The program for this year’s réunion annuelle de l’AELAC (Association pour l’étude de la littérature apocryphe chrétienne) taking place June 26-28 has been posted on the association’s web site. You can access it HERE.

Ahh…more scholarly thrust and parry over Secret Mark. This week, Peter Jeffery (author of The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled) responds to the lengthy review of his book by Scott Brown (available HERE). You can access Jeffery's response HERE and for Jeffery's own running compilation of discussions of Secret Mark, go HERE.

Allan Pantuck passed along to me an article he wrote with Scott Brown challenging one of the claims made by Stephen Carlson in support of his position that Secret Mark is a hoax perpetrated by Morton Smith. Brown, long a supporter of the authenticity of the text, has chipped away at several of Carlson’s claims now, and this one is quite devestating to Carlson’s argument. Here is the abstract for the article: 

Allan J. Pantuck and Scott G. Brown, “Morton Smith as M. Madiotes: Stephen Carlson’s Attribution of Secret Mark to a Bald Swindler,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 6 (2008): 106-125.

In 1960, Morton Smith announced that he had discovered in the Mar Saba monastery tower library a fragment of a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria containing excerpts from a longer version of the Gospel of Mark that Smith called the ‘Secret Gospel of Mark’. Controversial since its publication in 1973, this discovery has recently been criticized in print as both an academic hoax and a malicious forgery. This paper uses newly discovered manuscript photographs and archived documents to refute a claim found in Stephen C. Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax, namely that Smith invented a pseudomymous twentieth-centuty individual named ‘M. Madiotes’ as an elaborate and deliberate clue that he himself had forged the letter of Clement.

While researching Syriac manuscripts for the Infancy Gospel of Thomas I came across a reference in a manuscript catalogue (W. Wright and S. A. Cook, A Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, 2 vol. Cambridge: University Press, 1901) to a text called “History of the silver which Judas received from the Jews as the price of our Lord Jesus Christ.” I have never heard of this text before and thought I’d ask here if anyone knows anything about it.

The manuscript is Cambridge Add. 2881. It is dated 1484 and comes from Damascus. It is written in Garshuni (i.e., Arabic in Syriac letters) with some portions in Arabic, but not the Judas text. The Judas text runs from f. 136b-138b. Also included here are several other apocryphal texts: Acts of Thomas (f. 53b), The Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ to his Disciples on the Mount of Olives (f. 103b), the Abgar Correspondence (f. 158b), The Relation of Pontius Pilate regarding the dealings of the Jews with our Lord, written in the year 18 of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius (f. 160a), and History of the Decease of the Virgin Mary (f. 223a).

Bruce Chilton, a prominent Historical Jesus scholar, has contributed a piece on Elaine Pagels' groundbreaking book The Gnostic Gospels for the New York Sun (HERE). Thanks to Jim Davila at Paleojudaica for pointing this out.