Report on Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium Pt 3

Report on Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium Pt 3 by Ryan Wettlaufer (pt 1 here; pt 2 here)

By the time I made it back to the conference they were in the middle
of Pierluigi Piovanelli's paper on Morton Smith and Aleister Crowley.
Yes, I do mean that Aleister Crowley. Piovanelli seemed to be trying
to establish the events and trends in Morton Smith's life that would
both motivate him and enable him to create a forgery like sm. For
example, Piovanelli pointed out a time when Smith was studying
Clement, thus giving him the knowledge necessary to forge a letter of
Clement. The titular event, however, was when Smith became fascinated with the life of Crowley, who - as Piovanelli documented - Smith appreciated as having a certain kind of edgey realness that was missing from other religious folk. In Crowley, Piovanelli argued, Smith found an archetype of the kind of Jesus he would really like to see, and so Smith invented the sm excerpts - with their edgey sexual elements - to create that Jesus. At least I think that's what Piovanelli was arguing, he went well past his allotted time and Phil Harland, who was chairing at this point, eventually cut him off.

Next came Allan Pantuck, who, surprisingly, is actually credentialed
as a medical doctor and a urologist. I wondered then what kind of
biblical studies chops he might have, and the answer was pretty
impressive ones. His work was well disciplined, well researched, and
very well ordered. If anyone could convince me of the authenticity of
sm, I think it would be this guy. He presented - with very nice
images of photos and scans - a survey of Morton Smith's own personal
writings. The point of this survey was essentially the opposite of
Piovanelli's: he wanted to show how Smith's life would have left him
ill-equipped to create a forgery like sm. For example, Pantuck showed
several personal letters wherein Smith lamented his poor Greek skills.
He confirmed this with personal writings of other scholars who
commented on Smith's poor Greek skills. These poor skills, Pantuck
argued, mean that Smith could not have had the ability to compose a
fake letter of Clement. Over all it was a strong presentation, though
I wonder what Smith would have thought about his integrity resting on
his incompetence!

Next came Peter Jeffery from Notre Dame. He was supposed to present
on Clement, and he may have been doing that in the first half of his
paper. It was rather quiet, and so I went to look in the back in the
vain and unfulfilled hope of replenished coffee. Suddenly, though,
Jeffrey came quite alive, and the second half of his presentation was
spirited to say the least. He exclaimed with more than a little
excitement that Smith's writings were full of "bullshit! just
bullshit!" and challenged anyone in the room to take "the Jeffrey
Challenge" wherein if you could take a copy of Smith's work, spend an hour in the library checking each one of his ancient source references, and not come to the conclusion that he was a crazy charlatan, then Jeffrey would write you a glowing recommendation on official Princeton letterhead to the business school of your choice! Jeffrey repeated this challenge several times, noted that he could use Princeton letterhead because he was emeritus there, and was, well, full of twitchy glee. Honestly, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all,
except that I might have figured out where all the coffee went.

Finally Scott Brown gave a very quiet and studious paper on the seven
veil motif in sm and how it compared to Clement. It seemed like a
fine study, though at the end Brown admitted that, as there were no
Clement scholars there, no one was really qualified to evaluate his
thesis.

That was it for the main conference. There was a public debate later
that night, but I did not attend that. What was my reaction? I
suppose I now lean towards some kind of inauthenticity. What I really
came away with, however, was a better realisation of the variety of
options outside of the "hoax or real?" binary offered by the
conference's title. It could, at one end, be a real letter of Clement
with real, secret excerpts of Mark. Or, it could be a real letter of
Clement with nevertheless fake excerpts from Mark. Or, it could be a
fake letter of Clement with fake excerpts from Mark. If the latter,
however, the forgery could have been carried out by Smith, or it could
have been carried out by someone prior to Smith - even long prior - so
that Smith's discovery was, for his part, quite sincere. Finally, all
of those options could be further mirrored into two versions: the one
that sees the sm excerpts as describing a homosexual encounter, and
one that sees it as an innocent reference to teaching at night. In
other words, the sm subject is more complicated than I'd realised.

As for the conference, I thought it was well organized, but overall I
wasn't impressed by the level of debate. There seemed to be a lot of arbitrary back-and-forthing. One person argued that the style of sm proved authenticity because it matched the style of Mark. Another argued that the style disproved authenticity exactly because it matched the style of Mark - that's exactly what a forger would do! One argued that handwriting analysis proved that it was a forgery. Another
argued that different handwriting experts could show that it was not a
forgery. One argued that Smith studied Clement and was skilled at
Greek. Another argued that Smith did not study Clement enough and was unskilled at Greek. All told, it reminded me of a rather frank admission by the Lawyer Allan Dershowtiz that I read the other day (just don't ask why I was reading Dershowtiz!), who said "when you read opinions like this, you get the sense of philosopher-kings sitting around deciding how to arrive at the right result by a series
of inductive and deductive reasonings and analogies. In fact, that is
not how legal thinking generally occurs. People start with a
preference for having the case decided in a certain way... We start out
with points of view and then we search the literature. We search
philosophy, we search science for ways of rationalizing our
conclusion" (Thinking About Thinking, p. 15).


Other reports from the symposium:

Sarah Veale

Guestpost at Apocryphicity by Calogero A. Miceli

Tony Burke (Apocryphicity)

Idem, pt 2