Chapter Ten
Chapter Ten the Conspiracy and the Naked Nock Why did Morton Smith choose to read γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ as “naked man with naked man”? This goes to the heart of everything. This is where everything went off the rails. This is where an innocent discovery became, over time, a pawn in a larger American drama of suspicion, sexuality, academic rivalry, and religious anxiety. We will likely never know the answer. We can speculate. But we will never truly know. It is the “For the one who knows” dilemma all over again. Yes, Morton Smith could simply have made a mistake. But that explanation ignores the reality of Arthur Darby Nock’s involvement. There were two, not one, brilliant men trying to make sense of the text. This was not merely a young and relatively inexperienced associate professor wrestling alone with a difficult manuscript. Nock was the editor of one of the most prestigious journals in the world, the Harvard Theological Review . He was one of the most learned historians of religion of the ...