I am sorry but in this post-truth age terms like this get bandied about, Mr Saturn wasn't an 'antinomian mystic' for God's sake. This is exactly what I say about Marcion. Please Stuart take note of this. If you are going to start bandying about meaningless terms like 'antinomian' in this way (and I know you inevitably will) let's start looking at Scholem's use of the terminology in other respects. Here https://books.google.com/books?id=9QnJD ... an&f=false St Paul's doctrines are identified as 'antinomian' so by the twisted logic of the Morton Smith obsessed if Smith wrote or commented on one of the Pauline epistles his action before 1958 could constitute just such an 'interest.'antinomian mysticism
For fuck's sake Smith was not an Aliester Crowley devote! Will you evil men stop at nothing to destroy a man's career who happened to stumble on a discarded book in a library? I actually happened to have known a devotee of Crowley. I happen to have come from a Frankist background. I have gone through papers of Smith's when he tended private (Swedenborgian) school in Pennsylvania, I've gone through his academic papers up to and after 1958. Can we stop with this endless bullshit please.
Smith was not a libertine. He was the furthest thing. He would have been a Trump supporter or at least he was to the right of Trump. His protege Jacob Neusner shared his 'alt right' sensibilities. Smith did not attend fucking black masses or eat babies or any of the other nonsense you typically accuse him of. He was very, very conservative. He likely had what we would now call 'sexual issues' - he never got laid. Never. No guy was fucking him in the ass. He wasn't fucking any girls in the ass, vagina or whatever. He likely masturbated a lot - like most of the participants in this forum because girls don't 'dig' ugly-ass eggheads.
In other words, it's not surprising that Smith who was a great scholar never got laid. Do I imagine that Von Campenhausen was a pussy hound? Do I have my suspicions that Von Harnack was sending secret payments to his baby mama? All of us, I mean of all of us, who care about these things are not getting laid and likely have sexual performance issues. So can we stop pretending we playas or that some of us are straight or gay please? We all ascetics or at most have a woman who grudging goes along with our monthly or weekly release. No one finds any of us attractive, we don't find ourselves attractive. That's why we bury ourselves in old books that no one else cares anything about.
But I have to bring this up because of the repulsive misrepresentation of nebulous terms like 'antinomian' in these discussions. 'Antinomian' can be used to mean whatever you want it to mean. 'Mystical' refers to the essence of the religious experience. Is there any evidence that Smith PRACTICED any form of religious mysticism or magic? No of course not - he was a scholar and so kept a 'safe distance' from the subject he was studying (unlike many of his critics I might add). He learned Hebrew and studied Jewish texts but there is no evidence that he PRACTICED Judaism. Yes he claimed that Jesus was a magician. So did others (Celsus most notably). But I attribute that to the fact that he was following a line of inquiry rather than - as I am sure you and your ilk would suggest - he was himself a magician.