The Jesus Archive
About this place

A Greek Orthodox monastery founded in 483 in the Kidron gorge between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. In 1958 Morton Smith reported finding here, copied into a seventeenth-century printed book, a letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria quoting a ‘Secret Gospel of Mark’. The pages were later removed; scholars still debate whether the letter is ancient, and the evidence is set out on the Secret Gospel’s page.