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.

Chris Zeichmann over at Thoughts on Antiquity (HERE) has posted a summary of a panel discussion of Secret Mark that took place at Claremont Graduate School last week (February 28). Among the panelists were Marvin Meyer, John Dart, Birger Pearson, and Dennis MacDonald.

(I recently moved into a new house and have been without an internet connection at home for two weeks. So, I am a little behind on posting my usual post mortem of my New Testament Apocrypha class. Here is last week’s post; this week’s will follow shortly).

This week’s New Testament Apocrypha class covered the agrapha and fragmentary gospels. The course is structured so that we review an orthodox/canonical text and then discuss related heretical/non-canonical texts. This week the orthodox text was Mark. The point of the structure is to have the students see how the apocrypha expand upon or react to other texts (the assumption is that the apocrypha are later than the canonical material, though my lectures note the theories of Koester, Crossan, et al who claim otherwise). This structure also allows us to look at the orthodox material for heretical ideas, or ideas that heretics will read into them, such as Mark’s adoptionist Christology.

In our discussion of agrapha I was struck by the methodology employed to delimit the 270-or-so known agrapha. It makes sense to eliminate some material from the corpus, such as material now identified as apocryphal texts (Gospel of Thomas) or fragmentary texts typically featured separately in editions (Papyrus Egerton). But otherwise the goal  appears to be to find which agrapha could go back to the historical Jesus. Therefore, anti-Christian polemical sayings are eliminated, as are agrapha from Muslim sources (indeed many of these are transformations of narratives from apocryphal gospels), and sayings with parallels in pagan literature. The elimination of this material is unfortunate. All of these are useful for seeing developments in Christian traditions and would be worth giving wider visibility. I tend to object to the idea that we should be focusing solely on “early” material. But most objectionable about this methodology is the elimination of “heretical” sayings—i.e., sayings that do not agree in form or content with the canonical gospels. The assumption is that the historical Jesus would not say anything that is distinctly different from what we find in the canon. No wonder then that many scholars see little in the agrapha to change our knowledge of the historical Jesus.

Much of our discussion of fragmentary gospels focused on Secret Mark. Not a scholar of Secret Mark, I am happy to remain agnostic about the issue of the text’s authenticity. So, my lecture provided the students with an overview of Stephen Carlson’s position that the text is a forgery. Each point of his argument was countered with objections brought forward by Scott Brown and some objections of my own. Scott has become the go-to-guy for rebuttals of the forgery hypothesis advanced by Carlson and, more recently, by Peter Jeffrey. For Scott’s reply to Jeffery, see his lengthy review of Jeffery’s book, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery at the RBL site and then see Carlson’s response to Brown on Hypotyposeis (and be sure to read the comments from other readers). For another recent post on Secret Mark see Roger Pearse’s comment on Thoughts on Antiquity.

Carlson seems genuinely surprised that Scott “is not budging” on his belief that Secret Mark is genuine and critiques Scott for “overstatements” that Jeffery’s arguments are unsubstantiated (alas, Carlson does not confront Scott’s arguments against Jeffrey’s case for forgery). I have not read Jeffery’s book but I was surprised at some of what Scott says about the author’s position on the text—particularly on his reading of it as “obscene” (p. 250), misogynistic, and supportive of pederasty. Jeffrey apparently shows great disrespect to Smith, almost to the point of demonization (he states: “And I pray for the late Morton Smith—may God rest his anguished soul,” p. ix). Jeffery’s agenda seems more to discredit Secret Mark for its homosexual content (a forced identification—e.g., Jesus’ “seizing of the boy’s hand” is meant to be a euphemism for genitals? the cave tomb represents a closet?) and it’s “forger” for his homosexual lifestyle than to present a solid, carefully-researched case for its inauthenticity. Again, I don’t necessarily support Scott’s position that Secret Mark truly is an ancient gospel, but I am impressed at the rigour of his research (this 47-page review includes references to the archive of Smith’s correspondence, which assists in dispensing of some elements of the forgery hypothesis, particularly those elements that bear on Smith’s motives). Those, like Jeffrey, who wish to argue for forgery need to read Scott’s book (Mark’s Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith’s Controversial Discovery) and follow his example.

Addendum: Stephen Carlson clarified his position on Secret Mark in a post on his blog Hypotyposeis. Carlson believes the text is a hoax, not a forgery–that is, Morton Smith invented the text as an elaborate joke on the academy. My apologies, Stephen, for being imprecise.

John Dart, a writer for the Christian Century and author of several CA-related books (Decoding Mark, Unearthing the Lost Words of Jesus, and The Jesus of Heresy and History), posted on the publication’s “Theolog” a response to the recent NY Times article on Secret Mark (mentioned previously HERE). You can read it HERE. Thanks to Scott Brown for passing this along.

Jim Davila at Palaeojudaica has a few posts (HERE and HERE) on the new thriller The Book of Names by Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori (read a review HERE). The book features a battle between a group of chosen ones, the lamed vovniks, mentioned in the Talmud and a rival group called the Gnoseos. Comparisons to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code are inevitable but there have been plenty of decent biblical or medieval thrillers that are worthy of mention. Ian Caldwell and Diustin Thomason’s The Rule of Four and Lev Grossman’s Codex are both highly readable literary thrillers dealing with efforts to thwart evil efforts to hide important medieval manuscripts. There are numerous Jesus novels that feature apocryphal traditions—far too many to mention.

Another early biblical thriller is the now-infamous The Mystery of Mar Saba written by in James H. Hunter 1940 which some claim inspired Morton Smith to “forge” Secret Mark. For a discussion of the book in connection with the gospel see HERE. Novelist Jeffrey Archer will add to the CA-related fiction next month with his The Gospel According to Judas by Benjamin Iscariot. You can read about it HERE, but here’s a quick publisher’s summary:

The Gospel According to Judas, by Benjamin Iscariot sheds new light on the the mystery of Judas—including his motives for the betrayal and what happened to him after the crucifixion—by retelling the story of Jesus through the eyes of Judas, using the canonical texts as its basic point of reference. Ostensibly written by Judas’s son, Benjamin, and following the narrative style of the Gospels, this re-creation is provocative, compelling, and controversial.

The Gospel According to Judas, by Benjamin Iscariot is the result of an intense collaboration between a storyteller and a scholar: Jeffrey Archer and Francis J. Moloney. Their brilliant work—bold and simple—is a compelling story for twenty-first-century readers, while maintaining an authenticity that would be credible to a first-century Christian or Jew.

Another thriller named The Gospel of Judas by Simon Mawer appeared in 2002, before the rediscovery of the ancient text.

Stephen Carlson, author of the The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark, has posted a review of Peter Jeffery’s The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery.

Bruce Chilton contributed a length article to The New York Sun back in October focusing on the controversy over Secret Mark. The title is “Unmasking a False Gospel.” Here is an excerpt from the conclusion to the article: 

No literature has suffered more from this problem than that of the second century of Christianity. In the case of "the Secret Gospel," a modern researcher ( Morton Smith himself, or someone whose forgery duped Smith) has made up a Gnostic document up in the attempt to manipulate scholarly discussion and public perception. The fact that this attempt succeeded for so long stands as an indictment of American scholarship, which prides itself on skepticism in regard to the canonical Gospels, but then turns credulous, and even neo-Gnostic, when non-canonical texts are concerned.

Stephen Carlson on his blog Hypotyposeis has noted two recent printed works on the Secret Gospel of Mark. The first is a review of Carlson’s book by Bruce Chilton for the New York Sun. The second is an article from the Daily Princetonian about another book The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery, this one by Princeton music professor Peter Jeffery, supporting Carlson’s position on the text.