#4 is divided into parts.
rakovsky wrote: ↑Tue Jan 15, 2019 10:07 pm
(A) Stuart just brought up a new point for me that there are "no other examples of (sectarian) mystery cult material (quoted in full placed inside an existing canonical gospel." Marcion was a gnostic, but his version of the NT wasn't visionary or mystery cult material, AFAIK.
Read this phrase again: "(sectarian) mystery cult material (quoted in full placed inside an existing canonical gospel)."
It's an artificial construct of a category created for the sole purpose of arguing that it is a forgery. There can be no doubt about its motivated construction (Marcion's gospel was "in," but that was too uncomfortable, so the goalposts shifted again).
Suppose it's true. Suppose it's meaningful at all. It's not logical to conclude that the only known example of "it" (again, if "it" is meaningful and something we need to care about whether there are multiple of "it," which isn't demonstrated) is from the 20th century instead of the 2nd century. You can't make it not exist; it exists. It's real. The only question is where it comes from, when it comes from. You have to deal with it either way. You can't get rid of the Mar Saba letter. The text will always exist; there will always be at least one thing like it.
We have other cases of texts that aren't like other texts.
For example, the Epistula Apostolorum is a revelatory resurrection appearance text in letter form, but it's catholic, not gnostic.
The Gospel of Thomas surely has its own category, as already mentioned.
#5
rakovsky wrote: ↑Tue Jan 15, 2019 10:07 pm
(B) Roger Viklund got Robert Price to admit in 2009 that he was mistaken about Secret Mark, so then I tried to see if Price's views had changed, and it turns out in 2011 Price's book repeated his earlier rejection. On top of that, I found Price's discussion with Morton Smith, where Smith analogizes the Mar Saba letter to New Age forgeries of ancient documents, complains about a scholar who - like the Orthodox monastery - opposes the New Age forgeries, and concludes that the New Age documents are authentic because they represent faith. ie. by inference the Mar Saba letter hinting at secret rituals is analogously modern yet authentic because it represents someone's faith.
‘In 1985 I (Robert Price) asked Morton Smith how he responded to charges of forgery, recently renewed in Per Beskow’s excellent book “Strange Tales About Jesus: a Survey of Unfamiliar Gospels” (Fortress, 1983). He told me the now-familiar story of the custodians of the manuscript secreting it away out of embarrassment at the notoriety Smith’s book “The Secret Gospel” had brought them, henceforth wanting to suppress the evidence. He asked, furthermore, what business Beskow had in condemning all the more recent New Age gospels as spurious: if they embodied someone’s faith, weren’t they authentic gospels, no matter who wrote them or when? Later I wondered if his words did not apply equally, even especially, to his own Secret Mark!’
You've once again misinterpreted your source. It's wrong that "Smith
analogizes the Mar Saba letter to New Age forgeries of ancient documents." It is Robert Price who, later, made that analogy/claim.
You've failed to mention the actual context. It was actually Per Beskow who decided to lump "Secret Mark" with various "New Age" gospels; this forced the context of the discussion such that there would also be an opportunity for Smith to say something about these New Age gospels. That Smith objected to considering Secret Mark as modern and to the libelous statements Beskow made about Smith, is evident from the legal threats Smith made against Beskow, which resulted in the publisher having Beskow change the wording of a paragraph of the book.
Now you know, kids, why
it's important that you make legal threats and claim libel like this if you aren't a forger. Otherwise people are going to come along and claim that you're okay with others saying that you're a forger, when you are not a forger and are very much not okay with being called a forger. They're going to say that you gave their forgery libel a wink and a nod, even if you didn't have the guts to confess it directly.
Yes, it's maddening, but that's how it is. People will grasp onto anything they think they can get.
#6
rakovsky wrote: ↑Tue Jan 15, 2019 10:07 pm
(C) Secret Alias had made the argument
We're now in argument-for-the-opposite territory. If this was in the requested order of importance, it means we're all out of arguments.
#7
rakovsky wrote: ↑Tue Jan 15, 2019 10:07 pm
(D) I thought that chiasms were a good argument for Secret Mark's authenticity
Another argument for the opposite. Wow, we hit the bottom of the barrel even faster than I expected.
Okay, so, if we're this quickly in "zero" territory, and given that #1 was nothing but your claim that there are many, many arguments... it looks like the claim of #1 is not actually true. There may be many things that people say and that people enumerate as arguments, but they go off the rails into contrived stuff very quickly. These are the kind of highly-motivated "observations" that you add for the faithful, not arguments that are actually meaningful and convincing as evidence.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown