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Old 02-01-2009, 08:18 AM   #61
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[page 1, line 24] ...Then, he
[25] added certain sayings, the interpretation of which he knew would initiate the hearers
[26] into the innermost sanctuary of the truth which has been hidden seven times.
As cave has duly noted, there's no 'veil' in this passage at all. Therefore, nothing to do with Oscar Wilde.

The most literal translation will probably be "sevenfold hidden truth".

Best,

Yuri.
Yuri, if there is no connection in the Clement's phrase to "veils" , and if the Salome in the Secret Mark text is transparently not the Herod's dancer, why was Morton Smith invoking Oscar Wilde in the footnotes ?

Any ideas ?

Jiri
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Old 02-01-2009, 08:45 AM   #62
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And now part 2--

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Reply to 1/
First of all we have little or no evidence for this sort of secrecy (the Disciplina Arcani) before the 3rd century CE. (See for example Justin Martyr's openness about Christian belief practice and ritual).
And yet Clement was also a 3rd c. author--the Stromata are possibly closer to Kata Kelsou (where Origin does speak of secret teachings) as they are to anything written by Justin. Furthermore, towards the end of his life, Clement's church had come under persectution, perhaps helping to initiate the tradition of the Disciplina Arcani.
Clement at least seems to be speaking of long established practice, Capocrates, before the middle of the 2nd century, allegedly had to play dirty to get hold of the Secret Gospel.
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If Theodore is to swear falsely on oath about the authorship of Secret Mark, (an odd procedure anyway, Theodore cannot possibly have firsthand information on the point)
But, he does--he not only has the Carpocratian gospel, he now has information about the accurate contents of Secret Mark.
Strictly he has hearsay information.
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the only plausible motive is to reassure ordinary Christian believers or catechumens. (It is unlikely that committed Carpocratians would believe him
Yes, but what proto-orthodox Christian would want to complicate matters by admitting that Mark wrote the secret gospel? The point is not to win over the Carpocratians; the point is to protect the reputation of the Alexandrian church, among all parties.
Why does admitting the Secret Gospel is by Mark compromise the reputation of the Alexandrian church ? (Given your view that there is no genuine homoeroticism therein and Clement's generally tolerant attitude to apocryphal gospels.)
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But, if the true state of affairs is known by all Alexandrian Christians then there is a major risk that Theodore's simple Christian hearers will be faced with an official denial on oath, by their church, of something they know or will learn to be true.
But the sense I get is that Clement is explaining the official position: it's ok to lie to the heretics. And that everyone knows this.
Clement may have believed that it was acceptable to lie to heretics but his actual statements on economy with the truth seem to be about avoiding upsetting ordinary simple Christians
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I even get the sense that it was literally the personal church of the metropolitan/patriarch of Alexandria that held Secret Mark--but not any other bishops or priests. It was just a special text that they happened to have.
I think this is probably anachronistic for the time of Clement and almost certainly anachronistic for the time of Carpocrates. Demetrius was probably the first Metropolitan/Patriarch of Alexandria in any meaningful sense.
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No no, I don't see the readings from Secret Mark as belonging to a post-baptismal initiation ceremony. Instead, I see it as just a part and parcel of the baptism/anointing rituals of the Alexandrian church (and again, perhaps only of the metropolitan's church).
I'll try and answer this in the other thread.

Andrew Criddle
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Old 02-01-2009, 01:07 PM   #63
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I don't quite understand this, Andrew. Are you trying to say that the Clementine scholars generally do not accept Mar Saba MS as genuine? But this would not be true.

As for NT scholars, very few of them accept the validity of Secret Mark. (But, then again, most of them probably never even heard of it.)

So could you clarify, please?

Yuri.
Hi Yuri

When I said historically I was referring to the situation before the books by Stephen Carlson and Peter Jeffery ie the situation before 2005.

The Great majority of the NT scholars of whom I have knowledge writing in that period accepted the Mar Saba letter as a genuine work of Clement of Alexandria whatever their precise views about "Secret Mark" itself.

However Clementine and Early Church scholars such as Eric Osborn and Annick Martin had expressed their strong doubts about authenticity. Other Clementine scholars entirely ignore the Mar Saba letter even when it seems relevant to their studies and arguments.

Andrew Criddle
Dear Andrew,

What you said originally was that "some Clementine scholars have had no problems with the letter". But the truth is that _most_ Clementine scholars have had no problems with the letter.

Best,

Yuri.
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Old 02-01-2009, 01:24 PM   #64
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Dear Andrew,

What you said originally was that "some Clementine scholars have had no problems with the letter". But the truth is that _most_ Clementine scholars have had no problems with the letter.

Best,

Yuri.
Hi Yuri

Could you give a few names of Clementine scholars who have happily used the letter in their work ?

Thanks

Andrew Criddle
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Old 02-01-2009, 01:30 PM   #65
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The biggest problem with Criddle’s conclusion, however, is that it is based on a statistical methodology that was tested on Shakespeare’s writings and shown to be unreliable in determining authorship when only these two categories of words are considered. In fact, this method correctly identified the writer of only three out of seven poems tested, a success rate of 43 percent, which is about as reliable as a coin toss.

[note 72 = Ronald Thisted and Bradley Efron, “Did Shakespeare Write a Newly-Discovered Poem?” Biometrika 74 (1987): 445–55. Allan Pantuck informed me of this study and observed that if Criddle’s method had been applied to their data, it would have excluded at least two of the four undisputed poems of Shakespeare that Thisted and Efron used as controls. These statisticians concluded that tests based on words not previously used and words previously used once were unreliable and that “there is no consistent trend toward an excess or deficiency of new words” (451). For additional problems with Criddle’s methodology, see Brown, Mark’s Other Gospel, 54–57.]
The Article can be downloaded from http://biomet.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/74/3/445

The problem is that the claim that my method would have excluded at least two of the four undisputed poems of Shakespeare that Thisted and Efron used as controls seems simply wrong.

The four poems are
Cymbeline with 7 otherwise unused words and 4 used once only
Puck with 1 otherwise unused word and 4 used once only
Phoenix with 14 otherwise unused words and 5 used once only
Sonnets with 7 otherwise unused words and 8 used once only

Cymbeline Phoenix and Sonnets cause no problem at all for my analysis Puck is borderline as a deliberate imitation of Shakespeare. Although the numbers for Puck are very small.

(The Puck detailed statistics in the paper look odd I will try later to find out what is going on.)

Andrew Criddle

FWIW If you repeat my exact analysis on the Puck poem then you get a chisquare value of 3.65 which is probably not significant.
Hi, Andrew,

What you addressed above was whether or not the method you used in your statistical analysis was valid. But even supposing that your method was valid, there still seem to be some other problems, as Brown is pointing out.

For example, there's also the question of how the hypothesis you've stated, namely,

“the author of the letter, in imitating the style of Clement, sought to use words found in Clement but not in other Patristic writers and to avoid words not found in Clement but present in other Patristic writers. In doing so the writer brought together more rare words and phrases scattered throughout the authentic works of Clement than are compatible with genuine Clementine authorship.”

relates to the actual statistical analysis that you've performed.

This is what Brown says,

"This is a hypothesis, not a fact, and as a hypothesis it has a very tenuous relationship to the actual statistical analysis, which did not examine the relationship between the letter’s vocabulary and the vocabularies of other patristic writers. And notice the reference to “phrases” in his explanation. Criddle studied individual words, so this conjecture about phrases has no basis in the data produced by his statistical analysis. He simply imagined what a forger might have done."

So is it really true that your hypothesis has "a very tenuous relationship to the actual statistical analysis"?

Best,

Yuri.
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Old 02-01-2009, 01:45 PM   #66
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As cave has duly noted, there's no 'veil' in this passage at all. Therefore, nothing to do with Oscar Wilde.

The most literal translation will probably be "sevenfold hidden truth".

Best,

Yuri.
Yuri, if there is no connection in the Clement's phrase to "veils",
That's right, Jiri.

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and if the Salome in the Secret Mark text is transparently not the Herod's dancer,
I don't see how these two Salomes can be related.

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why was Morton Smith invoking Oscar Wilde in the footnotes ?

Any ideas ?

Jiri
I wish I knew... I don't have the book with me right now, unfortunately, but I'll try to look it up in the future.

All the best,

Yuri.
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Old 02-01-2009, 02:54 PM   #67
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Hi, Andrew,

What you addressed above was whether or not the method you used in your statistical analysis was valid. But even supposing that your method was valid, there still seem to be some other problems, as Brown is pointing out.

For example, there's also the question of how the hypothesis you've stated, namely,

“the author of the letter, in imitating the style of Clement, sought to use words found in Clement but not in other Patristic writers and to avoid words not found in Clement but present in other Patristic writers. In doing so the writer brought together more rare words and phrases scattered throughout the authentic works of Clement than are compatible with genuine Clementine authorship.”

relates to the actual statistical analysis that you've performed.

This is what Brown says,

"This is a hypothesis, not a fact, and as a hypothesis it has a very tenuous relationship to the actual statistical analysis, which did not examine the relationship between the letter’s vocabulary and the vocabularies of other patristic writers. And notice the reference to “phrases” in his explanation. Criddle studied individual words, so this conjecture about phrases has no basis in the data produced by his statistical analysis. He simply imagined what a forger might have done."

So is it really true that your hypothesis has "a very tenuous relationship to the actual statistical analysis"?

Best,

Yuri.
Hi Yuri

I'll get one point out of the way. It's many years since I did the detailed analysis but IMS the letter does show distinctive Clementine like phrases as well as words. However Scott Brown is quite right that my analysis was based on words not phrases and hence in discussing my results I should have limited myself to the words I had attempted to statistically analyze rather than the phrases which I had not analyzed in that way. (I do mention on page 218 the distinctive phrase sarkikwn kai enswmatwn but this sort of anecdotal evidence falls short of statistical analysis.)

On the point of distinctively Clementine vocabulary: Of the 9 words I listed as occurring once and once only in Clement andrapodwdhs exantlew hierophantikos and prosepagw are distinctive in the sense that (according to Morton Smith) they are found in Clement but not in either Athanasius or Philo. Hence the presence of these words in the Mar Saba letter makes the text substantially more Clementine. In order to make a work appear, in its vocabulary, distinctively by an author one needs to add rare words used by that author. Such words will frequently be used only once or twice by the author. (Of the words in the letter found in Clement's acknowledged works more than once but not in either Philo or Athanasius Morton Smith lists only anamignumi Carpocratians planhths and proparaskeuazw) So the words I listed play an important role in making the Mar Saba letter appear distinctively Clementine in vocabulary. I briefly discuss these issues on page 218 of my paper although Scott Brown does not appear to mention this.

Scott Brown comments quite properly that my results could have more than one explanation. I did consider and rule out one obvious explanation, that Clement is largely repeating a passage in his acknowledged works. (He isn't). I could have added that, if genuine, the letter represents Clement writing in a new genre, the letter, which makes the strong linguistic resemblances with his other works in other genres even more surprising.

Andrew Criddle
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Old 02-01-2009, 06:42 PM   #68
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(Of the words in the letter found in Clement's acknowledged works more than once but not in either Philo or Athanasius
If I may ask, why are these authors relevant? Philo wrote in the (early) first century, whereas Athanasius wrote in the fourth.

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I could have added that, if genuine, the letter represents Clement writing in a new genre, the letter, which makes the strong linguistic resemblances with his other works in other genres even more surprising.
Is it really so surprising that Clement wrote letters?
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Old 02-02-2009, 04:31 AM   #69
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(Of the words in the letter found in Clement's acknowledged works more than once but not in either Philo or Athanasius
If I may ask, why are these authors relevant? Philo wrote in the (early) first century, whereas Athanasius wrote in the fourth.
They are the authors Morton Smith used as controls. Whether they were good choices I'm not sure. (They are both Alexandrian writers).
FWIW so far as I checked, Not present in either Philo or Athanasius tended to mostly mean rare in Patristic writers in general but my checks were only cursory.
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I could have added that, if genuine, the letter represents Clement writing in a new genre, the letter, which makes the strong linguistic resemblances with his other works in other genres even more surprising.
Is it really so surprising that Clement wrote letters?
2 points

1/ We have only late unreliable evidence for surviving letters by Clement. See Letters of Clement

2/ My point was not about the unlikelihood of Clement writing letters. It was about the improbability of such letters resembling so cllosely in style and vocabulary, his work in other genres.

Andrew Criddle
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Old 02-02-2009, 09:56 AM   #70
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If I may ask, why are these authors relevant? Philo wrote in the (early) first century, whereas Athanasius wrote in the fourth.
They are the authors Morton Smith used as controls. Whether they were good choices I'm not sure. (They are both Alexandrian writers).
FWIW so far as I checked, Not present in either Philo or Athanasius tended to mostly mean rare in Patristic writers in general but my checks were only cursory.
1/ Thinking about it further: Philo is an obvious choice for a control, there are important similarities between him and Clement, partly because Clement is often paraphrasing Philo. However I'm less sure about Athanasius. I think Morton Smith used Athanasius because features shared by Athanasius and the Mar Saba letter might be evidence of post-Clementine linguistic features in the letter. However if there are such features in the letter they are probably post-Athanasius as well as post-Clement.

2/ The argument that Athanasius and Philo are not suitable controls for testing Clementine authorship undermines Morton Smith's arguments for Clementine authorship at least as much as it does my critique thereof.

Andrew Criddle
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