Toto

(Stephan Huller holds this symposium in contempt.)

There is a Facebook page: York Christian Apocrypha Symposium Series

Some blog posts: The Story So Far

Mystery Story of Mar Saba

And a few Stephan Huller blog posts: Roger Vicklund on James Hunter; Morton Smith was NOT gay and more.

stephan huller

The truth is that I have the brain of a two year old. Maybe I was jealous. Maybe it just caught me off guard that my alma mater was holding the conference and they wouldn't take up my offer of paying for half the cost of the flight to bring Agamemnon Tselikas there. Here was my thinking. This Greek professor has complete access to all the sites of the Greek Patriarchate of Jerusalem. So I thought make him feel like a star. Expose him to the debate and the state of research as it stands now. Then he gets interested in everything so he'll go back home to his office in Jerusalem he might go up to the Patriarch of Jerusalem and say 'Hey friend. Do you remember this manuscript we took out of this Latin book? Where is it?'

That was my thinking. Really the manuscript is there. Memos (dim. form of 'Agamemnon') says I looked for it already. But you know what it's like if you're looking for something you don't really care about. It's probably in a place that's far away from everyone. Probably with the Patriarch's stuff. So I figure it would have been a four hundred dollar investment to get a stop over from Athens to Toronto and back.

Then the debate is over. But these guys figured no, let's have a retread of all the arguments, all the debates. That's not my bag. So I didn't go home to visit mom, brother and the old the gang. It's childish but I thought we missed an opportunity to solve the whole question. But what do I know.

Anyway thanks doc. You've diagnosed my ailment.

DCHindley

I was surprised to learn that James Hogg Hunter had visited Mar Saba in 1931. As I have earlier speculated, I felt there was a strong possibility that Hunter's connection to missionary work in Sudan might have put him into contact with rumors of a mysterious gospel fragment at Mar Saba, which he spun into his Mystery at Mar Saba storyline.

Timo S. Paananen's blog includes excerpts from the book that bear strong resemblance to an indictment against the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt in Rena L Hogg's biography of her father, John Hogg, A Master-Builder on the Nile (1914).

Mystery at Mar Saba (as quoted by Tiro):

Hunter begins by narrating the history of the monastery, but goes on to offer an opinion on its current state of affairs (on pages 229-230):

Such was the weird home of Christian men in past ages, now degenerated into a ghastly institution of superstitious formalism lacking soul and heart, of rites performed by monks whose honesty and mode of life left much to be desired.

That's some vicious thing to say. But once started on this track, Hunter gathers steam.

The life of the monastery was as empty as the burnt-out crater of a volcano. What religious life there was had deteriorated into a burden of prescribed, and ungraciously observed, devotions; of dreary ceremonies begun at midnight with weird chants and rites that make the blood of the casual visitor who stays overnight run cold. With nothing to occupy their time, it was easy to see that the monks had degenerated.

When on the roll, let it roll, I guess.

The older monks were crafty and seemed sub-normal; the younger ones for the most part had fled there to escape the penalty of some misdeed committed among the world of men. The effect of the life there was to reduce the anchorites to a state of deplorable baseness and wretchedness. There was nothing in the life of the monastery conducive to the development of either the body, the mind or the spirit.

Think it could not get any worse, would you?

The rankest of moral weeds could only grow in a corrupting atmosphere like this. In such a miasma, man became obsessed with his fellow-man. In their souls was hate instead of love, tumult where peace should have reigned, as they performed mechanical religious duties, and remained ignorant of the blessed Gospel of the Son of God and the transforming power of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Master Builder:

Their religious leaders were "epistles of Christ" in whose corrupted text might be wrongly read Christ's license to drunkenness and vice; while the errors that had crept into their creed set the seal of Christ's name upon a religion in which salvation was divorced from sanctification, and purchased by pious ejaculations, the use of the sacraments, fastings, alms, and the intercession of Mary and the saints. …

And if we ask how the Coptic Church, with so fair a history, had sunk so low, the answer is not far to seek, and carries its own warning to us all. Her people had lost their Bible. It had been entombed for them in a language once their own, long since forgotten. Only now through the efforts of strangers in the nineteenth century was it being given back to them in Arabic, their adopted tongue. Meanwhile they had been sorely tried, and the soul that does not simply "trust in God and do the right" is submerged by sorrow, instead of being borne by its waves to higher levels. We have not always stood life's test so well that we can marvel or condemn when we find that instead of being perfected by suffering they had sunk under it, injured morally as well as physically by their ordeal.

It was little wonder, indeed, that the race had deteriorated. For centuries freedom and safety were matters of purchase, while to appear wealthy was to court ruin. They strove to adjust themselves to their circumstances by worldly prudence. The gaining and hoarding of money had become in all classes the prime aim in life, its concealment the path of wisdom, lying and deceit their weapons of defence. Not so are nobility and honour nourished. Still more fatal was another adjustment. To protect their women from the dangers that threatened them in the enjoyment of their ancient freedom, they adopted for them the Mohammedan custom of seclusion. Close upon the heels of the new custom followed the taint of the attitude of mind which it embodied. Their women, degraded by both custom and attitude, soon sank in the main to the level of man's contempt, and the life of the people was poisoned at its source. [94-95]

…

a third picture was drawn [for the Patriarch], a picture of the Coptic Church of the day, and of the ignorance, Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and immorality of its spiritual guides throughout the country … [108-109]

I can't demonstrate, yet, any connection between the Hogg missionary family and Hogg-Hunter, but the parallels get ever more curious.

DCH

youngalexander

Just wondering if Tolkein based his Orcs on these descriptions?:Cheeky:

aspronot

Huh?

Toto

That's from the point of view of the Christian evangelical author.

Toto

If two authors describe Orthodox monasteries in similar terms, it might just be because that's the way monasteries were, especially in the eyes of American Protestants.

IIRC, Nikos Kazantzakis gives some similar descriptions of monasteries in Northern Greece around the same time, particularly in his Report to Greco (or via: amazon.co.uk).

stephan huller

I think Pantuck's argument made it difficult to use this Hunter novel thing. His article in BAR also dealt with the same topic. I just can't believe that we're stuck on this nonsensical claim that the text is a forgery. If I was going to explain it all by means of a parable I'd say God sent a test to the 'experts' to test them in their cleverness. They failed the test. Even those who defend the authenticity of the text - none of them can unravel what the text is saying, what it's context is in any meaningful way.

That's why I prefer to look at it as some kind of a divine joke. All these people, studying the Bible, Patristic literature and this message floats down from heaven on the inside of an old Latin book. And nothing. No one knows their ass from a hole in the ground. Everyone fails the text because with everyone of them, pride gets in the way.

If this was a Biblical narrative, this would be the pretext for some massive catastrophe to wipe the earth of all the iniquity of the sons of men.

But lucky for us these things can't really happen or perhaps we're all meant to live in eternal damnation like the people in Sartre's No Exit.

gurugeorge

Well, 2012 is approaching, after all