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In the summer of 1958, Morton Smith, a newly hired Columbia University historian, traveled to an ancient monastery outside Jerusalem.
1958年夏天，新聘用的哥伦比亚大学历史学家莫顿·史密斯前往耶路撒冷郊外的一座古修道院。
In its library, he found what he said was a lost gospel.
在这里的一个图书馆里，他发现了一本他所说的丢失的福音。
His announcement made international headlines.
他发布的声明登上了国际头条。
Scholars of the Bible would spend years debating the discovery’s significance for the history of Christianity.
研究《圣经》的学者们会花费数年时间来争论这一发现对基督教历史的意义。
But in 1975, one of Smith’s colleagues went public with an extraordinary suggestion: The gospel was a fake.
但在1975年，史密斯的一位同事公开提出了一个非同寻常的建议：福音是假的。
Its forger, the colleague believed, was Smith himself.
这位同事认为，造假者是史密斯本人。
The manuscript, in handwritten Greek, ran two and a half pages, but one passage drew outsize attention.
手写的希腊文手稿长达两页半，但其中一段引起了极大的关注。
It depicted Jesus spending the night with a young man he’d raised from the dead.
它描绘了耶稣与他复活的年轻人共度一夜。
“The youth, looking upon [Jesus], loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him,” it read.
“年轻人看着[耶稣]，爱他，开始恳求他与他同在，”书中写道。
“And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body.
“过了六天、耶稣告诉他当怎样走、到了晚上、那少年人来到他跟前、穿着细麻布、赤身露体。
And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.”
那一夜年轻人就住在耶稣那里，他将神国的奥秘教给了年轻人。”
To devout Christians, the homoerotic subtext was obvious blasphemy.
对于虔诚的基督徒来说，同性恋的潜台词显然是亵渎神明。
But Smith argued the opposite: His discovery, he believed, was part of an unknown, longer version of the Gospel of Mark, containing lost stories from about 50 C.E., making them the oldest known account of Jesus’s life—and, in Smith’s view, the truest.
但史密斯却持相反的观点:他认为，他的发现是《马可福音》一个不为人知的更长的版本的一部分，其中包含了公元50年左右丢失的故事，使它们成为已知最古老的耶稣生平记录——在史密斯看来，也是最真实的。
Smith theorized that “Secret Mark,” as the text came to be called, portrayed a private baptism that Jesus reserved for his closest disciples: One by one and at night, he contended, Jesus hypnotized male followers into believing they’d risen to heaven and been freed from the laws of Moses.
这本书后来被称为《秘密马可》，史密斯推测该书描绘了耶稣为他最亲密的门徒保留的一次私人洗礼：他认为，耶稣一个接一个地在晚上催眠男性追随者，让他们相信他们已经升入天堂，从摩西的律法中解脱出来。
Smith argued that Jesus and his initiates may have concluded this liberation with a sexual act—a “completion of the spiritual union by physical union."
史密斯认为，耶稣和他的门徒可能已经以性行为结束了这次解放--“通过肉体结合来完成精神上的结合”。
Smith knew that orthodox believers would wholly reject his claims.
史密斯知道，正统的信徒会完全拒绝他的主张。
To suggest that the central figure of Christianity—by tradition celibate—used gay sex as a path to God was an outrage.
暗示基督教的核心人物--传统上的独身主义者--将同性恋性行为作为通往上帝的途径，这简直是一种侮辱
His academic colleagues were only slightly less aghast, but they couldn’t fully dismiss him.
他的学术同行们对此只是略感震惊，但他们不能完全不理会。
By the time Smith published his find—in a 454-page volume from Harvard University Press, with deeply erudite footnotes and appendixes, and in a popular book called The Secret Gospel—he’d been tenured by Columbia and Secret Mark had made the front page of The New York Times.
当史密斯发表他的发现时-哈佛大学出版社出版了一卷454页的书，带有博学的脚注和附录，以及一本名为《秘密福音》的畅销书-他已经被哥伦比亚大学录用，《秘密马克》已经登上了《纽约时报》的头版。
Several major scholars had accepted the text as genuine.
几位主要学者认为这本书是真实的。
