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

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John2
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

Post by John2 »

rakovsky wrote:
One of the strongest arguments against its authenticity is the combination of the unlikelihoods that it would require:

(A) An alleged early Christian ritual practice - private gnostic-style instruction involving possibly disrobing and in my reading of the passage, homosexual activity - that was unknown or very rarely known until M. Smith's 20th c. discovery, was related in
(B) a gospel version (Secret Mark) that was unknown or very rarely known until the 20th c. discovery ...
I've never taken a close look the Mar Saba letter until now, and after reading it and this thread and poking around the internet, I don't see what the big deal is if Secret Mark is genuine. It seems to be more or less the same as the account of Lazarus in John. As Wikipedia puts it:
In each story it is the sister whose brother just died who approaches Jesus on the road and asks his help; she shows Jesus the tomb, which is in Bethany; the stone is removed and Jesus raises the man from the dead, who then comes out of the tomb. In each story, the emphasis is upon the love between Jesus and this man, and eventually, Jesus follows him to his home. Each story occurs “at the same period in Jesus’ career,” as he has left Galilee and gone into Judea and then to Transjordan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Gospel_of_Mark


I couldn't say if what Clement (or whoever is purporting to be him) says about the origin of Secret Mark is correct (that Mark had added things to his earlier work), but if Carpocrates had obtained a copy of it, then why couldn't John, or whoever added it to John (like the passage about the adulterous woman, which John or an interpolator could have known from Papias or an oral tradition)?
Bishop J.B. Lightfoot wrote that absence of the passage from the earliest manuscripts, combined with the occurrence of stylistic characteristics atypical of John, together implied that the passage was an interpolation. Nevertheless, he considered the story to be authentic history. As a result, based on Eusebius' mention that the writings of Papias contained a story "about a woman falsely accused before the Lord of many sins" (H.E. 3.39), he argued that this section originally was part of Papias' Interpretations of the Sayings of the Lord, and included it in his collection of Papias' fragments. Bart D. Ehrman concurs in Misquoting Jesus, adding that the passage contains many words and phrases otherwise alien to John's writing.

However, Michael W. Holmes has pointed out that it is not certain "that Papias knew the story in precisely this form, inasmuch as it now appears that at least two independent stories about Jesus and a sinful woman circulated among Christians in the first two centuries of the church, so that the traditional form found in many New Testament manuscripts may well represent a conflation of two independent shorter, earlier versions of the incident." Kyle R. Hughes has argued that one of these earlier versions is in fact very similar in style, form, and content to the Lukan special material (the so-called "L" source), suggesting that the core of this tradition is in fact rooted in very early Christian (though not Johannine) memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and ... Authorship
I also don't get the impression that there is anything homosexual about Secret Mark; no more than the story of Lazarus at least, and Clement cites Secret Mark preceisely to counter the idea that it contained anything homosexual:
After these words follows the text, "And James and John come to him," and all that section. But "naked man with naked man," and the other things about which you wrote, are not found.
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

Post by Roger Viklund »

rakovsky wrote: Fri Jan 18, 2019 2:33 pm I think that paleography is still a significant argument, but it's not as strong as it might seem because of Smith's prior detailed studies and many photographs of 18th. c. Greek manuscripts, along with potential assistance, as you said.

Yes, a forger could plant another copy in another cave or monastery, and so the discovery of such a second copy, while increasing the argument for authenticity, might not be conclusive, depending on the case.
But how would he manage to forge the text when he neither had the skills in Greek nor in writing the 18th-century script?
In "A Question of Ability: What Did He Know and When Did He Know It? Further Excavations from the Morton Smith Archives", in Burke, Tony, Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate. Proceedings from the 2011 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium, Eugene, Or.: Cascade Books (2013), pp. 184–211, Allan J. Pantuck investigates Smith's knowledge of Hebrew. Pantuck chose Hebrew since contrary to Greek, Smith had actually studied the language intensively for many years. After three years of study in the US, he went to Jerusalem where he “spent numerous years acquiring” the language “through formal instruction”. He had to pass the test of written Hebrew as he was writing his Ph.D. dissertation in Hebrew. Fact is he failed several times before he eventually managed to pass. Still, he preferred to write to his teachers and friends in English excusing himself for his bad Hebrew which he didn’t want to embarrass them with. Even in 1944, when he had completed his dissertation, he said that his teacher had corrected and made additions to his thesis, including also “corrections for mistakes to its Hebrew”. After 1944 he wrote some letters in Hebrew. When analyzed “by a native speaker of Hebrew (Yonaton Moss), there are at least seven footnoted instances where Smith’s Hebrew is described as “elliptical,” “strange,” “unclear,” “obscure,” and in one case possibly “intending the reverse” of what Smith had actually written.”

How about his Greek then? Well, according to Pantuck his “Greek appears to be have been primarily self-taught”. He never took any formal courses. He also never published anything which he had written in Greek. When he had the chance to do so on two occasions, he chose not to. The only publication he made in Greek was written by him in English and translated into Greek by a native Greek speaker. In an e-mail written to Scott Brown in 2006 and published by Pantuck, Roy Kotansky wrote the following:
“I am a scholar of magic, and though I did my Ph.D. on magic at Chicago (1988) under Dieter Betz, I asked Morton Smith, a longtime colleague and friend, to be my principal reader, outside of Chicago. My work, on the magical lamellae, has long since been published in a Cologne papyrological series. As a managing editor of Betz’s Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, years ago, I also read, and critiqued, all of the contributors’ translations, including those of Morton Smith. What strikes me most about the issue of forgery with SM, is not that Morton would have done this at all (he wouldn’t have, of course), but rather that he COULD NOT have done it: his Greek, though very good, was not that of a true papyrologist (or philologist); his translations of the big sections of PGM XIII did not always appreciate the subtleties and nuances of the text’s idioms, I believe, and he seemed very appreciative of my corrections, at that time. He certainly could not have produced either the Greek cursive script of the Mar Saba ms., nor its grammatical text, as we have it. There are few up to this sort of task . . . I was with him once at the Getty Museum examining magical gemstones in the collection in the ’80s, and many times I had to gently correct his misreadings of rather obvious readings. Morton was not a paleographer/epigraphist, nor a papyrologist. I don’t think that he read these kinds of Greek texts very well.” (Pantuck, A Question of Ability, p. 196)
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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Robert Price's understanding of M.Smith's motivation for forging Secret Mark, from his review of Scott G Brown's book on it:
Morton Smith never made much of the gospel he had “discovered.” He avoided basing his serious scholarly hypotheses upon it, leaving other scholars to do with it as they pleased. But this doesn’t mean he didn’t write the text. No, his point was to toss an apple of discord onto the scholarly seminar table. The more seriously scholars took it, the more fun Smith had. He could hardly overrule them on the meaning of the text without betraying his authorship of it. It was a Candid Camera stunt, and it would have ruined it for him to intervene. He knew better than to base any serious work upon it, so he didn’t. That would have vitiated his serious work (like Jesus the Magician). What he wanted was to dupe other scholars into taking his hoax seriously and basing their work on it. I should say that Brown has fallen for it, and the very sophistication of his analysis is precisely the sort of sophistry Smith wanted to tempt forth and laugh at.
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/ ... gospel.htm
In his review, Robert Price says that Brown theorizes that Secret (ie. "mystikon") Mark is not supposed to really be a Secret or esoteric or Hidden Mark, but only a more spiritual, mystical, or symbolic Mark. But Price says that Brown goes to too much trouble to prove this and that Brown's arguments for its authenticity and non-esotericity are weak. He surmises Brown's motives this way:
But the plane [of Brown's theories about Secret Mark] crashes with a climactic anticlimax: what Brown offers us as the supposedly advanced, deeper truth of the elite gospel turns out to be the same as the theme constantly reiterated throughout Plain Old Mark: the way of the Kingdom of God and sharing its glory is the way of self-abnegation, martyrdom if need be, here and now. This is deeper teaching? This was kept from Joe Q. Catechumen? How can any reader of Plain Old Mark have avoided it? “What LGM 1 and 2 do is deepen a reader’s appreciation of this gospel’s Christology and discipleship theology” (p. 216). What vapid euphemism! This hardly amounts to a “heightened esotericism” (ibid.). The mountain labored to bring forth a mouse. Why all this trouble for so meager a result? I suspect that it is part of Brown’s larger apologetical agenda: if the “Longer” gospel were really a secret gospel, if it had real secrets, a genuine Gnostic, esoteric dimension, then it would lend itself more readily to the theory that Smith concocted it as an embarrassment to orthodox Christianity. And that Brown will not have. But one fears that, in the wake of Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax, Brown’s efforts have been rendered as Quixotic as those of “Sindonologists” after the Carbon 14 dating of the Turin Shroud.

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

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Of what value is this? Price's 'understanding' of Smith's motivation for allegedly involving himself in a non-existent crime. Do you hear how stupid this is? You've been making a series of cart leading the horse arguments. Please give us your best argument for forgery or why we shouldn't accept this text or stop with this parade of nonsense. In this particular case, Smith is condemned for "never [having] made much of the gospel he had discovered." Even if we accept that at face value he would have been damned if he had made a big deal about the discovery, right? You can't win that one. You're either too interested or suspiciously not interested. So it's like drowning the witch - either way you get the result you want.

As it was Smith's Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark is a big expansive text. You can't argue that he didn't make a big effort to understand the MS. I take it that - like most scholars - he naturally was drawn to think about and interpret the text in terms of his own scholarly POV - and there was only so far that could take him. That's why he dropped interest in the text. His own interests didn't really align with the text. Smith wasn't an expert on Clement or Alexandrian Christianity or even Philo of Alexandria for that matter. It's my guess that the gospel is of THAT milieu - -the Alexandrian Jewish-Christian tradition. And Smith wasn't an expert in that background. That's why he stopped talking about it. He did his best in the scholarly book to make sense of it and didn't have much to add after that.

This is so repetitive. You think the text is a forgery THEREFORE this or that weird thing or this or that anomaly or this or that unanswered question supports your original assumption. But that's not the way real scholarship works. You have to find something substantial and then argue that from that we should consider forgery.
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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My number one reason to doubt its authenticity are the combination of unlikelihoods that it requires, as I laid out in the o p. The second reason is how M . Smith's interests and views and activities (including photographing 18th c. Greek manuscripts) line up with the discovery (eg. a letter in an 18th c. Greek hand). The third reason is how it has weird parallels with literary counterfeiting (eg. Anglo Saxon Attitudes). Reason number four is how researching the topic feels like a rabbit hole or learning about Scientology or Mormonism, where new facts about it and apologetics for its authenticity turn out to be silly or fail to really prove the authenticity. Reason 5 could be Smith's weird veiled admissions about it, like those that Price and Jeffrey quote. Reason 6 could be how Neusner thought it was faked.

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

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When someone says "just like I was saying" and every previous point has been refuted and ridiculed by everyone else, you know they aren't going be swayed by the facts. You are promoting a faith-based argument. You aren't even pretending any more to be engaged in this conversation. There is no point engaging someone who is simply disguising their prejudices as rational arguments.
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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rakovsky wrote: Sun Jan 20, 2019 9:50 am My number one reason to doubt its authenticity are the combination of unlikelihoods that it requires, as I laid out in the o p. The second reason is how M . Smith's interests and views and activities (including photographing 18th c. Greek manuscripts) line up with the discovery (eg. a letter in an 18th c. Greek hand). The third reason is how it has weird parallels with literary counterfeiting (eg. Anglo Saxon Attitudes). Reason number four is how researching the topic feels like a rabbit hole or learning about Scientology or Mormonism, where new facts about it and apologetics for its authenticity turn out to be silly or fail to really prove the authenticity. Reason 5 could be Smith's weird veiled admissions about it, like those that Price and Jeffrey quote. Reason 6 could be how Neusner thought it was faked.
• Well, number one would only be relevant if the other were true.
• Number two is not accurate, since his “interests” are inaccurately presented by the forge promoters. The logic is also flawed. Smith was a manuscript hunter who travelled and visited monasteries and libraries where he would catalogue and photograph thousands of manuscript. The fact that he would be the one to find the Mar Saba ms is then made suspect as he was “photographing 18th c. Greek manuscripts”. But who would find such a manuscript if not a scholar who searched for them?
• Number three is one of the strangest argument I have encountered. First as the parallels are so weak, and second because the theory is so far-fetched and the logic so incomprehensible.
• Number four is a backward argument – the arguments for its authenticity are silly or they fail to prove the authenticity. But how can one prove something unprovable beyond probability, especially since many pro-forgers keep repeating arguments which already have been proven wrong?
• Number five is one of those untrue arguments. Smith never admitted that he forged the text – on the contrary, he vehemently attacked those who dared to accuse him of such an act. Of course, in some pro-forgers mind that also is proof that he forged it.
• Number six is maybe even stranger than number three. Anyone who has read Neusner’s personal vendetta on Smith can clearly see that this has nothing to do with scholarly arguments but is an emotional attack and payback. No argument for anything!
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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Roger,
It's nice that you at least went through each of the points
My main motive is that I am really into categorizing and learning first to mid second century texts, which I find both inspiring and interesting. So I want to be careful about which ones I categorize as real.
Have you looked at the Apocalypse of Elijah, Philo On the Theraputae, or the other texts that I put at the bottom of my first century writings list as likely mistaken for 1st c. texts on Christianity? I read about them carefully before putting them in my list.

At first, when I saw Secret Mark in the Early Writings webpage list of early texts, I took it as authentic. Then when I read in Wikipedia that scholars were in controversy about it, I changed to undecided.

When I read in it that Smith's teacher Nock thought it was a forgery(5th c. I think) and his close colleague Neusner thought Smith forged it, I thought that the two could have been closed minded, but it gave me a little more doubt, since people close to him thought it was a forgery.

Then I read that the discovery lines up with his publishing topics and views before and after the discovery, I started to think that it was more likely forged. I had already read some of his book Jesus the Magician, which I thought had some significant and unique potential insights. The Secret Mark letter seemed unique in being an alleged mainstream church document uniquely narrating Jesus that matched Smith's unique nonmainstream take on Jesus. If a scholar with a unique take on history comes up with a uniquely matching document, then one should question more the authenticity of the find. It's like the Donatio of Constantine. The "rediscovered" text lined up with the Roman church's idea about the pope's power, and this matching is evidence that suggests the Roman church forged it.

After that, I read the claims about the Mysery of Mar Saba novel, which seemed to me uncanny circumstantial evidence, but not real solid either, because it could conceivably be a coincidence only. But sometimes forgers do use fictional literature in making their forgeries, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which IIRC plagiarized passages from a French or Italian novel, and the Book of Mormon, which picked up contemporary pseudoscientific theories that the Indians were the lost tribes of Israel. After all over the above, I thought that Secret Mark was most likely a forgery.

The calculation running in my head was:
Scholarly controversy × Newly discovered previously unknown text in an unknown Letter × Close associates think it was a forgery × Prior & Subsequent Interests & Activities & POVs match the discovery × Uncanny parallels in modern literature = Likely forgery
Last edited by rakovsky on Sun Jan 20, 2019 12:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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

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rakovsky wrote: Sun Jan 20, 2019 11:10 am Roger,
It's nice that you at least went through each of the points
My main motive is that I am really into categorizing and learning first to mid second century texts, which I find both inspiring and interesting. So I want to be careful about which ones I categorize as real.
Have you looked at the Apocalypse of Elijah, Philo On the Theraputae, or the other texts that I put at the bottom of my first century writings list as likely mistaken for 1st c. texts on Christianity? I read about them carefully before putting them in my list.

At first, when I saw Secret Mark in the Early Writings webpage list of early texts, I took it as authentic. Then when I read in Wikipedia that scholars were in controversy about it, I changed to undecided.

When I read in it that Smith's teacher Nock thought it was a forgery(5th c. I think) and his close colleague Neusner thought Smith forged it, I thought that the two could have been closed minded, but it gave me a little more doubt, since people close to him thought it was a forgery.

Then I read that the discovery lines up with his publishing topics and views before and after the discovery, I started to think that it was more likely forged. I had already read some of his book Jesus the Magician, which I thought had some significant and unique potential insights. The Secret Mark letter seemed unique in being an alleged mainstream church document uniquely narrating Jesus that matched Smith's unique nonmainstream take on Jesus. If a scholar with a unique take on history comes up with a uniquely matching document, then one should question more the authenticity of the find. It's like the Donatio of Constantine. The "rediscovered" text lined up with the Roman church's idea about the pope's power, and this matching is evidence that suggests the Roman church forged it.

After that, I read the claims about the Mysery of Mar Saba novel, which seemed to me uncanny circumstantial evidence, but not real solid either, because it could conceivably be a coincidence only. But sometimes forgers do use fictional literature in making their forgeries, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which IIRC plagiarized passages from a French or Italian novel, and the Book of Mormon, which picked up contemporary pseudoscientific theories that the Indians were the lost tribes of Israel. After all over the above, I thought that Secret Mark was most likely a forgery.
Hi Rakovsky!

I haven’t looked at the texts that you have put at the bottom of your first century writings list. I will in due time, but that is a separate issue and does not affect Secret Mark.

In my opinion, there has only been two strong arguments presented in favour for the text being forged. The first is about the handwriting. Carlson presented only one strong argument, and that was the shaky handwriting with “the forger’s tremor”. That turned out to be a mistake due to his choice to examine the printed images in Smith’s book instead of the photos. Then there is Tselikas’ analysis, but he has obviously made “a number of ‘common-sense’ inferences regarding the signs of forgery, especially where he argues for Smith being the forger, that are simply wrong in light of forensic considerations.” The only sustainable analysis was done by Anastasopoulou and she came to the conclusion that it was highly unlikely that Smith could have written the complex 18th-century writing. The 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. That is the sum of strong arguments in favour of Secret Mark being a forgery – in my opinion. This should be balanced with everything else (which I don’t intend to list here now) that speaks for the text's authenticity. And for me, this speaks strongly for the fact that the text is genuine. But I admit that it is possible that it is a forgery, although quite unlikely.
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Re: A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

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I've often felt - given the assault on the Mar Saba document at the height of the 'conservative' tide in the early 2000s - that critics have turned this into a popularity contest. You know - if you like Secret Mark press '1' if you don't like it press '2' text charges may apply. But is that what it comes down to? A 'consensus of scholarship' to decide whether Jesus existed or not. A 'consensus of scholarship' to decide whether the Marcionite canon was older than the orthodox canon. I don't know if that's the best way to decide things. I think it's just better if you don't like the text, just ignore it. Write to your audience. With arguments as subjective as this, the decision to mention or not mention Secret Mark is really up to you. It's not fair to anyone to say that your 'gut feelings' are better than another person. The text was found, it looks like an eighteen century MS. Ignore it if you want, but don't ruin the party for everyone else. It's kind of rude. By arguing the text is a forgery - rather than 'it might be a forgery' - you are implying that your 'gut' feelings are better than mine or someone else's. How do you quantify your 'superior gut'? I don't even know that an 'appeal to authority' is decisive here. There are about the same number of scholars with similar credentials on both side of the issue. I think in the end behaving mannerly should be the default position of everyone.
“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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