. I've shown Tselikas's work to people who argue for authenticity and those who argue for forgery. No one wants to give in.

My son recently became amazing at football (soccer). And he's been trying to figure out how the change came about. His conclusion (certainly with my help) is that our psyches by nature refuse to give up certainty. Even if that certainty is shit, a shitty certainty is preferable to the uncertainty of excellence in a chaotic universe where, now, anything, good or bad is possible at any time. It was shocking for me those who argue for authenticity were so rigidly against ANYTHING said by someone who concluded its a forgery that they refused to give up on the document saying "naked man with naked man." Basically "fuck Tselikas" shows you the limits of what our minds are capable of. All those idiotic papers. Carlson writing one stupid thing and then Brown writing this other thing and Carlson writing something brilliant and then Brown and then Carlson - at the end of it no one engaged in the debate can just admit it all has the value of used toilet paper being flushed down the toilet. That's the world we're in.

[Peter Kirby]

Claims to identify his lover

Atanas Todor Madjoucoff was a handsome Arabic interpreter, born in Palestine to Greek Orthodox parents. He and Smith had met in Jerusalem, apparently in the 1940s, and reunited in 1951, when Smith took a year’s research leave from Brown. Madjoucoff accompanied Smith to monastery libraries around Greece, and in August 1952, according to passenger manifests, they boarded the SS Excambion together, in Piraeus, for an 18-day voyage to Boston

Was this the only supposed relationship that the article was able to identify? A translator?

Is it wrong to suggest that there should be smoke where there's fire? Where are the other 'rumors' here?

As you say, it doesn't matter, but people spend so much time talking about it, generating curiosity on its own.