In the first phase, the letter was thought to be genuine, while Secret Mark often was regarded as a typical apocryphal second-century gospel sprung from the canonical traditions. This pastiche theory was promoted by F. F. Bruce (1974), who saw the story of the young man of Bethany clumsily based on the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John. Thus, he saw the Secret Mark narrative as derivative and denied that it could be either the source of the story of Lazarus or an independent parallel. Raymond E. Brown (1974) came to the conclusion that the author of Secret Mark "may well have drawn upon" the Gospel of John, "at least from memory". Patrick W. Skehan (1974) supported this view, calling the reliance on John "unmistakable". Robert M. Grant (1974) thought that Smith definitely had proved that the letter was written by Clement, but found in Secret Mark elements from each of the four canonical gospels, and arrived at the conclusion that it was written after the first century. Helmut Merkel (1974) also concluded that Secret Mark is dependent on the four canonical gospels after analyzing the key Greek phrases, and that even if the letter is genuine it tells us nothing more than that an expanded version of Mark was in existence in Alexandria in AD 170. Frans Neirynck (1979) argued that Secret Mark was virtually ”composed with the assistance of a concordance of the” canonical gospels and wholly dependent on them. N. T. Wright wrote in 1996 that most scholars who accept the text as genuine see in the Secret Gospel of Mark "a considerably later adaptation of Mark in a decidedly gnostic direction."