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Did Mark the Evangelist Write a Secret Gospel? Did Jesus Have a Relationship with a Young Man? A Fresh Investigation into the Secret Gospel of Mark

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In 1958, an American biblical scholar named Morton Smith was inspecting the book and manuscript collections of Mar Saba, a 1500-year-old monastery in the Judean wilderness. While leafing through a 17th-century printed book Smith discovered something unexpected–a note in Greek written on the blank pages at the back of the book. At the start of the note was a cross, a clue that a monk may have written it. The note purported to be a letter written by an important early Christian leader, Clement of Alexandria, along with quotes from a secret version of Mark’s Gospel. Smith soon realized that the contents of this letter and the secret Gospel were so shocking that, if true, they could call into question the traditional image of Jesus found in the gospels.

Morton Smith's photo of the last page of Voss' printed book and the first page of the Letter to Theodore manuscript. — Morton Smith’s photo of the last page of Voss’ printed book and the first page of the Letter to Theodore manuscript. Morton Smith Papers, box 1/7, and Saul Liebermann Papers, box 1/11. Image courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

In the letter, Clement reveals that the version of the Gospel of Mark found in the New Testament was only a first, incomplete draft of the Gospel. Clement claims that after the death of the Apostle Peter, his assistant Mark traveled to Alexandria in Egypt, where he wrote an expanded version of his Gospel that contained secret teachings for spiritually advanced Christians. But this Secret Gospel of Mark, Clement says, eventually fell into the hands of a group of hedonistic Christian heretics who believed that experiencing carnal pleasures would lead to salvation. Known as the Carpocratians, these heretics rewrote parts of the Secret Gospel of Mark so that it could lend scriptural support to their sexual practices.

A Christian named Theodore, to whom Clement writes, is anxious to know whether stories about Jesus that the Carpocratians have told him are really part of the Secret Gospel. In response, Clement quotes a passage from the “real” Secret Gospel, a story about Jesus raising a young man from the dead. When he comes back to life, the youth looks at Jesus, loves him, and begs Jesus to stay with him. The youth is rich and has his own house, where Jesus stays for six days. Finally, instructed by Jesus, the youth comes to him at night, naked except for a linen sheet over his body, and Jesus teaches him—as the Secret Gospel puts it—“the mysteries of the Kingdom of God.” Despite its suggestive content, Clement tells Theodore that the Carpocratian heretics have wrongly interpreted this story sexually, adding phrases like “naked man with naked man” to their corrupted version of the Secret Gospel. Clement is about to explain to Theodore what this enigmatic story about Jesus really means . . . but then the letter breaks off.

Clement of Alexandria as depicted in André Thevet's Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins et payens (1584). — *Clement of Alexandria as depicted in André Thevet’s* Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins et payens (1584). *Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Morton Smith soon realized the enormity of his discovery, and after taking black and white photographs of the handwritten pages, he put the book back where he found it in the monastery. Two years later, he announced the discovery of the letter of Clement to Theodore concerning the Secret Gospel of Mark at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, an announcement that was also heralded on the front page of the New York Times. Ever the provocateur, Smith shocked the straight-laced audience of biblical scholars by quipping that any priest who behaved like Jesus did in this text would find himself in serious trouble with his ecclesiastical superiors. After his announcement, Smith then devoted years trying to make sense of the letter’s contents, and in 1973 he released two books detailing his findings—one technical and academic, and the other designed for a general audience.

Smith did not believe, as Clement claimed in the letter, that the Secret Gospel was an expanded version of the Gospel of Mark written by the same author—namely, Mark the Evangelist. But because the story of the raising of the young man resembled the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John (chapter 11) and the story of the rich young man in the Gospel of Mark (chapter 10), Smith believed that the Secret Gospel preserved a very ancient story that both Mark and John used in their Gospels. If he was right, Smith had discovered in the Secret Gospel one of the earliest known stories about Jesus, a narrative that offers us a glimpse of the historical Jesus’ secret teachings and intimate interactions with his closest disciples.

*A seventeenth-century portrait of St. Mark by Guido Reni. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

After Smith published his findings in 1973, most scholars believed that Smith had indeed discovered an authentic, ancient letter from Clement of Alexandria, but few thought that the story from the Secret Gospel predated the canonical gospels, as Smith argued. Rather, many scholars preferred to see the Secret Gospel as a second-century apocryphal expansion upon the Gospel of Mark, which was similar to a number of other early apocryphal gospels.

But there were a handful of scholars who were suspicious about the circumstances of the discovery, and suggested that it might be a modern forgery—possibly fabricated by Smith himself. After all, other than Smith’s photographs, there was no proof that this manuscript existed, and Smith’s decision to leave the manuscript in the monastery instead of removing it for safekeeping was second-guessed. Despite allegations of forgery, however, the conventional wisdom among scholars was that Smith’s initially assessment was likely correct.

Morton Smith's photo of Mar Saba from his personal sketchbook. — *Morton Smith’s photo of Mar Saba from his personal sketchbook. Image courtesy of T. Alwood.*

Yet this conventional wisdom was shattered in 2005 by Stephen Carlson, a patent lawyer who at the time was not a trained biblical scholar. Carlson published a book whose title made his view of Smith’s discovery absolutely clear—The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark. Carlson alleged not only that forensic analysis of the manuscript showed the presence of a “forger’s tremor” (that is, irregular movements indicating an attempt to imitate a different style of handwriting), but also that Morton Smith had left behind several subtle clues–“breadcrumbs”–in the letter of Clement that revealed him to be the author.

Although scholars who believed that Smith had discovered an authentic writing pushed back against Carlson’s claims, his book led a flurry of other scholars to claim to have found evidence that Smith had forged the manuscript. Some pointed to parallels between Smith’s discovery and the contents of a 1942 novel, The Mystery of Mar Saba; others saw indications that Smith was already interested in the ideas that the Secret Gospel contained before he “discovered” the manuscript; still others alleged that Smith was a gay man, and that he had created a text containing a homoerotic encounter between Jesus and a young man in order to validate his own sexuality.[1]

Many of the arguments that Smith forged the document rely on evidence that is highly circumstantial. Nevertheless, the sheer number of these arguments seems to have created a new conventional wisdom among biblical scholars: that the Secret Gospel of Mark is a modern forgery, and Morton Smith is likely its author. Certainly, there are still scholars who argue that Clement’s letter and the Secret Gospel are genuine ancient writings, but these voices have become increasingly marginalized. At present, scholars can be divided into two broad camps: those who believe that Morton Smith discovered an enormously important ancient writing, and those who believe that he invented this writing himself.

*Morton Smith in front of Mar Saba in 1983. Image courtesy of A. Pantuck.*

While there is much about Morton Smith’s discovery of Clement’s letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark that remains unclear, we are convinced of two facts that, taken together, render both of the current scholarly opinions about this text inadequate. First, given our extensive experience working with manuscripts, we regard the Greek handwriting style of the manuscript to be so complex and so characteristic of other Greek handwriting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it would have been impossible for Morton Smith to forge it. Perhaps a master forger whose native tongue was Greek might have been able to create this manuscript, but Smith was not a Greek-speaking master forger.

Second, we are convinced that this letter, even if ancient, was likely not written by the second-century Christian writer, Clement of Alexandria. The real author of the letter probably made use of the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea, a fourth-century Christian historian and biographer. While the true name of the author remains a mystery, it was probably not Clement of Alexandria. So, the writing that Morton Smith discovered was not composed by Clement of Alexandria. Nor was it forged by Smith himself. Neither of the current scholarly opinions about the Secret Gospel of Mark are correct. The truth, we argue, lies somewhere in between.

book cover for the secret gospel of mark

In our new book, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), we offer a new theory about the origins and historical significance of the Secret Gospel of Mark. But we also reveal that the story of the Secret Gospel transcends the document itself, which incidentally is now lost. While the Secret Gospel of Mark can teach us something about Christianity’s distant past, it also exposes the inner workings of a small cadre of biblical scholars tasked with reconstructing that past. In the end the Secret Gospel may have less to say about the historical Jesus than it does about the preoccupations, politics, and rivalries of those who seek to uncover the truth about him.

[1] For a lively back and forth that addresses much of this evidence for Smith’s alleged forgery, see Craig Evans, “Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark: Exploring the Grounds for Doubt,” 75-100; and Scott Brown and Allan Pantuck, “Craig Evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark: Exploring the Grounds for Doubt,” 101-134; both of which can be found in Tony Burke (ed.) Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013).

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

African Catholic Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church by Elizabeth A. Foster (2019)

by David Whitehouse

(This article was originally posted on Imperial and Global Forum)

On July 1, 1888, Charles Lavigerie, founder of the White Fathers Catholic missionary order, gave a speech to a packed Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris in which he denounced the evils of slavery in Africa. The event was a public relations triumph, with African children who had been repurchased from slavery being paraded by the Fathers, clad in white burnouses with red fezzes on their heads, on the church steps. In the late nineteenth century as in the 1950s, slavery was used by the Catholic Church to galvanize public opinion and to raise funds. Lavigerie was not an isolated forerunner of post-war Catholic radicalism. He trained a generation of missionaries to enter the field as convinced anti-slavery activists, as well as supporting a series of military operations against slavery in Africa, with varying degrees of success. And yet until now Catholic missionaries have usually been relegated by historians to the status of obedient cogs in colonial state machines. Elizabeth Foster’s new book offers a major challenge by showing how missionary leaders like Lavigerie and his successors had aims that were often in clear conflict with those of the colonial state – a conflict between French Catholic missionaries and the colonial powers that resurfaced in a big way after the Second World War.

An emphasis upon political transition from colonial regimes to independent states dominates the literature on African decolonization. But decolonization, defined by Foster as the “ending or limiting of European hegemony” that involved power systems that were clearly outside of state apparatus, was a much broader process (p. 11). The book effectively uncovers the conflict between colonial state and Catholic mission in Africa in the 1950s. Foster sees the emergence of a more robust Catholic Left in France against a backdrop of colonial crisis as a key development. Catholicism in France, Foster argues, had previously been the almost exclusive property of the conservative Right. The Catholic Church hierarchy therefore struggled in an “awkward dance” in the 1950s as it sought to reconcile conservatives with radical anti-colonialists (p. 14). To make its provocative case, the book draws on a rich supply of archival sources in France, Italy, and Senegal, as well as a wide range of periodicals.

Charles Lavigerie (via Wikipedia)

Another main strength of the book lies in its illumination of the bifurcation between European and Christian identity that Catholic missionary work in Africa entailed. Catholic intellectuals such as Joseph Michel sought in the 1950s to “reclaim and reorient the church as a defender of the oppressed, colonized populations” of the French Empire (p. 100). As Foster argues, the Catholic church was considerably more successful in keeping its adherents in post-colonial Africa than in Europe. World War Two looms large as a turning point here, complementing other recent scholarship. According to Darcie Fontaine, for example, the war is similarly seen as the turning point in the development of French Catholic thinking about the colonies, as Christian theology was used in France as a basis for resistance to Nazism.[1]This can, however, lead to obscuring the continuity of missionary agendas and practice.

In Foster’s account, racial hierarchy keeps its orthodox place as a guiding paradigm of missionary thinking.[2] Foster argues that racist disdain for évolué Africans was common among missionaries and that blatant Catholic racism only became institutionally unacceptable in the 1950s. The new generation of post-war missionaries had more enlightened attitudes than the old guard they replaced. Missionary longevity in the field, the assumption appears to be, solidified racism. This begs the question of why Catholic missionaries would want to work among “unredeemable” and “inferior” peoples for so long.[3] For Lavigerie, setting Africans free from slavery and building the kingdom of Christ in Africa were intended as achievements that would fully match or surpass the establishment of Christianity in Europe. Why would these goals have resonated with peoples who were considered as inherently inferior? Foster’s book begins to provide answers.

Foster’s focus is on the period of decolonization, and the chronological gap between her discussion of Lavigerie and the 1950s paves the way for a new field of research. So, too, would the addition of Protestant missionary sources. After all, Foster makes quite clear the French hostility to American Protestant missionaries. Protestants usually answered back, and denominational rivalry was itself a potential driver of more polarised political stances taken by missionaries on the ground in Africa. Foster’s work thus raises big questions about how Catholic missionaries’ anti-slavery agenda shaped developments and denominational conflict in the first half of the twentieth century across the vast swathes of sub-Saharan Africa in which Christian missions operated. This important book starts the process of giving radical missionary currents their due place in models of colonialism and decolonization.

David Whitehouse is a freelance editor at the Africa Report published by Jeune Afrique in Paris and a PhD candidate at Exeter researching the impact of missionaries in Rwanda and Burundi 1900-1972.

[1] Darcie Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

[2] For example, Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[3] Adas has even argued that that Europeans in the early centuries of expansion into Africa and Asia rarely used race to explain what they saw as their superiority, but rather Christianity and, much later, technological accomplishment. See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2014).

The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia by Liam Matthew Brockey (2014)

By Abisai Pérez

This book addresses the life of Jesuit father André Palmeiro (1569 [Lisbon] – 1635 [Macau]), who was the first inspector, or Visitor, of the Jesuit Company in India and East Asia with the mission of consolidating and expanding religious conversion in the remote regions of the Portuguese empire. Through the analysis of the Visitor’s experiences, Brockey describes the Jesuit order as an association of men from different countries who shared a feeling of fraternal union but also had contrasting views on how to carry out the preaching of the Gospel. In this book, the author dismantles the stories of solitary heroism in missionary work by evaluating the success and limits of the Jesuits’ strategies of adopting local customs, performing their mission in native languages, and debating with local intellectual elites about religious matters. Brockey argues that pragmatism and cultural adaptation, coupled with Portuguese colonialism, allowed the Jesuits to preach in the most remote regions but also confronted them with the orthodox branch of the Catholic Church.

Through the study of Palmeiro’s diary and correspondence with his superiors –most of the documents located in the Jesuit archive in Rome– Brockey vividly describes the challenges of the Visitor in India and China. He begins by describing Palmeiro’s formation as a scholar in Portuguese universities, where he stood out for mastering Catholic theology, and his efforts to learn how to run a religious order in a vast multicultural region during his journeys along the Malabar coast and in Sri Lanka. Then he turns to Palmeiro’s last years in Macau and inland China and analyzes the endeavors of the Visitor in reforming the conduct of his brethren according to Rome’s directions and providing support to his fellows in Japan, where the Jesuits faced extremely violent persecution.

Through this voluminous book, the author addresses three major issues that explain the success and limitations of the Jesuits in spreading Catholicism in Asia. First, while most historians have emphasized the stoic endurance and outstanding preparation of the Jesuits in matters of classical arts and theology, Brockey shows through the Visitor’s eyes that many of the missionaries were earthly men with human weaknesses and personal concerns. Far from being harmonious and focused on cultivating holiness, Brockey depicts the Jesuit missions as sites of conflict and instability. The book contributes to understanding that the dissensions within the order were not necessarily over religious matters based on personal ambitions, conflicts over jurisdiction with ecclesiastical hierarchies, and the unrealistic expectations of a young generation who hoped to convert thousands of souls by the mere act of preaching. Although Palmeiro was neither adventurous nor did he perform miracles like some of his predecessors, his pragmatic vision allowed him to successfully establish friendly ties with the royal courts of Ethiopia and the Mughal empire. Through diplomacy, the Visitor strengthened the proselytizing activities of the Jesuits in places where they only possessed rhetorical skills to survive.

Second, Brockey contrasts pragmatism with the Jesuit method of “cultural accommodation,” that is the adaptation of Catholic doctrine to local cultural conditions. The author challenges the vision that praises as “modern” the Jesuit method of conversion through the preaching in native languages and the embracing of local customs. Palmeiro’s involvement in two controversies over the method of cultural accommodation serves Brockey to explain the limits of that practice. First, when the Visitor arrived at Goa, he played an important role in the prosecution against father Roberto Nobili, who has adopted the lifestyle of Hindu Brahmans by wearing their robes, studying religious texts with them, and sharing meals with them that than his Catholic brethren. Portraying himself as a “Christian Brahman,” Nobili claimed the strategy would allow the conversion of members of the highest Hindu caste and consequently the rest of the population, but the ecclesiastical authorities accused him of heresy. Despite being a well-trained theologian, Palmeiro adopted a pragmatic attitude when he discredited that strategy. The Visitor resolved that its success was not only limited, but it was promoting a schismatic community given that converted Brahmans did not want to be subject to the authority of the Portuguese Church. Palmeiro adopted the same realistic approach when he later arrived in China. Facing the defiant attitude of his brethren who insisted on studying Confucian texts, using Chinese concepts to explain Catholic doctrine, and wearing silk robes like the local elite, Palmeiro prohibited those practices on the grounds that they were not gaining new souls for the Catholic cause. Despite their cultural accommodation, the Jesuits had become recognizable to the Chinese elite as learned men, but not as spiritual leaders. The cases of India and China, Brockey says, demonstrate that over time the Jesuits abandoned the method of cultural accommodation not because of the intolerance of ecclesiastical authorities but because of their practical ineffectiveness in expanding Catholicism.

The final issue that Brockey emphasizes is the close relationship between missionary work and Portuguese colonialism. The Jesuit presence in Asia would have been impossible without the commercial networks and the military presence of the Portuguese empire. The chaotic collapse of the Jesuit missions in Japan serves Brockey to demonstrate that the missionary success of the Jesuits depended heavily on colonial interests. The Visitor’s efforts to provide reinforcements to his fellows immersed in violent persecution in Japan were thwarted by the refusal of Portuguese civil authorities to confront the Japanese shoguns. Commercial interests proved to be more important than God’s desire and the Portuguese authorities did not want to lose the profits obtained from the commercial connection with Japan.

In the end, Mathew Brockey remembers that, contrary to the stories of heroism and miraculous conversion, the Jesuits in Asia always relied on the military support of the Portuguese empire. Not only the Chinese and Japanese experiences but also the parallel collapse of the Jesuit and the Portuguese empire in Asia reflected how the sword facilitated the preaching of the Gospel.

Fandangos, Intemperance, and Debauchery

“Can any good come out of San Antonio?” This was the question at the heart of an 1846 letter penned by the Rev. John McCullough. He was writing to his Presbyterian superiors on the East Coast, who had assigned him the task of conducting missionary work on the new American frontier in Texas.

McCullough’s letter, housed on the UT Austin campus at the Briscoe Center for American History, is colorful, detailed, and dour, providing a rare first-hand account of a fledgling Texas community caught in the crossfire of the Mexican-American War.

Photograph of a letter by Rev. John McCullough — McCullough’s letter, housed at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

McCullough describes San Antonio as a cosmopolitan merchant town of 4,000 people, the majority being Mexican, with Anglos, Germans, and French making up the remainder. He notes that the city was filled with “traders from the Rio Grande,” as well as medical tourists — “travelers” there for health reasons. In addition, the town was “thronged with strangers” — a testament to the presence of 2,000–3,000 newly arrived U.S. troops. The mix of troops, tourists, merchants and locals created a moral landscape that made McCullough recoil.

For the Reverend, San Antonio was a place full of “people exhibiting intemperance and uttering blasphemy.” Gambling was the “prevailing vice,” the sabbath was ignored and locals engaged in a “species of night frolics called fandangos.” It was also a place where priests kept cockerels “shod for fighting” in the church annex. Such men-of-the-cloth also had “a respectable posterity” of children “scattered throughout town.”

Black and white print entitled Sketches in San Antonio--The Fandango--From A Sketch by Our Own Correspondent — Fandangos were a source of revenue for San Antonio, raising $560 in 1847, 10 years after a licensing scheme had been passed (by a council consisting of Anglos and Mexicans).

McCullough obviously experienced a significant degree of culture shock on the frontier. Of the other remaining accounts of San Antonio during the period, most are morally neutral, even celebratory. For example, in 1828, José María Sánchez and the botanist Jean Louis Berlandier passed through, Sánchez noting without prejudice that the “care-free” people were “enthusiastic dancers” while Berlandier spoke dancing as “the chief amusement among the lower classes.” In 1845, the traveler Frederic Benjamin Page described San Antonians as a people for whom “music and dancing, hunting and the chase, cards and love make up their whole existence.” In 1857, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. cheerily recalled a “jumble of races, costumes, languages and buildings,” a “free and easy, loloppy sort of life,” populated by women whose dresses “seemed lazily reluctant to cover their plump persons.”

A print featuring a large map of San Antonio from the 19th century

Undoubtedly, McCullough’s spiky moralism was influenced by personal convictions and a desire to secure funding for his missionary endeavors. Nevertheless, life on the frontier was precarious and often tragic — factors which may have fueled the preachy intensity. According to R. F. Bunting, McCullough’s successor, the San Antonio of 1846 was a “miserable and dilapidated place,” wrecked by war and preyed upon by “desperados” and “undesirables.” Indeed, McCullough survived several attempts on his life by those who took umbrage at his use of the pulpit to rail against gambling and saloons. He had some success setting up a local school but in 1849 his mental health was failing. The same year, his wife died in a cholera outbreak and he moved to Galveston to recuperate with family members. After recovering his faculties he founded a seminary for women with his two sisters there. However in 1853 Galveston endured a severe outbreak of yellow fever. The school closed down — McCullough lost both his sisters as well as a nephew and niece to the outbreak. Dejected and defeated, he left for Ohio.

Black and white portrait of Rev. John McCullough — A portrait of Rev. McCullough

Despite his moral indignation, nervous disposition and chaotic life, McCullough ultimately waxed optimistic in his account of Texas: “Can any good come out of San Antonio?” His answer was identical to the biblical passage of John’s gospel that he was paraphrasing — “with God all things are possible.” But his faith in Texas was material as well as spiritual: “no doubt . . . this will, in a few years be a large town.” For McCullough, the area around San Antonio had enough rivers (with enough girth and fall) to build “manufactories” that could “surpass Lowell,” the Massachusetts town that had grown rapidly into a manufacturing powerhouse in the first half the 19th century. He also mused that central Texas might one day be the “best cotton growing region in the world,” a comment that underlined his ambivalence to slavery as much as his penchant for speculation. (McCullough was from a staunchly abolitionist family and preached to black congregations throughout his life. However one early 20th century account of him adds — rather euphemistically — that he “accepted southern culture.”) Perhaps it was his optimism about Texas that led to his return later in the decade. During the 1850s McCullough had married again (to a woman whose extended family owned several slaves) and apparently settled for a quiet life in Ohio as a salaried minister. But at some point in 1859, he decided to mess with Texas once more, moving to Burnet County in a wagon carrying his family and grand piano, and with plans, according to the Southwestern Presbyterian, to “preach in that destitute region” and found another school. It turned out to be a disastrous decision. The Civil War disrupted his fundraising and left him bankrupt. He died of apoplexy suddenly in 1870, leaving a widow and nine children. Obituaries remembered McCullough as a pioneer preacher and a kind man, despite the fact that his “attachment to principle [was] inflexible.” The adobe walled huts in which he used to teach English to street children had long since vanished from San Antonio’s streets. Today, he is commemorated by a five mile long stretch of tarmac north of Interstate 35: “McCullough Street.”

Feeding of the Body and Feeding of the Soul: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 5)

This series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways written archives alone cannot.

Pauline Hodencq’s exhibit centers on corn in Aztec culture not only as source of calories but also as the foundation of the most revealing religious metaphors. For the Aztecs milpa corn dominated the agricultural cycle; it was even the source of children’s toys. More important, corn organized Aztec ways of relating to deities and understanding the body. Gods were corn growers and bodies were maize. Gods consumed bodies in the same way humans consumed corn.

Who Put Native American Sign Language in the US Mail?

More on the Kiowa from our featured author of the month.

by Jennifer Graber

In 1890, a strange letter with “hieroglyphic script” arrived at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School. It was sent from a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory to a Kiowa student named Belo Cozad. Cozad, who did not read or write in English, was able to understand the letter’s contents—namely, its symbols that offered an update about his family. The letter provided news about relatives’ health and employment, as well as details about religious practice on the reservation.

Letter written using Kiowa sign language. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

While Belo Cozad understood the letter, Americans working at the school did not. Neither did reservation officials who saw the letter once Cozad returned to Oklahoma. Anthropologists working there sent a copy to the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, where a staff member set out to understand it. Interviewed back on the reservation, Cozad provided “translations” of the letter. The anthropologists concluded that several Kiowas, though hardly all, knew this writing system. Although Cozad insisted that his parents and grandparents had long known the practice and taught it to him, the specialists concluded that it was of “recent origin.”

Letter written using Kiowa sign language. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

The anthropologists were partly right. The system had only recently been put on paper. But the gestures and signs that inspired it, recently labeled by non-Natives as Plains Indian Sign Language, had been used by Kiowas for generations. Indeed, one of the Smithsonian workers likely recognized it from earlier work on Native signing systems. The marks on Cozad’s letter mimicked the signs for individual words. A circle followed by four loops signifies four brothers. Three horizontal lines stand for the number three. A box with vertical lines, followed by a swooping downward and then upward line, means that someone has been buried in a grave. Together, the signs tell Cozad that he no longer had four brothers, but only three. One had recently died and been buried.

Symbols relating the death and burial of Cozad’s brother. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

With this letter, Cozad’s family took an old form, Plains Indian Sign Language, and adapted it for their new situation. With the hope of reaching their kin in boarding school, they had put signs onto paper and placed it in the US mail.

Kiowas displayed a similar capacity to adapt older forms from the realm of religious practice. Ritual gatherings, especially their version of the Plains Indian Sun Dance, were threatened by declining buffalo herds and, eventually, military supervision and criminalization. Even so, Kiowas found ways to adapt their Sun Dance rites to new conditions, including purchasing buffalo hides from Texas ranchers and choosing ceremony sites far away from government supervision.

They also experimented with new sources of sacred power. Between 1868 and the end of the century, some Kiowas borrowed peyote rites from neighboring indigenous peoples. Soon, Kiowas developed their own peyote songs and added peyote to the pantheon of beings and things imbued with power. Other Kiowas accepted the message of Wovoka, the Paiute leader of the movement that came to be known as the Ghost Dance. They danced with the expectation that relatives who had died and depleted buffalo herds would be restored. Still others considered Christian missionaries’ proclamation about Jesus as a powerful figure who provided healing in this life and heaven in the next.

Kiowa ritual life followed a pattern recognizable in the Cozad’s sign language letter, namely the adaptations of older forms for new and difficult situations. For generations, Kiowas had gathered to seek blessing, protection, healing, and empowerment from beings imbued with dwdw, or sacred power. At Sun Dances, these efforts focused on the sun and the buffalo. In other venues, Kiowas sought visions and healing that could be bestowed from powerful animals, plants, or places. Often, Kiowas presented offerings as they made supplications, or to signal their thankfulness when blessings were received.

In their letters, Cozad’s family took the long-practiced gestures of sign language and sent them across the hundreds of miles that separated the reservation and boarding school. Kiowa religious life exhibited a similar pattern. For the sake of connecting family and maintaining land in a desperate colonial situation, Kiowas sought new ways to engage sacred power. Even as they looked to new sources, they maintained the postures of supplication, the same tokens of thanks. Cozad’s letter included references to these new practices. The writers tell Cozad, through signs, that Jesus is looking down over all the tipis and beyond in the four cardinal directions.

Symbols show Jesus looking over the Native Americans. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

The relatives encourage Cozad to pray to Jesus. They also signal the diversity of religious forms among Kiowa people. At the letter’s end, through signs that stand for the moon and the morning star, the family relates that a fellow Kiowa has been out singing peyote songs.

Symbols relate how one Kiowa experimented with peyote rites. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

In a period of unwelcome and devastating change, Kiowas did new things. They tried peyote rites and Christian prayer. They wrote letters and put them in the US mail. But all these things reflected older ways of being and doing. And all these things functioned to maintain family, kin, nation, and land in an increasingly perilous situation.

This article originally appeared on the OUPblog, May 9, 2018.

The Gods of Indian Country

by Jennifer Graber

In 1930, historian William Warren Sweet wrote that the “conquest of the continent” was America’s greatest accomplishment and its churches’ “greatest achievement” involved “the extension of their work westward.” Drawing on Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the importance (and closing) of the American frontier, Sweet’s classic and oft-read textbook identified westward movement as fundamentally important to American religion.Historians of American religions have rightfully turned away from Sweet’s conclusions. Indeed, since the 1960s the study of American religions has been transformed from a sleepy corner of the historical profession to what commentators have identified as an increasingly popular subfield. The scholarship now includes excellent monographs on long-neglected groups, oft-overlooked sources, and is shaped by theoretical insights from critical work on religion, race, gender, ethnicity, and labor. During the field’s much-needed transformation, the frontier faded into the background, at least for a time.

A new generation of scholars has returned to the frontier, bringing with them all the critical tools now available in the subfield. Rather than asking how religion fueled American expansion, they have investigated how the experience of expansion reshaped American religions, those practiced by both settlers and Native people. It’s within this new mode of writing that I set out to study the religious transformations prompted by the invasion and defense of lands inhabited by Kiowa Indians and later designated Indian Territory (and eventually Oklahoma) by Americans.

Americans got their first long-term experiences on Kiowa lands and engagements with Kiowa ritual activity when Quakers were assigned to administer the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation in 1869. Ready to engage their fellow humans trapped in “heathen darkness,” Quakers distributed food rations, organized schools, and held meetings for worship among the reservation’s more than 5000 Native occupants. Quaker workers frequently mentioned Kiowa “superstition” as the greatest obstacle to their acculturation of Euro-American habits and assimilation into American life.

National Archives, Bureau of Indian Affairs

Several years later, however, a Quaker administrator saw something he recognized as real religion. Kiowa elders and young men requested that he transcribe a petition for them. They were concerned that American buffalo hunters were devastating the herds. These hunters acted illegally and the Kiowa petitioners implored the federal government to stop them. In the petition, they claimed that Kiowas and the buffalo had been created together, to be like brothers. They argued that one could not live without the other. If the U.S. government failed to protect the herds, Kiowas would also die.

National Archives, Bureau of Indian Affairs

While Native claims about relations to other-than-human beings were hardly uncommon, the Quaker employee had no reference point for understanding such connections. But unlike dismissive attitudes he displayed earlier in his tenure, the Quaker seemed open to seeing something new. In his account of the proceedings, he referred to the “gravity” and “reverential feeling” of the smoking session held prior to the discussion. In a letter, he encouraged federal officials to act because the buffalo were a “matter involving [Kiowas’] traditional religious belief.” For years, this Quaker worker had witnessed Kiowa buffalo hunting, as well as their use of hides for tipis and meat for food. He had observed, and even sent troops to monitor, Kiowa Sun Dances, rites in which the people gave thanks for the buffalo. After these experiences, he eventually saw something “religious” where he had once seen only heathenish practices unworthy of the descriptor.

Similar to the Quaker’s change in perspective, American expansion shaped Kiowa ritual life. Around the same time as the buffalo petition, Kiowas struggled to maintain practices that had been central to them for generations. They held Sun Dances in summer, even as hunger beset them and federal officials sent troops to monitor them. Along with efforts to sustain older practices, Kiowas also considered new ritual options. While men who raided south into Texas and Mexico had long encountered Native peoples who engaged peyote as a source of sacred power, Kiowas had never adopted it as a regular practice. That changed in the 1870s. With their Sun Dances under scrutiny and people suffering from outbreaks of disease, Kiowas gathered for peyote meetings. Welcoming ritual specialists from other Indian nations, Kiowas brought the rites to the reservation and developed their own practices and songs. Within two decades, peyote practices were widespread among Kiowas.

The Ghost Dance of 1889-1891 by the Oglala Lakota at Pine Ridge. Illustration by Frederic Remington, 1890.

Eventually, Kiowas would consider two more ritual options from outside their own traditions. In the 1880s, the first Christian missionary arrived. Under the tutelage of a Kiowa man who studied in the East and received Episcopal deacon’s orders, a small number of Kiowas accepted baptism in the early 1880s. Affiliation with Christianity increased after a host of missionaries arrived in the 1890s. Around the same time, messages from Native neighbors told of a Paiute prophet who claimed the world could be renewed through dance. Called the Ghost Dance by Americans, the movement spread to reservations across the West. Kiowas adapted it their situation, using feathers to identify the movement, singing songs and dancing with the hope of restoring depleted buffalo herds and returning loved ones lost to hunger and disease. By 1890, Kiowas participated in older Sun Dance and healing practices, as well as peyote rites, Christian worship, and Ghost Dancing, all in the hope of sustaining their lands and people threatened by American occupation.

William Warren Sweet wrote that there was no more influential “fact” in the development of American religion than “continuous contact with frontier conditions and frontier needs.” No historian working today would make such grand claims. Events on the “frontier” must be considered in relation to American efforts to reconstruct the South, debates about Chinese immigration in California, labor disputes and unrest in the North, and legal conflicts over Mormon plural marriage and what constituted acceptable religious practice. Even so, encounters prompted by expansion played a significant role in reshaping the religious worlds of settlers and Native people. It lay at the heart of settler ideas about American civilization and it functioned as one more resource in the struggle for Native peoplehood, lands, and sovereignty.

Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West

and more on the book here.

Colonial Chalices: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 4)

Chalice (Cáliz) Mexico City, 1575-1578 (via LACMA)

Lillian Michel’s exhibit focuses on colonial chalices, one of the most sacred objects of the Eucharist. Unlike many other colonial objects that incorporated indigenous techniques and materials, silversmiths charged with the production of chalices were strictly regulated. There was little room for the incorporation of indigenous materials, let alone indigenous religious sensibilities. Chalices therefore can better document the arrival of new European styles in art and architecture than changes in indigenous traditions.

More from the Colonial Latin America Through Objects series:

Of Merchants and Nature by Diana Heredia López
Nanban Art by John Monsour
Andean Tapestry by Irene Smith

Giordano Bruno and the Spirit that Moves the Earth

By Alberto A. Martinez

Before Galileo did anything in astronomy, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno argued that the Earth moves around the Sun. Bruno believed that the Earth is a living being, with a soul. These were unusual beliefs for a Christian.

In 1592, Bruno was captured by the Inquisition in Venice and imprisoned. The next year he was transferred to the Inquisition’s prison in Rome. After seven and a half years of interrogations, he was finally condemned to what was widely feared as the worst kind of punishment: he was gagged, taken to a public place, tied to a post, and burned alive. Historians are quick to point out that Bruno was not killed for his belief in the Earth’s motion, but for heretical religious beliefs.

Engraving of Giordano Bruno from ca. 1830 (via Wikimedia Commons)

For years I investigated this story and what I found really surprised me. It turns out that Giordano Bruno’s belief in the moving Earth was directly connected to some of his beliefs that were heretical. To Catholics, heresies were willful departures from Catholic dogma. Heresies were the worst kinds of crimes, even worse than murder. Heresies were crimes against God.

Bruno’s final condemnation by the Inquisition exists only in a partial copy, prepared for the Governor of Rome. Unfortunately, it omits the list of accusations against Bruno, that is, his alleged heresies. But there is some good evidence of what they were.

On February 8, 1600, the Roman Inquisition condemned Bruno at the palace of the supreme Inquisitor, Cardinal Ludovico Madruzzi. On that day, one of the witnesses present was a young German humanist, Gaspar Schoppe, a guest living at Cardinal Madruzzi’s palace. Days later, Schoppe also witnessed Bruno’s execution at a public marketplace, an open intersection of city streets in Rome known as the Campo de’ Fiori: the “Field of Flowers.”

The statue of Giordano Bruno at the Campo de’ Fiori, in Rome. The plaque reads: “9 JUNE 1889. TO BRUNO. THE CENTURY PREDICTED BY HIM. HERE WHERE THE FIRE BURNED” (via author).

The day Bruno was burned, Schoppe wrote a detailed letter to a friend explaining what had just happened. Schoppe complained that ordinary people in Rome were saying that a Lutheran was burned. But Schoppe explained that that was not true at all. Bruno wasn’t a Lutheran, but something far worse—a “monster.”

Schoppe wrote: “Perhaps I too would believe the vulgar rumors that Bruno was burned for Lutheranism, but I was present at the Holy Office of the Inquisition when the sentence against him was pronounced, & so I know what heresy he professed.”

Excerpt of Gaspar Schoppe’s letter from February 1600, published in 1621, stating Bruno’s “horrendous” beliefs and teachings (see below for source).

Schoppe listed twelve of Bruno’s absurdly horrible claims, his “teachings” (quibus horrenda prorsus absurdissima docet). I’ll quote just two of them, the first and fifth:
(1) “Worlds are innumerable,”…
(5) “the Holy Spirit is nothing other than the soul of the world,”…

Schoppe commented: “perhaps you might add: the Lutherans neither teach nor believe such things, and therefore should be treated otherwise. I agree with you, & therefore, precisely no Lutherans do we [Catholics] burn.”

This means that if the Lutherans held these teachings or beliefs, docere neque credere, they would be burned. It also means that Bruno was burned for these teachings and beliefs.

A portrait of Gaspar Schoppe by Peter Paul Rubens, 1606 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The two accusations above recur throughout Bruno’s trial, from its beginning to the end. It turns out that both were directly connected to Bruno’s conviction that the Earth moves. And most importantly, surprisingly, I found that these beliefs were heresies.

First, Bruno had said in nine books that many worlds exist: not just the Earth, but the Moon, the planets and the stars: “innumerably many worlds.” Apparently he didn’t know it was a heresy to claim that “innumerably many worlds exist.” This belief had been denounced as a heresy by many authorities including Saint Philaster, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and Pope Gregory XIII.

Catholics were horrified by this idea, because if many worlds exist then Jesus Christ would have to be born and crucified in each of those worlds to offer salvation to the beings in such worlds.

Second, Bruno said that the Earth has a soul. In twelve of his books he repeatedly asserted that the world has a soul, the Earth has a soul, or the universe has a spirit. According to Bruno, the Earth was alive, like an animal. Just as our bodies are made from matter, from bits of the Earth, so too he said that our individual souls come from soul of the Earth.

Yet this belief that heavenly bodies are animated had been declared heretical by the Fifth Ecumenical Council in the year 553. Similarly, in 1277, Bishop Etienne Tempier in Paris had condemned as a heresy the belief that the heavenly bodies are animated, like animals. This was viewed as a belief of ancient pagans, not Christians.

When Bruno was interrogated by Inquisitors, he said that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the world. Apparently he didn’t know that in 1141 the Council of Sens had condemned as heretical the claim that “the Holy Spirit is the soul of the world.”

Relief depicting the trial of Giordano Bruno, from the base of the Ferrari statue in Campo de’ Fiori (via Wikimedia Commons).

Books on heresies echoed this statement. For example, in 1590, Tiberio Deciani published a Criminal Treatise on All Heresies, in Venice, including the heresy that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the world. Yet Bruno said that to the Inquisitors in Venice when he was interrogated in 1592. And Bruno repeated it to the Roman Inquisitors; he “relapsed” into this heresy. Anyone who relapsed into a heresy, after being instructed to abandon it, was a proven to be an obstinate heretic.

So these heresies about many worlds and about the universal soul were linked to Bruno’s conviction that the Earth moves. It moves because it’s a heavenly body. It moves because it has a soul.

Still, is there any direct evidence that the Inquisitors were aware, concerned, or annoyed, specifically, by Bruno’s claim, in three books, that the Earth moves around the Sun?

Yes. By 1597, theologians working for the Roman Inquisition had extracted ten propositions from Bruno’s books. The propositions were censured and Bruno had to recant. Two were about the “world soul” or “universal spirit.” One was about the planets being animated. One was about the existence of many worlds. And yes—Bruno’s fifth censured proposition was: “About the Earth’s motion.”

A line engraving of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) . Copernicus is holding a model of his heliocentric theory (via Wikimedia Commons).

This all means that Bruno’s belief in a moving Earth was part of the heretical worldview that he advocated both in his books and in his trial. His ideas about many worlds and about the soul of the world convinced him that Copernicus was right: the Earth moves. Those same ideas about worlds and souls led Bruno to his death.

Sixteen years later, in 1616, when Galileo first got in trouble with the Inquisition in Rome, four of the same Inquisitors and Consultors from Bruno’s trial also met with Galileo. One of them was now the head of the Inquisition. Another one was now the head of the Index of Forbidden Books. And another was now the Pope.

But Galileo was more cautious than Bruno.

Illustration depicting Galileo Galilei at his trial by the Inquisition in Rome in 1633 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Galileo denied that the Moon was another world, even though he discovered—he saw with a telescope—that the Moon has mountains and valleys. Bruno had actually predicted that, whereas Copernicus had not. Galileo didn’t say that “innumerably many worlds exist,” though he proudly wrote that he had discovered “innumerably many stars.” Bruno, not Copernicus, had predicted that too. Galileo discovered moons around Jupiter. And again, Bruno had predicted that some planets have moons, like the Earth, while Copernicus had not.

Galileo did not tell the Inquisitors about any soul or universal spirit that moves the Earth either. But in two private letters, in 1615, he guardedly admitted that he believed that the Sun can be described as the soul of the world and that it transmits a spirit throughout the universe, a spirit that gives life and movement to all things. Even the Earth?

After meeting with the Inquisitors in Rome, Galileo never again wrote about the universal spirit that vivifies and moves all things. We don’t even know if the Inquisitors knew that, in private, secretly, quietly, Galileo too entertained such ideas.

Bruno was not killed for his belief in the Earth’s motion. But this belief was directly linked to key heresies that led to his execution.

The trial of Bruno was in the background of Galileo’s troubles with the Inquisition. Galileo lived in the haunting shadow of the burning man.

Photo Source: Gaspar Schoppe to Konrad Ritterhausen, 17 February 1600, printed in Gaspari Scioppii, “Epistola, in qua sententiam de Lutheranis tanquam haereticis atram Romae fieri asserit & probat,” in Machiavellizatio (Zaragosa: Didacus Ibarra, 1621), pp. 30-35.

Also by Alberto Martinez on Not Even Past:

Alberto Martínez on Darwin’s Finches & Other Science Myths.

Was Einstein Really Religious?

Dividing by Nothing.

More of Alberto Martinez’s works and writings can be found here.

Historical Objects: Latin America

“Colonial Latin America Through Objects” is a class taught by Prof. Jorge Cañizares that offers a view of a region’s past by exploring material remains: currencies, playing cards, musical scores, water mills, comets, relics, mummies, coded messages, to name only a few of the 50 objects studied. The class introduces students to a region from unusual angles that upset deeply seeded assumptions about Hispanics.

The students are required to produce two online museum exhibits. The five best exhibits for the mid–term are sampled here. These five exhibits address unusual aspects of colonial Latin America through their material culture. Click on links to see full exhibits (and credits for images).

The history of conquest as described in sixteenth-century indigenous codices by Tymon Sloan

Bernadino De Sahagun, Illustration of the Mirror-Faced Bird, La Historia Universal De Las Cosas De Nueva Espana,1577 Ink on Paper Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence, Italy

Bernadino De Sahagun,
Illustration of the Mirror-Faced Bird, La Historia Universal De Las Cosas De Nueva Espana,1577
Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence, Italy

Cranial Deformity and Identity by Aaron Quintanilla