None of the canonical gospels portray Jesus as having said anything whatsoever about homosexuality. You can scour every last line of the four canonical gospels and you won’t find anything that can be unambiguously interpreted as a reference to homosexuality in any form. As far as the canonical gospels are concerned, Jesus did not condemn homosexuality, but he did not endorse it either.
Fascinatingly, though, it is possible that there may have been an alternate, non-canonical version of the Gospel of Mark in circulation in the second century CE that implied that Jesus himself had sexual relations with men. The existence of this possible version of the Gospel of Mark is controversial and many scholars regard it as a flat-out hoax. Nonetheless, it is worth talking about—even if only for the sake of curiosity.
A brief disclaimer
First, it is important to note that people in the ancient Mediterranean world generally did not tend to think about sexual orientation in the same way that people in the United States in the twenty-first century tend to think about sexual orientation. Generally speaking, people in the ancient Mediterranean world did not have the concept that people are either inherently “gay” or inherently “straight.” People thought about sexuality in terms of action, not “orientation.”
If a man in the ancient Mediterranean had sexual relations with other men, then people did not generally think of him as inherently a “gay man”; instead, they simply saw him as a man who had sexual relations with other men. The idea that people are either inherently “gay” or inherently “straight” does appear in a few ancient texts (note, for instance, Plato’s Symposion 189d–193a), but this idea didn’t really become the dominant way of thinking about sexuality until the nineteenth century CE.
Jesus’s dispute with the Pharisees over divorce
Now let’s talk about what the canonical gospels portray Jesus as saying about homosexual activity—or, more accurately, what they don’t portray him as saying. Many people have tried to interpret various passages from the gospels as either condemning or endorsing homosexuality, but, upon closer examination, it can easily be shown that none of these passages really have anything to do with homosexuality.
For instance, people who want to believe that Jesus disapproved of homosexuality often point to a story about a supposed interaction between Jesus and a group of Pharisees that is first attested in the Gospel of Mark 10:2–9. Here is the passage in question, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):
“Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ He answered them, ‘What did Moses command you?’ They said, ‘Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.’ But Jesus said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’”
Many people have tried to claim that Jesus’s reply to the Pharisees in this passage is his “definition” of which kinds of sexual relationships are lawful and that this “definition” strictly excludes all forms of homosexuality.
This argument, however, is easily disproven by the context of the passage. In this passage, Jesus is clearly not trying to give a comprehensive definition of which kinds of sexual relationships are lawful; he is merely trying to answer a specific question that the Pharisees have asked him about whether it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife. Anyone who tries to interpret this passage as a condemnation of homosexuality is clearly overinterpreting.
ABOVE: The Pharisees and Sadducees Come to Tempt Jesus, painted between 1886 and 1894 by the French painter James Tissot
Jesus and the centurion
Meanwhile, many people who want to believe that Jesus approved of homosexuality point to a story that is attested in the Gospel of Matthew 8:5–13 and the Gospel of Luke 7:1–10. In the story, a centurion comes to Jesus and tells him that his παῖς (paîs), which means “slave boy,” is very ill and he asks Jesus to cure him. Jesus accordingly does so.
Here is the version of the story from the Gospel of Matthew, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), with some minor modifications of my own to bring it closer to the Greek:
“When he entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, appealing to him and saying, ‘Lord, my slave boy [i.e., παῖς] is lying at home paralyzed, in terrible distress.’ And he said to him, ‘I will come and cure him.’ The centurion answered, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed. For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, “Go,” and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, “Do this,” and the slave does it.’”
“When Jesus heard him, he was amazed and said to those who followed him, ‘Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ And to the centurion Jesus said, ‘Go; let it be done for you according to your faith.’ And the slave boy was healed in that hour.”
Many people have tried to argue that the Greek word παῖς that is used in this passage actually means “catamite” (i.e., a male slave kept by a master to be used for sexual purposes). They argue that, by agreeing to heal the slave boy, Jesus was giving implicit sanction to the centurion’s relationship with him and thereby approving gay relationships in general.
As someone who can actually read Koine Greek, I can say that this argument fails on several levels. First of all, in Koine Greek, παῖς is the most common word that means “boy” or “slave boy.” It’s true that this word might be used in some contexts to refer to a catamite, but the word doesn’t necessarily mean “catamite.” The word is very commonly used in Koine texts without any kind of sexual implication and there is nothing in the story about Jesus and the centurion to independently suggest that the gospels are using the word with a sexual connotation. The only reason why some people interpret the παῖς in this passage as a catamite is because they want him to be a catamite.
Furthermore, even if the παῖς in this passage were indeed supposed to be a catamite, the argument that Jesus approved of the centurion’s relationship with his slave boy hinges on the crucial assumption that Jesus understood that the slave boy was the centurion’s catamite, but there’s also nothing in this passage to suggest that Jesus believed this about the slave boy.
Finally, this whole argument is really wrong-headed in my view. If we assume that the παῖς in the story is indeed a catamite, then this isn’t really the kind of relationship that we should be glorifying. We are hypothetically talking about a powerful adult Roman centurion forcing an enslaved adolescent boy to provide him with sexual favors. This is clearly not a healthy, consensual gay relationship in any sense.
If you argue that Jesus approved of Roman centurions keeping teenaged boys as sex slaves for their own exploitation, that’s really more of an argument that Jesus was a terrible person than an argument that Jesus approved of gay relationships.
ABOVE: Jesus and the Centurion, painted in around 1571 by the Italian Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese
“Eunuchs from birth”
Other people who want to argue that Jesus approved of homosexuality have tried to point to a passage found in the Gospel of Matthew 12:19, in which Jesus declares, translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):
“For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”
Many people have tried to interpret the phrase “eunuchs who have been so from birth” as a reference to homosexuality. This is, however, almost certainly not the case. Gay people are not “eunuchs,” nor would a person in the ancient world have been likely to conflate a gay person with a eunuch.
As I discuss in this article from August 2020, the phrase “eunuchs who have been so from birth” in this passage almost certainly refers to people who are literally born with intersex genitalia. Intersex people were well known in the ancient world and they were widely referred to as “eunuchs.” For instance, the famous Gallo-Roman orator Favorinus of Arelate (lived c. 80 – c. 160 CE) is described in contemporary sources as “a eunuch born without testicles, rather than castrated.”
The reference in this passage to “eunuchs who have been so from birth” definitely proves that the author of the Gospel of Matthew was aware of the existence of people who were born with non-conformative genitalia. It does not, however, prove that Jesus openly approved of homosexuality.
The bottom line here is that there is nothing in any of the canonical gospels to suggest that Jesus ever talked about homosexuality or that he was even necessarily aware of its existence. As far as the canonical gospels are concerned, Jesus simply never talked about it. If you want to find any kind of content about Jesus and homosexuality, you are going to have to turn to non-canonical source material.
A very strange passage
Before I talk about a possible non-canonical source that may imply that Jesus engaged in sexual relations with men, allow me to talk about a very strange passage that occurs in the canonical Gospel of Mark 14:51–52. Right before the passage, the gospel describes how the Romans arrested Jesus and how all Jesus’s disciples fled in terror. Then, for some reason, the gospel writer decides to tell us this, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):
“A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.”
Scholars have puzzled over this passage for centuries. It seems entirely out of place. Jesus has just been arrested. All the disciples have run away. And, then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, the gospel decides to tell us about a random naked man running away. The gospel never tells us anything about who this man is, why he’s there, why he’s naked, or why the Romans are chasing him.
Well, nearly six decades ago, a scholar claimed to have made a discovery that might provide an answer.
ABOVE: Painting from c. 1522 by Antonio da Correggio of the so-called “naked fugitive” who is mentioned in the canonical Gospel of Mark 14:51–52
A (supposed) long-lost ancient letter
In summer 1958, Morton Smith, a professor of ancient history from Columbia University, visited the ancient Greek Orthodox Mar Saba monastery, located near Jerusalem. According to his own account, while he was there, he discovered an eighteenth-century handwritten transcription of a previously unknown letter attributed to the Church Father Clement of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 CE) scrawled in the endpapers of a 1649 printed edition of the work of the Church Father Ignatios of Antioch.
This letter that Smith supposedly discovered at Mar Saba describes two alternate versions of the Gospel of Mark that were supposedly in circulation at the time when Clement of Alexandria was alive. The letter states that there was a version of the Gospel of Mark known as the “Secret Gospel of Mark,” which supposedly included a very interesting passage between the verses that are now labelled Mark 10:34 and 10:35. The passage reads as follows, as translated by Morton Smith:
“And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me.’ But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand.”
“But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. 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. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.”
The Mar Saba letter asserts that this version of the Gospel of Mark was written by Mark the Evangelist himself as a more mystical version of the gospel. If this is true, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the young man who is described as spending the night with Jesus wearing only a linen cloth over his naked body is, in fact, the same youth wearing the linen cloth who is mentioned as fleeing from the scene of Jesus’s arrest in Mark 14:51–52 and that, in the gospel, this young man is possibly Jesus’s lover.
But things get even stranger! The Mar Saba letter also mentions that the Carpocratians—a group of libertine Gnostic Christians whom proto-orthodox Christians like Clement regarded as heretics—apparently used a different version of the Secret Gospel of Mark that included the phrase “γυμνὸς γυμνῷ,” which means “naked man with naked man.” The Mar Saba letter, however, insists that this phrase was inserted by the Carpocratians to justify their sexual misdeeds and that it was not a part of the true Secret Gospel.
ABOVE: Color photograph of the second page of the Mar Saba letter, in which the author describes the Secret Gospel of Mark
Morton Smith took a set of photographs of the Mar Saba letter in black and white. He spent the next fifteen years of his life preparing a major academic book on the subject titled Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, which was published by Harvard University Press in 1973. He followed this up with a book aimed at popular audiences titled The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark, which was published by Harper & Row.
Unsurprisingly, as soon as Smith’s first book about the Secret Gospel of Mark was published, it immediately provoked widespread controversy. Many scholars immediately began to argue that Morton Smith did not really find the letter at Mar Saba as he claimed, but rather used his extensive expert knowledge of the Greek language and early Christian history to fabricate the whole thing himself as a cunning literary forgery.
In 1976, the professors David Flusser and Shlomo Pines, Archimandrite Meliton of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and a young graduate student named Guy Stroumsa visited the Mar Saba monastery and saw the Mar Saba letter, confirming for themselves that the letter existed.
In around 1977, Kallistos Dourvas, the librarian of the Mar Saba monastery, removed the pages containing the text of the Mar Saba letter from the volume containing the works of Ignatios of Antioch so that the pages could be stored and catalogued separately. In 1983, Dourvas took a set of color photographs of the pages in question. After that, the letter was lost. Today, no one has any idea where the Mar Saba letter is. The two sets of photographs taken of the letter by Smith himself and by Kallistos Dourvas are now the only proof that the letter ever existed at all.
The letter was lost so many decades ago that nearly every person who is known to have seen it is now dead. Morton Smith himself died in 1991. Guy Stroumsa is the only living western scholar who is known to have seen the Mar Saba letter in person. He saw the letter as a young graduate student way back in 1976; he is now a seventy-two-year-old emeritus professor.
ABOVE: Photograph of the Biblical scholar Morton Smith, who supposedly discovered the Mar Saba letter in 1958
The question of authenticity
There are multiple levels of questions about the Mar Saba letter’s authenticity. First, there is the question of whether the Mar Saba letter itself is authentic, in the sense of it having actually been written by Clement of Alexandria. Scholars’ opinions about the authenticity of the Mar Saba letter remain divided. Many scholars have posed quite reasoned arguments that Morton Smith completely forged the letter himself. Meanwhile, other scholars continue to defend the letter’s authenticity. I’m not really qualified to make an assessment here.
If Smith did not forge the letter, then the letter almost certainly must have really been written by Clement of Alexandria, since the language used in the letter is so characteristically similar to Clement’s other writings that modern scholars generally agree that it is impossible that anyone other than an extremely adept scholar with access to modern critical resources could have forged it.
If the letter was really written by Clement, however, this raises the further question of whether Clement’s information was correct. Was the “Secret Gospel of Mark” that is described in the letter actually written by the same author as the Gospel of Mark that has been passed down through the medieval manuscript tradition? Is “our” version of the gospel actually a bowdlerized version? Or is it the other way around: perhaps “our” version of the Gospel of Mark is, in fact, the original version and the Secret Gospel of Mark is a later version created by an author with mystical inclinations.
For that matter, what about the other version of the gospel mentioned in the Mar Saba letter—the one used by the Carpocratians that supposedly included the phrase “γυμνὸς γυμνῷ”? Was this phrase really a spurious insert as the letter claims, or was it perhaps included in the original version of the gospel and only edited out by a later bowdlerizer?
Again, I don’t think I’m really qualified to answer these questions. My inclination is that the Mar Saba letter is most likely a forgery. Even if the letter is authentic, I don’t think it provides compelling evidence that the historical Jesus had sex with men. It is, however, interesting to note the possibility that some Christians in antiquity may have thought that Jesus had sex with men.
“God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
“Anyone who tries to interpret this passage as a condemnation of homosexuality is clearly overinterpreting.”
I think the word “condemnation” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here personally. He clearly doesn’t mention homosexuality so in that sense you are right, but can you explain how the words above are consistent with same sex relationships?
A better question is: “How are they not consistent?”
The Pharisees ask Jesus if a man is permitted to divorce his wife. Jesus replies by quoting scripture and telling them that, when a man has sex with a woman, they become one flesh and a man may not therefore divorce his wife. He says nothing about whether a man might have sex with another man or whether a woman might have sex with another woman because there was nothing about that in the question that he was asked. Homosexuality is simply never brought into the conversation.
Spencer,
In reading this I wanted to ask whether you have written a post about the brothers and sisters of Jesus and whether they where indeed not brothers as the church says but friends. I would be interested in whether they were siblings or just close friends.
According to Wikipedia, Clement of Alexandria thought homosexuality was a sin. So, if the Secret Gospel of Mark is authentic, then I would be suspicious of it implying Jesus was gay.
Clement certainly did believe that it was sinful to engage in homosexual activity, but it is quite possible that Clement, in his own distaste for homosexuality, might have rejected the homosexual interpretation of the Secret Gospel of Mark that seems so obvious to us and instead found some other way of interpreting the text. The Mar Saba letter does, after all, argue that the Carpocratian version of the Secret Gospel is a tampered version.
Of course, there are also fairly compelling reasons to suspect that the Mar Saba letter itself is a forgery. I don’t talk about those reasons in this article, mostly because they get extremely technical and I didn’t feel like going into them.
Have you read Dominion?
My understanding from that is that homosexuality back then was about power?
Jesus never said anything about bestiality either.
Bestiality is wrong because animals cannot talk, cannot comprehend human society or interactions on a sophisticated adult level, and cannot give informed enthusiastic consent to sexual activity with humans. Any human who has sex with an animal is therefore raping that animal.
If you find an animal that can talk, has a sophisticated understanding of human society and interactions equivalent to that of an adult human being, and can tell you that it wants to have sex with you, then I see no problem with you having sex with it. You won’t find an animal like that, though, so I see no point in debating this.
Animals, of course, can’t consent to being killed and eaten either. I think there’s a strong moral argument to be made that we should really all be vegetarians.
Are humans animals or more than just animals?
If we are animals and nothing more, then killing other animals is not a matter of morals. A lion killing a gazelle is not murder.
If we are more than animals and view eating animals as fundamentally immoral, you must also answer the moral dilemma of eating plants as well. Why do we choose to eat plants instead of animals? Aren’t they living beings as well? Who are we to judge that animals are superior to plants because of possessing things like consciousness? How could the modern world dismiss such a feeling as not being just another kind of unconscious bias of ours?
What you consider to be a moral imperative just places the problem on a different rung of the chain of being: how can it ultimately be justified to kill any living thing, or feel so confident that we can adjudicate that one manner of killing is permissible while another is not?
This is among the many questions that the secular world will never find satisfactory answers for, not only due to the jury being out on whether plants can in fact be sentient beings, but also due to its inability to define man’s true place within the world relative to other living things.
Your arguments against vegetarianism here are very poor.
The argument that, if humans are animals, then eating animals is justified because animals eat each other all the time fails, because it incorrectly assumes that anything animals do to each other is automatically moral. This is not a reasonable assumption. Just because something happens in nature doesn’t mean that it is morally right. Arguing that animals eat each other all the time, so eating animals must be moral is like arguing that human beings kill each other all the time, so killing human beings must be moral. It’s a non sequitur.
The argument that, if humans are “superior” to animals (whatever that means, exactly), then eating animals is justified because they are “inferior” to us also fails, because it incorrectly assumes that it is moral for “superior” beings to eat “inferior” beings. This is, once again, simply not a reasonable assumption. The criterion for whether it is moral to eat a living thing shouldn’t be whether one is “superior” to that thing (again, whatever that means), but rather whether the thing in question is sentient.
As for the notion of plants being “sentient beings,” it is not true that “the jury is still out.” There is, quite simply, no evidence to suggest that plants are sentient to begin with. So-called “plant perception” is pure pseudoscience. Plants do not have nervous systems and there is no reason to think that they are sentient or that they can feel pain. Moreover, even if you think a plant is sentient, it is possible to eat products from plants (such as the plant’s fruits) without killing the plant itself.
You didn’t see the argument I was making and read a lot into it that wasn’t there. I’ll make it even simpler for you:
Animals eating animals falls outside the realm of morals. It is fulfilling a biological imperative. Do we say it’s immoral for a cat to eat a mouse?
Again, the question you can’t answer, coming from a secular worldview, is: are we animals or not? If we are animals, it is no longer a question of morality.
Let’s understand your argument: eating plants is okay because they don’t feel pain? If pain is your category, why then is it wrong to kill animals, as long as it’s pain-free? Just because they possess a nervous system? Again, you don’t clarify what makes eating a certain living thing moral or not.
I’m not the one who made a categorial imperative. You did. That “we should all really be vegetarians.” You haven’t justified your claim.
I like how you want to make the idea of plant sentience taboo by calling it “pseudoscience” because you don’t know the literature. Here’s a peer-reviewed paper from this past year, discussing the many signs of cognition of plants: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15592324.2019.1710661.
What do you think–does cognition presuppose sentience? Want to retract your statement: “There is, quite simply, no evidence to suggest that plants are sentient to begin with?” Plus your claim that it is pseudoscience?
Again, you have no legitimate foundation for your belief that vegetarianism is moral. You made the claim and have not established the positive argument: why it *is* moral to eat plants.
You reflexively dismissing something you know nothing about shows you’re an unprincipled person and shouldn’t be telling people what is moral or not. Along with writing speculative, psilanthropist articles about Christ and who He was.
Final note for you: don’t write blasphemous, heterodox articles like these. It’s pretty obvious you’re a former Protestant with no knowledge of the Nicene fathers, Orthodox Christianity or the Byzantium rite whatsoever. It’s no surprise you’re a non-believer. You don’t know anything about the tradition or proper Christology of what you are writing about, despite thinking you were a Christian and have something to teach people now that you are disillusioned with the faith and believe you’ve thought your way to the right morals.
No offense, but stick to writing the appropriate types of revisionist gender and race-obsessed articles that unscrupulous 21st century “thinkers” like you are paying handsome tuitions right now to be told how to address.
Some thoughts: 1) Jesus didn’t have to talk about homosexuality being a sin, since the Jews already believed it was- it was already written in Leviticus. Jesus was always quoting from the Old Testament, so of course he knew about homosexuality.
2) From a Christian perspective, since Jesus is part of the Trinity and is God, we could argue that Jesus did, in a way speak against homosexuality.
3) From gotquestions.org: “Many Bible scholars speculate that the young man (who fled naked) was John Mark himself, the author of the Gospel of Mark.”
The whole business of posthumously guessing that certain people were gay or transgender has gotten outright bizarre. There are a lot of cases from the 18th, 19th or even early 20th century where behavior that looks “gay” to contemporary eyes wasn’t seen that way at the time. This can include Amelia Earhart’s and other women’s flapper haircuts. This can include the way people in the 19th century wrote to and interacted with same sex platonic friends that look gay to us, but didn’t imply a sexual relationship at the time. This could include 19th century bed sharing habits: This one is a biggie in the whole “Lincoln’s letters” thing . Even with The Hobbit movies despite a LOT of toning down of certain things, you had people sniggering about “gay hobbits” and claiming particularly Frodo and Sam but in some cases Merry and Pippin or other hobbits and characters were an item.
Then there are all the people claiming Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman were transgender due to essentially cross-dressing and “not conforming to women’s roles of the time”.
While I think you’re right that the evidence suggests Jesus had little if anything to say about homosexuality, I’ve learned to be extremely skeptical about these sorts of sexual speculations.
It’s been argued that a lot of what gets talked about as homosexuality in the ancient world was really pedophilia or the equivalent of “prison homosexuality”. Basically in so much of that world women were just so marginalized and hidden away in family compounds, made to wear veils long before Islam, and held under lock-and-key. That a lot of men had sex with men not because they were gay but because they had been in all male work-crews, barracks, trade caravans, hoplite units or whatever for a REALLY LONG TIME.
You still see that dynamic in parts of the Arab world or parts of Central Asia. Very few men live full time or “identify” as gay, but a very high percentage of men have had sex with other men They also spend a lot of time in extremely gender segregated settings.
Is it possible that so many early Christians could have held such a belief because it was such a common thing back then among any man who spent time with a mostly male group (ei The Apostles) that some people from that world just made the assumption.
According to professor Bart D. Ehrman the 4 gospels contain only about 13% from the original
Gospels, to which we have no access.
So, to discuss what Jesus has said is pointless.
And: the existence of Jesus is not proven, least the Jesus who performed miracles. This Jesus is naturally a hoax.
The existence of an historical Jesus is almost certain, according to Erhman and 99.9% of scholars. Let the word ‘proven’ to the field of exact science, we can’t even prove that major historical figures like Boudicca, or Clovis, or Charlemagne existed, you know. Especially a guy, a son of carpenter, that couldn’t have minted coins with his face on, or ordered to build statues in his honour, or had poets to write panegyrics for him. He was just a preacher that was divinized after his death.
Peter, Where does Ehrman say only 13% are original? Thanks!
Was carbon dating an already established practise in 1958? If so, he could have just torn a tiny little piece from the margin of that page for carbon dating and proven to the world that it wasn’t a forgery.
Also, were the monks aware of the controversial content of the letter?
If so, maybe they could have hidden it away somewhere or destroyed it