Toto

It was widely know among his colleagues that Smith was gay, but it would never in those days have been mentioned. Such things were just not talked about. And in fact, for some, it was just too obvious. But they couldn't talk about it. Maybe you had to have been there. It was before the metaphor about the elephant in the middle of the room was on everyone's lips.

And Smith played the game well. He had the manuscript, which appeared reasonable, he asked others to examine it, wrote papers, etc.

For Carlson not to mention Smith's sexual orientation would be like not mentioning the elephant in the middle of the dining room while trying to explain the large footprints leading to the front door.

S.C.Carlson

Actually, I didn't mention Smith's sexual orientation in the book, which one openly gay blogger faulted me for. I did talk about how the text's treatment of homoeroticism was anachronistic, indeed unrecognizable, for its purported origin yet nicely fitting the mid-20th century period of its disclosure.

Stephen

Solo

Whatever are you talking about ? Kinsey's reports were out in 1948 (male)and 1953 (female). Havelock Ellis and Freud were ancient history. Intellectuals, especially intellectuals at universities, talked sex once they built informal collegial ties. The US campuses were not Victorian salons.

Homosexual professors practiced, discretely, in the prescribed closet. But there was no self-evident connection between them and the fringe that did parks then. It is by no means impossible. Oscar Wilde's sense of esthetics did not prevent him from frequenting particularly seedy places in search for casual sex. But without concrete evidence it's like saying that if Smith was a heterosexual in 1950's, then his Jesus would have had to be into Broadway peepshows.

Here is a whiff of how the "Gay Liberation Movement", really looked like from the inside. See if it matches the silly stereotypes. Gore Vidal was the first sexually unleashed US writer and an icon for the New Left. Here he is interviewed with GAY SUNSHINE mag in 1974 and talks about promiscuous gay and bi- sex in the quarter century that preceeded:

From "Gore Vidal, Sexually Speaking", 1999, p. 229-230, 223

This little vignette I hope illustrates the gulf that separated at the time (and still does) the anabashed sexual avantgarde of Vidal and his interviewers and the other types of the community: the sex-cold "intellectuals", the overly feminized, affected "fags" (sorry I misnamed Vidal's term of scorn in a previous post), the "uptight queens", and the sexually naive gay "politicos" who started to crop up at that time. It was GV and the SUNSHINE types who were proclaiming super macho "hard sex", absolutely free of any emotional attachment, and dissed any kind of sentimentality around "balling". It was them who pioneered sex in city parks, twenty-four seven. It was them and them alone in the fifties, until the craze spread in the seventies, only to be cruelly extinguished by the outbreak of AIDS.

In terms of probabilities, Morton Smith would have been thousand times closer to Daniel Hirsch than to "Bob" in the classic encounter between the closeted, conflicted, hysterical homosexual and the polymorphous, relaxed sensuality of the Vidal's sex-athlete in Joe Schlesinger's 1971 film "Sunday, Bloody Sunday". And therefore, we would need to have some hard data, to pass an intelligent judgment on the likelihhood his sex proclivities driving him to forge documents.

Jiri

andrewcriddle

I can't see how the Talmudic reference supports your argument.

In the word rendered becomes corrupt in the pasage is SRY or SRYA which from my limited Hebrew should IMO literally be becomes evil

I don't think there is any idea here of salt being contaminated by a foreign substance.

Andrew Criddle

Toto

This is wandering a bit off topic.

No one is claiming that Smith's "sex proclivities" per se drove him to forge documents. There is some indication that his being a closeted homosexual, in violation of the commands of his church and the social mores of much of the country, was an issue for him and contributed to a motive for his prank, or hoax. Given that he did not write about it himself, we are unlikely to have any more information that we do now - some impressions he made on a few friends and colleagues. And we do not know that he was bitter about discrimination against homosexuals. His bitterness might have been over the church's rejection of homosexuality, and his loss of his religious belief.

That's all I will post on this, unless there is some significant further information on Smith himself.

Solo

I trust you appreciate how difficult it is for an English speaker to think of salt as being, or becoming, 'evil'. So, how should the saying be translated ? Any ideas ? It would not be by any chance that the semantic root of the Hebrew word for 'evil' is shared with the notion of 'badness' as a material quality ? Would it ?

The other, and bigger, problem with the position you have taken is this: we already know from the 'mule's offal' saying, that the Talmud rejects the idea of salt's taste degrading by a natural process. AMOF, it ridiculizes the idea as an hyperbole by a clever allusion to the virgin birth as the hallmark of apostasy. So, unless you want to argue that the proverb in Bek.8b flatly contradicts another writ of Talmudic wisdom, you will have to start contemplating the possibility that the 'evil salt' can ONLY come from mixing/contaminating/substituting salt, and thereby the covenant of salt with the Lord, (Num 18:18-19, II Chr 13:5) with something else.

Jiri

andrewcriddle

Don't trust me on this but IIUC and IMHO the root ( SRR ) is about being stubborn, refractory, failing to perform ones role, rebelling against ones obligations.

FWIW An online Hebrew English Dictionary renders SRY as dejected, sullen, ill-humored

IMHO I don't think that the apparent puzzlement of the rabbis at the idea of salt losing its saltiness really supports your argument.

Andrew Criddle

Yuri Kuchinsky

Greetings, all,

In his CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA (1973), Morton Smith reported that a rare manuscript was found that is remarkably close in appearance to the Mar Saba Secret Mark manuscript. Smith wrote that a Greek scholar, Professor Scouvaras, had discovered,

"...an eighteenth-century ecclesiastical document in a native Greek hand strikingly similar to that of our manuscript [it is reproduced on Plate IV in Smith's book]. ... [It is] an autograph codex of the Oecumenical Patriarch Callinicus III and was written about 1760 in the Phanariot hand which had been formed in Constantinople shortly before that time." (p. 2)

So what's the deal here, I would like to ask? Is the similarity here purely accidental? Did Smith fake some generic 18th century hand, and then a very close replica of it just happened to turn up out of the blue? Hmm... :huh:

And if this is not just a 'pure accident', we have the following possibilities,

-- Smith also faked the Scouvaras MS, and then planted it wherever Scouvaras happened to find it.

-- Scouvaras was actually secretly in league with Smith -- a conspiracy!

So, any opinions?

Yuri.

PS.
I tried to look up this Greek scholar on the Net, and it looks like the usual English spelling of his name is Skouvaras.

It's either Evangelos Skouvaras, or also perhaps Vagelis Skouvaras.

This seems to be the work of Evangelos Skouvaras,

SKOUVARAS Ε., "Στηλιτευτικά Κείμενα του ΙΗ' αιώνος (κατά των αναβαπτιστών) = Cencorious Texts of the Eighteenth Century (against the anabaptists)," Byzantinisch-Neugriechische Jahrbόcher, 20 (1970) 50-227.

So this is probably the same guy.

andrewcriddle

Stephen Carlson discusses the Callinicus manuscript on pages 44-45 of his book (and notes).

The similarities to the Callinicus manuscript show that the Mar Saba letter is either an 18th century Western Greek hand or a deliberate imitation thereof.

Stephen Carlson argues that a Western Greek style of handwriting would not be expected from a typical 18th century monk at Mar Saba in Palestine, but is plausibly the type of Greek script that Morton Smith would produce if seeking to imitate an 18th century Greek hand.

Andrew Criddle

S.C.Carlson

As best as I can tell, Patriarch Callinicus III, of Thessaly, was never a monk at Mar Saba, and monks from the Western part of larger Greece were rare at Mar Saba.