letter · reported 1958 · controversial early Christian document
A letter to one Theodore, quoting a longer secret Gospel of Mark, which Morton Smith reported finding copied into the endpapers of a seventeenth-century book at the monastery of Mar Saba in 1958. The manuscript was photographed, moved to the Jerusalem patriarchate, and has not been available for examination since; opinion runs from genuine Clement through ancient forgery to a modern one by its finder. It stood on this page as an undisputed writing of his, which is the one thing nobody claims. Kept and marked.