ECM of Mark Cites the Letter to Theodore (Secret Mark Stuff)

Yesterday, as I was consulting the recently published ECM of Mark, I came across some patristic citations by Clem (= Clemens of Alexandria) in several variation-units in the critical apparatus: Mark 10:32/2–40 (and related in /2–4, /6–10, /15); 10:34/26–30, 32; and 10:35/4, and 6. As I turned to part 2 Supplementary Material to find the particular references, it turned out that they were to EpTheod, (Morton) Smith 61,1; 61,2 and 63,2 (see image below from the Patristic Citations database online).

 

So, basically, these citations are from the controversial Letter to Theodore, which was discovered by Morton Smith in the Mar Saba monastery in the Judean Desert in 1958 in the back of a 1646–edition of Ignatius' Letters, copied by hand on the endpages. Smith took photographs of the pages and published his edition of the letter in 1973 (Greek text and Smith's photos here; English translation here). The implied author, Clemens of Alexandria, makes several references to both the (canonical) Mark and the infamous Secret Gospel of Mark (Theodore had posed questions about the latter; he apparently did not have a copy).  

There is an ongoing debate (though it has been a bit quiet lately) about whether this letter is genuine or a forgery (by Smith). For an introduction and negative assessment, see Stephen C. Carlson, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark (Waco, TX: Baylor, 2005). For debate, see Tony Burke, ed., Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2013).

I have heard that Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau are currently working on a new book, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Rogue Scholar, A Controversial Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity (Yale University Press, 2022?). Does someone know what they will argue? We will see whether they will put an end to the debate.

In any case, these patristic citations are not included in Nestle-Aland 28, but will they be included in Nestle-Aland 29? I hope not, perhaps it was just a mistake. In my opinion, these citations should be treated with great caution and not on a par with Clement's other writings. What is your opinion?

If you are all fed up with this topic, you can always listen to and sing along with us at the ETC blogdinner in San Diego here.

Update: Greg Paulson of the INTF informs us in a comment to the original post that, in light of this information, the editors have decided to add question marks to the references to EpTheod in the database (see image below), and "until a better scholarly consensus is reached" (of its genuineness), it will not be included in future Nestle-Aland editions. I am glad we caught this one.

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

Report on Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium Pt 2

Report on Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium part 2 by Ryan Wettlaufer (part 1 here)

Craig Evans went after break. His argument was that there were just too many co-incidences between ideas and comments that Morton Smith made before the supposed discovery of sm, and what he discovered in sm. Evans handed out a neat, 2 page chart of these co-incidences. For example, in his 1951 Tannaitic Parallels, Evans argues that Smith interprets the phrase "mystery of the kingdom of God" in Mark 4:11 as a reference to secret sexual activities. This, Evans argues, is a thoroughly unique interpretation held by no one else but Smith. It is remarkable, then, that in 1958 Smith would find the same phrase with the same unique interpretation in sm. Two pages of such co-incidences make, for Evans, "a case of too many coincidences and too many confirmations" for the discovery of sm to be genuine.

The response came from Allan Pantuck from University of California, who said that Evans had given a very fine paper, with the exception that he disagreed with every single point! He focused on refuting only a couple, however, arguing that they are either not really parallels, or not really co-incidences. For example, Evans had drawn a parallel between Smith and a fiction novel "The Mystery of Mar Saba" published in 1940, wherein the main character visits Mar Saba acknowledging that all the important mss were either burned, lost or removed, but hoping that something important might remain. Smith, Evans points out, also describes how he went to Mar Saba knowing that all the important mss were gone, but hoping something important might remain. Pantuck, however, countered that the fiction novel was based on the life of the author, who actually did consider himself a mss hunter and actually did visit Mar Saba with a faint hope of finding a valuable remnant. Since the author and Smith were both ms hunters who both visited Mar Saba, it's not really an incredible co-incidence, Pantuck argued, that they both had similar hopes and ideas.

After mid morning break came a presentation by Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review. He was supposed to present on the handwriting analysis of Agamemnon Tselikas, and he did distribute a hand-out to that end. He spent most of his time, however, making a very impassioned defence of Morton Smith's character, arguing that the only people accusing him of fraud are people who never knew him. Shanks emphasized that when we talk of fraud or forgery, we are accusing a "distinguished, tenured professor" of rank deception, and not only was this barbaric, but it was illogical to think that Smith would have engaged in such self-destructive behaviour, since his whole career would have been on the line had he been caught. In the ensuing discussion, several people pointed out that professors - even distinguished, tenured ones - commit all kinds of wrong-doing, and that humans in general have a bad habit of engaging in illogical, destructive behaviour. Shanks presented his case with great emotion, but I tend to agree with the crowd that an ad hominem argument really isn't valid, even if it's a pro hominem!

After this was lunch, followed by a paper by Marvin Meyer of Chapman University. Unfortunately I missed this one, as I was still wandering aimlessly around the campus of York University, desperately lost. The campus trails, you see, run in a random, goat-trail manner, and though there are stacks of arrow-signs at every intersection, they identify only the name of the nearest building in that direction, which means that while they may be helpful for finding out what building you are standing right in front of, they are pretty useless when the building you are looking for is far away from you, as it is for me most of the times when I am lost. There were a number of "you are here" maps, but, sadly, they were all either faded beyond recognition, or missing the all important "you are here" arrow.

To be continued...

Report on Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium Pt 1

This is a guestpost by Ryan D. Wettlaufer (check out his previous one here), who reports from the recent Secret Mark Symposium at York University on April 29.


On Friday April 29th I attended the Secret Mark conference at York University. I'm not a student of Secret Mark. Prior to this, my only two real experiences with it were reading Jacob Neusner's provocative summary in what was supposed to be a preface to an edition of Memory and Manuscript by Gerhardsson, and sharing a supervisor with Scott Brown. The former, I suppose, presupposed me against the authenticity of secret mark, the latter in favour, so in the end I guess you could say I was both uninformed and neutral. The perfect target audience in other words!

Tony Burke opened the conference by welcoming everyone and voicing his hope that this would allow for real discussion that would transcend that possible at the last SBL meeting. To that end, most of the papers had been emailed or posted in advance with time allotted at the conference for 15 minute summaries only, followed by generous discussion periods. I think this was a great way to do it. Confining the presentation to a 15 minute summary meant that most of the more tedious, technical data was kept in the full paper, while the presentation gave a concise version of the real meat of the argument.

Now for the papers. Note, I didn't know I'd be guest blogging this when I went to the conference, so I did not take notes, which means this is all offered as the best that I can remember it.

The first paper was by Charles Hendrick from Missouri State University. He argued in favour of the authenticity of both the Clement letter and the secret mark (herein sm) excerpts contained therein. The one point I remember, however, is that he argued strongly that despite popular portrayals, the sm excerpts did not describe Jesus having a homosexual encounter. Rather, the phrases "spend the night with" and "explain the mystery of the kingdom to" meant just that, and any sexual connotations we might read into them are purely the product of modern euphemism.

The response was from Bruce Chilton of Bard College. This was my first time hearing Chilton, and let me say, he is a phenomenal public speaker. If his topic was "the sleeping patterns of slugs" I think I would still find the lecture captivating. He was very good. In substance, he seemed to be offering his own paper more than responding to Hendrick. He spent most of this time (and a great deal of extra time) discussing the issue of provenance. He gave numerous examples of other documents, both ancient and early modern, that he has had a hand in authenticating and focused on the important role that provenance played in that authentication. The implication being, of course, that since we cannot verify the provenance of the sm material, we cannot authenticate it.

Then came morning break. I had woken up at 5AM in order to drive to the conference, and so I was happy when I saw a large urn of coffee at the back of the room. I remarked to a friend that "they better keep that coming all day!" Alas, before I could get any at first break, it was empty, never to be refilled all day long. I can't offer any compliments then to whoever is in charge of hospitality services at York.

To be continued...

Secret Gospel of Mark: Recent news

The Secret Gospel of Mark is attracting more attention, from rather different perspectives (cf. previously here and here).

Francis Watson has attempted to move from 'suspicion of forgery' to 'beyond reasonable doubt' in a paper published recently in JTS. This is an interesting read, and raises some questions, although occasionally it gets a bit ridiculous. To my mind it doesn't close the discussion.

Francis Watson, 'Beyond Suspicion: on the Authorship of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark' JTS 61 (2010), 128-170.

Roger Viklund has posed some questions about Stephen Carlson's use of relatively poor photographs in his hand-writing analysis: Tremors, or Just an Optical Illusion? A Further Evaluation of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis.

Scott G. Brown and Allan J. Pantuck have posed some questions about Stephen Carlson's use of an external hand-writing expert in 'Stephen Carlson’s Questionable Questioned Document Examination' here at Timo S. Paananen's web-site which is a good resource on SGM matters).

Up-date: The BAR have recently published an opinion on the Letter to Theodore by a "qualified" document expert (I use the quotation marks deliberately - check out the qualifications!) which opines that Smith probably did not write the 18th Cent. Greek text. Here. (It is not dated; hopefully it was not the first of April.)
Up-date 1a: Peter Jeffery comments on the hand-writing analyses here with discussion here.
Up-date 1b: Some questions are raised about the qualifications of the "expert" in the comments here.
Up-date 2: Surprise, surprise ... the other BAR expert (who seems actually to be an expert), apparently disagrees, but his report is not finished so you'll have to buy the next issue. See here.



What do I think? I wish I knew. Here is something I wrote recently:
M. Smith discovered a letter from Clement of Alexandria to (an otherwise unknown) Theodore written in an eighteenth-century hand in the back of a published book (see M. Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973) also ‘Clement of Alexandria and Secret Mark: The Score at the End of the First Decade’, HTR 75 (1982), 449-461). Among other things this letter mentions three expanded forms of Mark’s Gospel: the original Gospel, a secret gospel also written by Mark (on the basis of notes), and a further expansion used by Carpocratians (on whom cf. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. I.25). If this was an authentic letter of Clement it would provide evidence for expanded versions of Mark known in Alexandria, and in the third case at least, the expansions would reflect the views of a libertarian sect. However, I consider this letter to be of doubtful authenticity – specifically on the grounds of its extremely late attestation, the uncertain provenance of the manuscript, certain stylistic questions about the relationship of the letter to Clement’s normal style (A. H. Criddle, ‘On the Mar Saba Letter Attributed to Clement of Alexandria’ JECS 3.2 (1995), 215-220), and the impression that the letter seeks to disclose the contents of the secret gospel (F. Watson), and the air of mystery which the original editor encouraged by his dedication of his book ‘to the one who knows’. I have not, however, found recent attempts to prove that M. Smith was himself the author of the Clementine letter (S. Carlson, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark (Texas: Baylor University Press, 2005); P. Jeffrey, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (Yale: Yale University Press, 2007); F. Watson, ‘Beyond Suspicion: On the Authorship of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark’ JTS (forthcoming)) completely persuasive (cf. esp. S.G. Brown, Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery (ESCJ 15; Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005); ‘Factualizing the Folklore: Stephen Carlson's Case Against Morton Smith’ HTR 99 (2006), 291-327; ‘The Question of Motive in the Case Against Morton Smith’ JBL 125 (2006), 351-383; ‘Reply to Stephen Carlson’ ExpT 117:4 (2006), 144-149; ‘The Letter to Theodore: Stephen Carlson’s Case against Clement’s Authorship’ JECS 16 (2008), 535-572 and recently R. Viklund, ‘Tremors, or Just an Optical Illusion? A Further Evaluation of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis’ http://www.jesusgranskad.se/theodore2.htm (accessed March 2010)).

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Secret Gospel of Mark and Codex Bezae

Josep Rius-Camps (JRC) presented a paper in the Synoptic section entitled, "The Secret Gospel of Mark Authenticated by Codex Bezae." In a paper purporting to authenticate the notion of a Secret Gospel of Mark (SGM), I was struck by JRC's assumption of his thesis.

JRC begins his paper by noting that the majority of scholars regard the SGM as Morton Smith's "sophisticated hoax" in which he claimed to discover it. He then accentuates this fact with appropriate subjunctive terminology in the third paragraph: "According to Smith's manuscript...." But within the same paragraph, he moves away from the subjunctive to the indicative inferences: "Thus, Clement does not question its [i.e., SGM] existence." JRC should have written instead, "Thus, according to Smith's letter, Clement does not question SGM's existence."

From this point forward, JRC looses track of the fact that "the majority of scholars" view the letter as written by Smith. The rest of the paper is concerned to demonstrate that the SGM text, as found in Smith's letter, corresponds closely with Codex Bezae.

I don't understand how this authenticates SGM. After all, Morton Smith, if he composed the letter as an elaborate hoax, could just as easily have written the letter with D-text readings as he could have with NA25, etc. Nevertheless, JRC argues, "A forger would not have had recourse to a variant reading witnessed only by the Codex Bezae to give credibility to his alleged Secret Gospel." Well, Morton Smith, if he were the forger, would have had access to Codex Bezae! There seems to be a major disconnect here.

JRC ends his paper with five conclusions: 1)Canonical Mark is incomplete, suffering from the excision of passages which might invite moral laxity (he cites the Pericope Adulterae as a comparable example); 2) the gospel author himself produced two or more redactions; 3) historically, Jesus' journey to confront Temple authorities in Jerusalem can be accurately reconstructed, untangling the confusing data preserved in canonical Mark; 4) The text of Codex Bezae for Mark is better than other New Testament (Alexandrian and Byzantine) texts; 5) Mark himself was aware of a "mystical dimension" of the historical Jesus.