A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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Peter Kirby
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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Roger Viklund wrote: Sun Jan 20, 2019 12:05 pmThe second argument was by Andrew Criddle and his analysis of the presence (or lack of) words in the letter. This was a statistical study and presented some hard evidence instead of just silly arguments about unprovable motives and so on. I’d say his study still presents one of the strongest arguments for the text being a forgery. However, the case is still not that particularly strong as the method he used has turned out to be unreliable.
Is this referring to any particular attempt to show Andrew Criddle's method to be unreliable, and, if so, which attempt(s)?
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/25652275?s ... b_contents

also

https://books.google.com/books?id=U-YcB ... 22&f=false "Criddle's method has been shown to only correctly identify the authorship of three out of seven of Shakespeare's poems."
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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Yes, Stephan is correct. When the same method was tested on Shakespeare’s writings only three out of seven poems were correctly identified. And among those were four undisputed and the test identified two of them as inauthentic.

Ehrman misrepresented Criddle’s study by writing the following:
“… why is it that, on the other hand, the vocabulary and writing style of this document are so much like Clement? One impressive study, in fact, has shown that this letter of Clement is more like Clement than Clement ever is. That may sound odd at first, so I should explain how it works. Suppose you have a friend who uses the word awesome a lot, and you want to impersonate her. It may turn out that if you were actually to count, she uses the term awesome, say, once every three hundred words. But when you imitate her, you use it once every fifty words so that anyone accustomed to hearing her speak will recognize this as one of her characteristic words and think, “Yes, sounds just like her.” What we have here is a similar phenomenon: There is too much that is like Clement in this short letter, more than could be expected in any passage of comparable length elsewhere in Clement.” (Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, s. 85–86)
As Criddle compared the words only used once by Clement with those he never used before, it’s a bit strange to say that those words in the Mar Saba letter would show the letter to be more like Clement than Clement.
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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On the statistical theory behind my argument see https://www.jstor.org/stable/25652275?s ... b_contents

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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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He's a smart and knowledgeable guy in case you haven't already noticed. And very nice too.
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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andrewcriddle wrote: Mon Jan 21, 2019 11:22 pm On the statistical theory behind my argument see https://www.jstor.org/stable/25652275?s ... b_contents

Andrew Criddle
For those of us for whom statistics are not the strongest suit, if I may ask, what is your current assessment of your own statistical argument? Has it been thoroughly debunked? Only partially debunked? Debunked in any degree at all?
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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Ben C. Smith wrote: Tue Jan 22, 2019 9:50 am
andrewcriddle wrote: Mon Jan 21, 2019 11:22 pm On the statistical theory behind my argument see https://www.jstor.org/stable/25652275?s ... b_contents

Andrew Criddle
For those of us for whom statistics are not the strongest suit, if I may ask, what is your current assessment of your own statistical argument? Has it been thoroughly debunked? Only partially debunked? Debunked in any degree at all?
Basically they confirm that the calculations are correct, although they raise some issues, such as “whether or not the decision to focus on the number of 1-words preceded the observation that they are in surplus”. They say that this “is not clear. If it did not, then this presents a substantial problem in interpreting these results.” They also wanted to know the total number of words (which, If I remember correctly, were 1295) and how the selection was made, in order to judge the relevance of the result.

I have redone the study on approximately half the number of words and got a result that was close enough.
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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Ben C. Smith wrote: Tue Jan 22, 2019 9:50 am
andrewcriddle wrote: Mon Jan 21, 2019 11:22 pm On the statistical theory behind my argument see https://www.jstor.org/stable/25652275?s ... b_contents

Andrew Criddle
For those of us for whom statistics are not the strongest suit, if I may ask, what is your current assessment of your own statistical argument? Has it been thoroughly debunked? Only partially debunked? Debunked in any degree at all?
I think the statistical anomaly is clearly there. How statistically significant it is (how far could it be pure chance) is less clear. The exact numbers to be used are arguable (see discussion in my original paper) although my numbers produce a lower discrepancy from the expected than would arise if using Morton Smith's figures.

IMO there is genuinely something odd here. The question is, what is actually going on to produce the statistical anomaly ? I think, (but cannot prove), that the anomaly arises because the letter has less than expected distinctively non-Clementine words (words not used by Clement but found in other Alexandrian patristic writers) and more than expected distinctively Clementine words (words used at least once by Clement but not found in other Alexandrian patristic writers). IF this is right, the obvious explanation would be deliberate imitation of Clement by another writer.

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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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andrewcriddle wrote: Wed Jan 23, 2019 10:29 pm
Ben C. Smith wrote: Tue Jan 22, 2019 9:50 am
andrewcriddle wrote: Mon Jan 21, 2019 11:22 pm On the statistical theory behind my argument see https://www.jstor.org/stable/25652275?s ... b_contents

Andrew Criddle
For those of us for whom statistics are not the strongest suit, if I may ask, what is your current assessment of your own statistical argument? Has it been thoroughly debunked? Only partially debunked? Debunked in any degree at all?
I think the statistical anomaly is clearly there. How statistically significant it is (how far could it be pure chance) is less clear. The exact numbers to be used are arguable (see discussion in my original paper) although my numbers produce a lower discrepancy from the expected than would arise if using Morton Smith's figures.

IMO there is genuinely something odd here. The question is, what is actually going on to produce the statistical anomaly ? I think, (but cannot prove), that the anomaly arises because the letter has less than expected distinctively non-Clementine words (words not used by Clement but found in other Alexandrian patristic writers) and more than expected distinctively Clementine words (words used at least once by Clement but not found in other Alexandrian patristic writers). IF this is right, the obvious explanation would be deliberate imitation of Clement by another writer.
Thanks, Andrew. So what do you think is going on with your method being able to identify only 3 out of 7 plays as Shakespearean?
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

Post by Secret Alias »

I wonder whether Criddle developed the theory from the statistical anomaly but then never proceeded to test the theory to see if it produced the results with other authors. It was could enough to find an argument against one particular text. If it really was a discovery to help identify the authenticity of other texts, you'd expect him to have went on to apply the methodology to other disputed works - i.e. Origen. As such this was a 'one off' with the sole purpose of discrediting THIS text (a passion shared by his blogmate) rather than developing a widely applicable methodology.
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