The Secret Gospel Quotes

“As the wise man said: ‘Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“Nobody stood in the pulpit and told the congregation that none of the original copies of any of the books of the New Testament survived, nor any of the first copies, or the copies of those copies. At university, he learned the versions of the four Gospels he’d been taught to revere, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were hand copied over a period of many hundreds of years, accumulating all the scribal errors, additions, and omissions inherent in that very human process.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“God created humans with an incredible capacity for intellectual thought, and it’s a shame when people fail to use that capacity to foster their own faith and better understand their creator.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“God created humans with an incredible capacity for intellectual thought, and it’s a shame when people fail to use that capacity to foster their own faith and better understand their”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“You and me both.” Something on the ground had caught his attention.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“We admire Sufism in the West for its tolerance, mysticism, and poetry, its ecstatic rituals, its music, even. But it’s also, especially in rural parts, a religion that bears more than a casual resemblance to late medieval Catholicism. It encourages the veneration of saint-like figures at special shrines and their celebration at festivities.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“You know Samuel Huntington himself actually entertained an analogy between the Islamic fundamentalist movement and the Protestant Reformation, saying both are reactions to the stagnation and corruption of existing institutions. They advocate a return to a purer form of their religion.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“the fight against rigid thought was what makes us human”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“Each of us will take a different path, each will choose landmarks and travel at his own speed, navigate using the tools provided by his culture, experience, and faith.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“quietly into the stairwell. 3 Tel Aviv, Israel The email arrived on the secure system just before midday and played on Eli Zeira’s”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“Different kinds of books had different smells, too, from the cheap newspapery tang of an airport bookstore thriller, to the classy, sweet-gloss scent of a coffee-table tome. He allowed his mind to wander. Perhaps people choose books like they choose other people. Wasn’t there a theory that people chose their life partners, their husbands and wives, largely on smell? If you liked their smell, then your immune systems were compatible and your children would be healthier, or something like that.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“Another article in the Washington Post said, ‘While the West used the last two centuries to advance the cause of human freedom, the Islamic world, by contrast, was content to remain in its torpor, locked in rigid orthodoxy, fearful of freedom.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“The Carpocratians were a libertine Christian sect in second-century Egypt. The Free Daist Communion, a California-based Eastern religious sect founded by Franklin Albert Jones during the 1960s, carries on some of its traditions today. Their practices have attracted a number of criminal lawsuits. When Morton Smith’s book on his discovery went out of print, the Communion’s publishing house, Dawn Horse Press, bought the rights and republished it. Franklin Jones died in 2008.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 in Egypt. In 1941, a senior member turned up in Berlin, where he spent much of the war and met Hitler. For most of its history, the Brotherhood has been outlawed.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“the scholarly writings of Bart D. Ehrman, particularly his book Lost Christianities, published in 2003 by the Oxford University Press. For anyone wanting a good summary of scholarship on the Secret Gospel, it would be hard to go past “The Strange Case of the Secret Gospel According to Mark,” an article by Shawn Eyer originally published in 1995 in Alexandria: The Journal for the Western Cosmological Traditions, volume 3.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“The story borrows from the real-life discovery of the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark at Mar Saba in Israel by the renowned American scholar Dr. Morton Smith in 1958. It was a find that sparked a furious debate in the popular press and among scholars over the manuscript’s authenticity, with some suggesting Smith was the perpetrator of one of history’s most brilliantly executed hoaxes. That debate continues today. Since Smith’s death in 1991, the speculation has only increased.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“But how well do we ever know anyone? Human beings are like dark continents with only the edges explored. The middle remains uncharted territory.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“Perhaps, then, there’s another story to be told, a story about the dangers of allowing the obsession with texts and interpretations to cloud the profound simplicity of faith. We may never know with any real certainty if the manuscript, or the Secret Gospel it quoted, was genuine. But we don’t have the original text of any of the Gospels, do we? Seen in that light, at best the lack of academic inquiry into the professor’s find represents a stubborn refusal to deal with information that might challenge deeply held personal convictions. At worst, it’s about power and preserving it. I mean, think of all the volumes written about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Everyone is entitled to their perspective, and historical texts should be examined with academic rigor. Yet if we lose faith, or belief, or our common humanity in the process, haven’t we lost what is essential?”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“What would I write? I haven’t a shred of evidence. Can you imagine the uproar if I accused Israeli agents of murdering Smith to hide such a terrible yet inconvenient secret, the truth of the Vatican’s complicity in the Holocaust? No editor in his right mind would touch it! Let alone the subplots of the Islamic Army and a communal Christian cult. I know I wouldn’t buy it.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“Deep in thought, Alex was startled by the clink of the garden gate opening and closing again. Avigail’s face brightened as she replaced her teacup on its saucer and stood. “Ah, there you are. You look exhausted!” In her sixties, the woman walking up the garden path was tall and olive skinned, hair white as snow. The likeness to the professor is remarkable, Alex thought as he shook her hand. She even moves like him. “Dr. Stern, I’m Alex. I knew your father. I’m so sorry.” It was all he could think to say.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“It was now clear why the aircraft was so far off course when it went down. He continued staring at the translation. The British agent who recruited Otto was not named, yet Alex easily recognized his friend from the description. He was dumbfounded. Morton Smith must have gone to the Brits soon after being recruited by the Nazis, told them his story, and offered his services. He had been working for both sides, a double agent.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“Here is my translation. I don’t get to use my German often these days. It’s not perfect,” she said. “Thank you.” He opened it out, smoothing the folds on the garden table. The letter was addressed to “My Dearest Mary.” Alex read it aloud. It was a love letter of sorts and chronicled the gradual disillusionment of a young German officer fighting a war he no longer believed in. Hans Otto told his young bride of the treatment of Tunisian Jews by the Nazi occupiers, his own feelings of shame and impotence. He explained his loss of faith in the Fatherland that his family long served. Then came the approach in early 1943 by an agent of British Intelligence and his decision to betray his country, defecting with the plane carrying the secret archive.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“But really, it is no surprise, the Nazis were cunning. In those days, it seemed they knew everything. They had eyes and ears everywhere. Nobody was safe or beneath suspicion. Neighbors turned on each other, families were divided. Morton said they approached him in the lobby of his guesthouse in Jerusalem. No beating about the bush, very matter of fact. They said he would work for them and Rebekah and his daughter would receive favorable treatment in the camp. He was stunned, of course. This was the first he knew of the child. Morton had no choice, he loved her desperately, and would do whatever it took to preserve her life, and that of the daughter he had not yet met…” Alex interjected, “And he kept his side of the bargain. The Nazis did not keep theirs.” “Yes.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“Not in the slightest. In fact he told me about it very soon after we first met. I think it weighed heavily on his conscience. He needed to get it off his chest. He told me he would have done anything to save Rebekah. But it always puzzled him how the SS made the connection between the two of them, one an English graduate student stranded in Palestine and the other the daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman. We never did manage to figure it out.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“Rebekah knew Morton was studying at Cambridge. He was easy for me to find from there. I was fairly sure he had not fought in the war, even though he would have been of the correct age. Did you know he’d had polio as a child, he was a cripple?” Alex did not, but recalled that evening at the riverside mansion in Phnom Penh when he’d first noticed Smith’s slight limp. It seemed a lifetime ago. “And you’ve been in touch ever since?” “Yes. The early days in Israel were difficult ones. He would send money to help out, still does, even though we don’t need it anymore.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“After the war, you adopted the girl?” “Yes. Her name is Rachel. Like me, she is an old woman now.” “And you found him, tracked him down?” “It wasn’t hard. When Rebekah’s father learned of the pregnancy, she was abruptly pulled out of boarding school and returned to Germany. She and Morton corresponded until the letters stopped getting through. It was about a year after that that the family was rounded up and sent east to the camps.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“He was a little older than she was and his mother was Sri Lankan, father English, I remember that, too. They fell madly in love. The love of her life, Rebekah always called him. She was only sixteen, perhaps seventeen, but she was a very physical girl.” Avigail chuckled. “It was the memory of him, and his likeness in their child, that kept her sane through those years in the camp. She talked about finding him again after the war, marrying and having more children, a house, white picket fence, the works. You know, it seems strange in hindsight, but we always believed we would survive. Both of us did. It was not until Rebekah was murdered that I think I truly lost faith.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“was one night early on in our time at the camp that Rebekah told me about the boy she’d met at boarding school in England, just before the war. It was a strange name, and I never forgot it. Morton. Morton Smith.” Alex swallowed, throat dry. He realized he had goose bumps. Finally they were getting to the truth. He took a sip of his tea and nodded for the old woman to continue.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“Her words trailed off and Alex gently touched her arm. His hand settled on the tattoo and he wondered if he should be touching it, but Avigail smiled kindly and continued.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel

“the autumn of 1944, the SS constructed a gas chamber at the women’s prison camp. They gassed several thousand before the liberation by Soviet forces in April 1945. Rebekah Weizmann made it all the way through to February of that year. Then, one day, she just disappeared. “It was often the way at Ravensbrueck. One day, someone was there, another, they were gone,” said Avigail. “I was heartbroken, of course, but I don’t recall crying. There were no tears left by that stage, and I had her daughter to protect.”
― Dan Eaton, The Secret Gospel