Russell Shorto Quote
Another, less flamboyant example of this tendency was Dr. Morton Smith of Columbia University. One of the great powerhouses of biblical criticism in the second half of the twentieth century and a mentor to many of today’s top scholars, Dr. Smith was rummaging in the library of Mar Saba Monastery in Israel in 1958 when he found an eighteenth-century scrap of paper containing what purported to be a copy of a secret version of the Gospel of Mark. Around the scant twenty lines of text, which feature a certain naked youth whom Jesus raises from the dead and who then remained with [Jesus] that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God,1 Smith wove an elaborate theory: that Jesus’ free-love society amounted to a homosexual ecstasy cult. This was too outrageous even to become scandalous, and many scholars dismissed the idea outright, but Smith clung to it and continued to develop it until his death in 1990.
Another, less flamboyant example of this tendency was Dr. Morton Smith of Columbia University. One of the great powerhouses of biblical criticism in the second half of the twentieth century and a mentor to many of today’s top scholars, Dr. Smith was rummaging in the library of Mar Saba Monastery in Israel in 1958 when he found an eighteenth-century scrap of paper containing what purported to be a copy of a secret version of the Gospel of Mark. Around the scant twenty lines of text, which feature a certain naked youth whom Jesus raises from the dead and who then remained with [Jesus] that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God,1 Smith wove an elaborate theory: that Jesus’ free-love society amounted to a homosexual ecstasy cult. This was too outrageous even to become scandalous, and many scholars dismissed the idea outright, but Smith clung to it and continued to develop it until his death in 1990.
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About Russell Shorto
In November 2017, he published Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom, which tells the story of the American Revolution through the eyes of six Americans from vastly different walks of life. His 2021 memoir Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob covers Shorto's own family history and his ancestors involvement in the American Mafia in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. His most recent work published in 2025, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, continues to explore New York history into the British colonial period starting in 1664.
In 2022, Shorto founded the New Amsterdam Project at the New-York Historical Society, with a mission to promote awareness of New York's Dutch origins.