American biblical scholar at Columbia who controversially claimed to have discovered the 'Secret Gospel of Mark' at Mar Saba monastery in 1958 — and whose work on Jesus the Magician and Clement of Alexandria contributed to scholarly debates about early Christian diversity.
Advanced the thesis that early Christianity was more diverse and the canonical tradition more constructed than orthodox scholarship admitted — his Secret Mark discovery (still debated as possible forgery) opened the question of what else might have been suppressed from Christian origins.
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