Vorkosigan

The book is on its way:

The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark

• Secret Mark first became known to modern scholarship in 1958 when a newly hired assistant professor at Columbia University in New York by the name of Morton Smith visited the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem and photographed its fragments. Secret Mark was announced on the heels of many spectacular discoveries of ancient manuscripts in the Near East, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi gnostic corpus in the late 1940s, and promised to be just as revolutionary. Secret Mark presents what appears to be a valuable, albeit fragmentary, witness to early Christian traditions, traditions that might shed light on Jesus's most intimate behavior. In this book, Stephen C. Carlson uses state of the art science to demonstrate that Secret Mark was an elaborate hoax created by Morton Smith. Carlson's discussion places Smith's devilish trick alongside many other hoaxes before probing the reasons why so many scholars have been taken in by it.

Ted Hoffman

Congrats Carlson - looking forward to reading it.

Toto

Hm - the links to the table of contents and an excerpt don't work.

Amazon lists the book under its old title (and has a better price):

Uncovered: Morton Smith's Secret and the Anatomy of an Academic Hoax

Rick Sumner

Since the excerpt is down, perhaps the good Doc Carlson will offer us a taste? :thumbs:

S.C.Carlson

Thanks for all your nice comments.

I don't really know that part of the process, but I suppose that the TOC and excerpt will be ready after the book is typeset.