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

[Secret Alias]

M. Smith's response to Price's question of whether Smith forged it was that the monastery was hiding the manuscript out of embarrassment, and analogized it to Beskow condemning New Age materials for being spurious. M. Smith emphasized that the New Age documents were authentic because they embodied a faith, regardless of who wrote them.

WTF? Smith and Bob Price had a dialogue? Really? Smith died in 1991. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3622627 Maybe I am missing something.

[Secret Alias]

the monastery was hiding the manuscript out of embarrassment

Monasteries are filled with books which the monks basically ignore and allow cats and other animals to live in. Anyone who has ever spent time in monasteries in the Middle East (I am not one but I have known many people) knows that before Westerners come to organize the collections, the books are basically treated like shit. No one knows what is what. Could such an environment have allowed for someone to sneak in a copy of a book which already had writing in it? That's a bizarre question. First of all, it's usually hot in a place like Mar Saba. How are you going to smuggle a book under a T-shirt. Second of all, monks are xenophobic so they don't allow just anyone into their place. They have certain protocols. Now even if someone could demonstrate that you COULD smuggle a book into a monastery (they recently had an example of someone smuggling a gun onto a plane - https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/13/us/tsa-g ... index.html) does that mean that there wasn't security? No only that security could be beaten. Would someone who was afforded the opportunity to catalog the books at the beginning of his career like Morton Smith - a distinguished professor later - have taken the opportunity to blow that career as part of a massive effort to forge a letter of Clement in the back of an old book which mentions a Secret Gospel of Mark? It depends how fucking loonie tunes you are to argue that such a possibility - i.e. the massive plan set forth in the lead up to the trip (viz. buying a Voss edition practicing the handwriting, the composition, the study of (i) Clement i.e. to make the letter sound Clementine to Clement scholars (ii) Marcan to Mark scholars - then smuggle a book to a place you've never seen before dragging the fucking book on the plane into your hotel room and then one day deciding to smuggle it into this monastery. It's loonie tunes. But even if that is a possibility - how likely is it that it was carried out? Does the possibility that it could theoretically happen equal IT DID HAPPEN? Completely loonie tunes theory.

[rakovsky]

That was in 2007. I wrote to Bob in 2009 and pointed out some errors in his review of Stephen Carlson’s “The Gospel Hoax”...

It looks like R.Price is still holding his overall views on Secret Mark.

Recently I have read two treatments of the Secret Gospel of Mark, one brief (a few pages from Robert M. Price’s Secret Scrolls: Revelations from the Lost Gospel Novels [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011]) ... In chapter three Price discusses J. H. Hunter’s 1940 novel The Mystery of Mar Saba... He postulates: “Suppose Smith found some blank pages at the end of that library book, and they spoke eloquently to him nonetheless, whispering to him of an opportunity for a rich joke. And then perhaps he got to work composing the Clement piece with its implied homosexual evangel. If so, he would have been following he precise strategy employed by the scheming forgers of the Shred of Nicodemus in The Mystery of Mar Saba” (p. 30). If this statement sounds familiar, it is drawn from Price’s article “Second Thoughts on the Secret Gospel” from Bulletin for Biblical Research 14 (2004): 127-132 (cribbed entirely for his discussion of Secret Mark in Secret Scrolls, showing that Price’s views have not changed in the intervening years

https://www.apocryphicity.ca/2011/11/14 ... cret-mark/

[rakovsky]

WTF? Smith and Bob Price had a dialogue? Really? Smith died in 1991. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3622627 Maybe I am missing something.

Price wrote:

In 1985 I asked Morton Smith how he responded to charges of forgery, .....
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_secret.htm

[rakovsky]

the monastery was hiding the manuscript out of embarrassment

I am sure that Smith never said this. This is increasingly becoming a worthless conversation when you make up quotes.

I had quoted what Price wrote:

In 1985 I asked Morton Smith how he responded to charges of forgery, ...
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.
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_secret.htm

The custodians of the document were the monastery.

[Secret Alias]

Ok I wasn't aware of that. I changed my response above to reflect the new evidence.

[Roger Viklund]

When he says in his email to you that he is "mistaken", I take it he means on the three issues that you mentioned, not on all the evidence that he went over and his numerous skeptical articles about "Secret Mark" on his website. Otherwise, if his overall view has changed, you could ask him to write a retraction.

I only focused on a few subjects, those with the most obvious errors, and gave him some examples of what he had written that was inaccurate and explained why. That included Carlson’s handwriting analysis and the baldy Madiotes argument as the arguments he presented in those cases were obviously misleading and plainly wrong. I did not take up issues which were mere speculations, such as Hunter’s novel. Why? Because it’s better to focus on some important issues which you can prove to be wrong than to cover everything and so mix important issues with minor unprovable things. You cannot prove that Smith didn’t use “The Mystery of Mar Saba” to forge the Clement letter, no matter how implausible that theory is. So, I settled for just a few things and it was those things that Robert responded to.

[Secret Alias]

When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered there were scholars who argued they were forgeries because they seemed to be unlike any thing known from normative Judaism. Then we found out recently that scroll fragments WERE forged in more recent times https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45948986. What does that say about the original scrolls? By your logic the fact that it was possible to pass off fake scroll fragments that should mean the original discovery were fakes. The bottom line is that it's hard enough to quantify how likely it is IN THEORY to smuggle a pre-manufactured Voss book into a monastery. It's virtually impossible to use this probability - however slight - if it was to be calculated to determine if actual Mar Saba document Smith found in the monastery was a forgery. It's just a loonie tunes theory that does nothing to help determine whether or not the document is authentic. Here is an example of a modern writer claiming that THE ENTIRE Qumran collection is a late forgery - https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2017 ... rolls-hoax

[Roger Viklund]

I've seen debates both ways on the handwriting analysis and I think that a modern forger could mimic such handwriting, and Price gave more reasons for his doubt than those.

I wasn't referring this time to all the handwriting analyses done on the letter, but specifically to Carlson’s analysis – which was the only one done in 2009 and that analysis was plain wrong.

[Secret Alias]

A very close situation to the Mar Saba document (in light of it now having disappeared) is the Shapira Scroll - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapira_Scroll Zeitlin thought both the Qumran texts and the Shapira Scroll were forgeries.