a possibility so remote that it deserves a little reflection

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Peter Kirby
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Re: a possibility so remote that it deserves a little reflection

Post by Peter Kirby »

It sounds like Mike is implying that he remembered being inspired by your blog but didn’t want to cite it/you.
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Re: a possibility so remote that it deserves a little reflection

Post by perseusomega9 »

I spent some time worshipping in the Eastern Orthodox church and it really cant be overestimated how much the 3 Cappadocians influenced the church just going by their veneration
The metric to judge if one is a good exegete: the way he/she deals with Barabbas.

Who disagrees with me on this precise point is by definition an idiot.
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Peter Kirby
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Re: a possibility so remote that it deserves a little reflection

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perseusomega9 wrote: Mon Jan 14, 2019 7:27 pm
Peter Kirby wrote: Mon Jan 14, 2019 7:23 pm To be clear, the OP wasn’t about Mike’s or Stephan’s ideas.
I think we get that, yet there's considerable overlap between your and Stephen Alias' observations
I would imagine there is.
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Re: a possibility so remote that it deserves a little reflec

Post by DCHindley »

Peter Kirby wrote: Mon Jan 14, 2019 6:32 pm
Roger Viklund wrote: Mon Jan 14, 2019 3:05 am And since I don’t think Morton Smith was capable of making a fraud like this one, and since apart from Smith, I don’t see how anyone from Medieval time and onwards could have made such a forgery, I regard the letter as probably genuine.
Since we're in this thread, and since the alternative that the letter is ancient but not Clement's has been glossed over, I would be curious to know what you believe of the possibility/probability of the idea that the letter is not by Clement of Alexandria but was written by someone else in his name in antiquity, like many other texts of antiquity that are attributed to apostles and church fathers.
Didn't Smith himself do that? He may have glossed over it too.

Are you aware of any corpus of letters purportedly by a Church father, which we can be pretty darned sure was not? The Clementine Homilies/Recognitions comes to my mind. The letters between Peter and James are entrusted to Clement, Peter's trusty companion. Perhaps at one time the pseudo-Clementine literature included a letter or letters of Clement.

Such a tradition could then have had to been adopted and adapted as a "letter of Clement of Alexandria," since that one actually had some philosophic education, with the Secret Gospel stuff thrown in to bedazzle the readers/hearers. Still, too much hopping, skipping & jumping to get to the goal line, if one were to ask me.

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Re: a possibility so remote that it deserves a little reflec

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DCHindley wrote: Mon Jan 14, 2019 7:32 pm
Peter Kirby wrote: Mon Jan 14, 2019 6:32 pm
Roger Viklund wrote: Mon Jan 14, 2019 3:05 am And since I don’t think Morton Smith was capable of making a fraud like this one, and since apart from Smith, I don’t see how anyone from Medieval time and onwards could have made such a forgery, I regard the letter as probably genuine.
Since we're in this thread, and since the alternative that the letter is ancient but not Clement's has been glossed over, I would be curious to know what you believe of the possibility/probability of the idea that the letter is not by Clement of Alexandria but was written by someone else in his name in antiquity, like many other texts of antiquity that are attributed to apostles and church fathers.
Didn't Smith himself do that? He may have glossed over it too.
I don’t remember; you may be right.
Are you aware of any corpus of letters purportedly by a Church father, which we can be pretty darned sure was not?
Justin Martyr?

“The Cohortatio ad Graecos has been attributed to Apollinaris of Laodicea, Apollinaris of Hierapolis, as well as others. The Epistola ad Zenam et Serenum, an exhortation to Christian living, is dependent upon Clement of Alexandria, and is assigned by Pierre Batiffol to the Novatian Bishop Sisinnius (c. 400).”

I would suppose there are several more, not sure what the criteria are that you’re limiting it to (and why those criteria) and also not sure why you’re asking.
Still, too much hopping, skipping & jumping to get to the goal line, if one were to ask me.
They were your musings, weren’t they??

Are you trying to say that it is improbable in general for there to be any pseudonymous letters of a church father?

Or that it’s improbable for us to possess 1 or more pseudonymous letters if we possess 0 genuine letters?

Please be a little more clear about what you’re saying and why.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Re: a possibility so remote that it deserves a little reflection

Post by perseusomega9 »

@dch: There's no neat ancestral line in anything from Christianty's inception to imperial advocation at Nicea though
The metric to judge if one is a good exegete: the way he/she deals with Barabbas.

Who disagrees with me on this precise point is by definition an idiot.
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Re: a possibility so remote that it deserves a little reflection

Post by Secret Alias »

And when idiots say Smith should have stolen the MS ...

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/articl ... anuscripts
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Re: a possibility so remote that it deserves a little reflection

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So the identity of Theodore is one consideration FOR authenticity. In my humble opinion, and the opinion of another guy that was influenced by me and who wrote a paper which passed peer review at a major journal - there might be a connection here. Another consideration that struck me almost at the very beginning I encountered this text. I happen to be friends with an underwater archaeologist who happens to be a Greek national but who grew up in Alexandria. He remembers a massive church - the Church of St Mark - was still visible on the shores of Chatby. In the discovered MS it is STRONGLY IMPLIED that St Mark wrote the initiation text for the mystery religion run out of HIS CHURCH in Alexandria. Again, it is very subtle but you see it when you know. The Church of St Mark is really a U-boat in the history of Christian ideas. It's not mention in Clement, Origen or Eusebius. In fact, I would argue that if you didn't actually grow up in Alexandria or read the obscure history of the Coptic Church Fathers in Arabic (why would you have searched out the translation) you wouldn't have ever made the connection. Remember the legend that emerges from the Letter to Theodore isn't a mirror of any text we see anywhere else. It is very original. The hoax proposition says 'oh, it's original because it was made up by Morton Smith.' But then when the gospel seems to be a pastiche they say - 'you see Morton Smith copied the bits and pieces of Secret Mark from other gospels.' So they have it both ways.

The reality is that what Clement writes amounts to being the first statement of Alexandrian Christian origins. It implies that there was a physical structure - the Church (of St Mark) of Alexandria - which was big enough to have a 'holy of holies' where catechumen were initiated. Clearly 'Jesus' and the loved disciple conducted these rites in the wilderness. But the text was written for these to be conducted in a secret room somewhere. The Clementine literature introduce the idea of 'mystery initiations' in Alexandria albeit introduced to Clement by Barnabas. Clement gets pushed to Alexandria on his way to the Holy Land and is brought into the initiations. But what Clement tells is something that Morton Smith has never shown any interest in - i.e. a native Alexandrian mystery cult founded by the author of the earliest gospel.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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Re: a possibility so remote that it deserves a little reflec

Post by Roger Viklund »

Peter Kirby wrote: Mon Jan 14, 2019 6:32 pm Since we're in this thread, and since the alternative that the letter is ancient but not Clement's has been glossed over, I would be curious to know what you believe of the possibility/probability of the idea that the letter is not by Clement of Alexandria but was written by someone else in his name in antiquity, like many other texts of antiquity that are attributed to apostles and church fathers.
I’m back! Personally I think the letter was written by Clement. First, the author does not identify himself. Someone has identified him as Clement as can be seen from the heading, but we don’t know when this identification was done and if that person knew or just made a guess that it must have been Clement. I think Scott Brown has quite convincingly shown how close the ideas in the letter follows Clement’s way of thinking and his world of ideas. Second, I regard it as unlikely that someone would have tried to imitate Clement, especially without identifying himself as Clement. Then it’s more likely that someone misidentified the letter, which in that case would be written by someone else linked to Alexandrian Christianity.

Of course Origen then comes to one’s mind. But when I compare Clement to Origen I prefer to think it was written by Clement. The only really attractive in the Origen hypothesis is his disciple Theodore combined with the fact that the author doesn’t identify himself and therefore could be someone else than Clement and of course that Origen was a disciple of Clement and shared many of his ideas. The name Theodore seems though to have been fairly common.

How certain do I then think the identification with Clement is? Not particularly certain. I prefer to think that it was Clement as I think it fits nicely with him as the author, but who knows? It really doesn’t matter as long as the letter is ancient and the author actually had a copy of the Secret Gospel in front of him, as I think the Gospel has more of information to give than the letter has.
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Re: a possibility so remote that it deserves a little reflection

Post by Secret Alias »

Here's another argument for why Origen is an unlikely candidate. Origen did not have a good relationship with the Alexandrian Church. He is something of a heretic - a dissenter. It would be hard to imagine him wistfully recounting the authority of the Alexandrian Church of St Mark. Clement on the other hand is much more faithful to Philo at least - forget about Mark (but was Philo Mark? another question). And Philo was clearly an authority in Alexandrian Judaism and the Oniad tradition there. Given that some continuity must have existed between Alexandrian Jewish and Alexandrian Christian communities. Clement demonstrates more fidelity to that tradition.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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