Loren Rosson III

This book nicely complements Stephen Carlson's Gospel Hoax. Here is my review.
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Like Stephen Carlson a year ago, Peter Jeffery is able to show how obvious it is that Morton Smith fabricated Clement's letter to Theodore. One would think that Carlson exhausted all of Smith's anachronisms (the "bald swindler" M. Madiotes, Morton Salt, and modern gays in the 1950s being arrested in public Gethsemanes), but Jeffery has spotted more:

* The three features of Secret Mark's initiation rite -- resurrection symbolism, a period of teaching followed by a night vigil, and the wearing of a white cloth -- point to the Anglican Paschal liturgy as it was before the 1960s liturgical renewal movement. In addition, Clement and the Alexandrian church had a theology of baptism that was based not on the easter event of Jesus' resurrection, but on the epiphany event of Jesus' baptism by John. Secret Mark should thus have epiphany motifs (i.e. creation, the heavens opening with light, the descent of the Holy Spirit and fire, the seal of priestly and messianic anointings) rather than easter motifs (i.e. Pauline associations between baptism and resurrection). (pp 60-70)

* The homoeroticism in Secret Mark makes no sense in an ancient context. Adult males were supposed to pursue young boys/men, who in turn were supposed to acquiesce only after "playing hard to get" and only if the boy perceived that the sex would have intiatory value (i.e. that the man would go beyond sex and educate him in proper mores). But in Secret Mark, Jesus does not pursue the young man: just the opposite if anything, and this would have been shamefully unacceptable. Secret Mark was evidently written by a modern person who assumed that ancient homosexuality would have followed Plato's model of an older teacher with a young disciple, but who didn't quite understand how the roles played out -- and such misunderstandings were common in academic circles before the work of K.J. Dover in the late 70s. (This would seem to improve on Carlson, who argued that the homoeroticism in Secret Mark makes no sense since Jesus and the young man are depicted as social peers. But a "young man", however rich, suggests they're not quite peers.) (pp 185-192)

* Clement's letter is riddled with allusions to Oscar Wilde's 19th-century play, Salome, and Wilde was a homosexual martyr to boot. In the play Salome does the "dance of the seven veils", which is punned by Smith's Clement, who writes about "the truth hidden by seven veils". She is punned, in turn, by Smith's Salome, whom Jesus rejects along with the rest of the female race. (pp 226-231)

On top of this, Jeffery catches Smith in some pretty amusing lies. A notable one: whereupon discovering Clement's letter, Smith says he went to Vespers instead of staying to investigate his discovery, apparently forgetting what he said two pages earlier (in The Secret Gospel, p 10) -- that he had stopped attending religious services because he no longer "responded" to them. (pp 9-11)

Jeffery examines Smith's brief career as an Anglican priest, noting his excessively harsh judgments on homosexuals in a 1949 article -- very severe by Anglican standards at the time. Any fool can make the diagnosis: Smith was going through his own sexual crisis that caused him to leave the priesthood a year later. Interestingly, in that same 1949 article, Smith referenced a 19th-century debate between Catholics and Protestants over whether Clement of Alexandria believed that lying was justified if it served the causes of the church. Quelle surprise: the letter to Theodore answers that very question. (pp 149-184)

Jeffery goes after Morton Smith pretty hard, unlike Carlson who seemed (at least in part) to respect or admire a man who had the skills to bamboozle so many academics. Jeffery expresses sorrow and contempt: Smith "became what he opposed: a hypocritical Clement who condoned lying for the sake of a fundamentalist sexology" (pp 247-248); "a man in great personal pain", who didn't even understand himself despite pretensions to a superior gnosticism (p 243); a bitter academic, whose hoax stands as "the most grandiose and reticulated 'Fuck You' ever perpetuated in the long and vituperative history of scholarship" (p 242). He's right about that last one, but whether Smith wrote his hoax more out of experimental amusement or angry revenge remains unclear.

The names Stephen Carlson and Peter Jeffery will soon become closely associated, and that's a credit to them both. But who has the stronger case? Carlson has the edge with his forensic handwriting analysis. The Morton Salt exhibit (Carlson) and Anglican liturgical analysis (Jeffery) each point to Morton Smith in particular. Both address the homosexuality issue -- which also puts Smith directly on the spot -- though Jeffery more satisfyingly. Carlson insists on the pernicious nature of fakes, while Jeffery seems more interested in the perniciousness of Morton Smith himself. They complement each other perfectly, and stand as definitive twin debunkings of the Secret Mark hoax.


P.S. This book will be of interest to those who study ancient rituals, whether or not they care about Secret Mark. In discussing the baptismal imagery in Secret Mark, Jeffery offers an enlightening critique of academic treatments of liturgical traditions, insisting that instead of giving undue priority to texts, scholars should give full attention to three dimensions of worship -- the textual, the practical/actional, and the theoretical/critical. An example:

"We can learn a lot about a church by studying its hymnal (the textual dimension). But we can learn even more by attending its worship and observing that these people rarely use their hymnal -- they rely instead on photocopied pamphlets that are distributed each week and then discarded (the practical dimension). It is only when we have identified and interviewed the decision-makers, and gotten them to explain the critique of their hymnal that the photocopies embody (the critical dimension), that we will begin to understand who this community is before its god." (pp 57-58)

Ben C Smith

Sounds like a good read. Thanks for the review, Loren.

Ben.

Toto

The last thread on this

Amazon link for The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (Hardcover)

Yuri Kuchinsky

Greetings, all,

Here's an interesting review of Jeffery's book by W. V. Harris. Clearly, Jeffery's book represents an extended personal attack on Morton Smith, which is quite unfortunate...

As Harris writes,

"Jeffery's vicious hostility to Morton Smith seems to stem from the fact that he is a devout Christian, while Smith, after about 1950, was a religious sceptic."

*******************
A review of THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK UNVEILED by Peter Jeffery.
Reviewer: W. V. Harris
Times Literary Supplement No. 5455 -- October 19, 2007
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/printFr...-23206,00.html
*******************


Harris knew Smith personally, as both were teaching at Columbia in the 60s. It's interesting that, as it now turns out, Smith was a supporter of Vietnam war! (While Harris was against, which dampened down their personal relationship.) Here, there may be an interesting parallel with Dr. Robert Price, a pre-eminent skeptic currently, who also supported Bush, and the war in Iraq... Human nature is certainly far from predictable, and a skeptic in one area can sometimes be quite a conformist in another.

In any case, here are some snippets from Harris' review,

__________

Unfortunately for his own case [that Smith forged the letter of Clement], Jeffery adopts rhetorical strategies that boomerang disastrously. From the beginning, he is blatantly one-sided: Smith's description of how he found the manuscript is "an inherently implausible story", and so on, long before any clear-cut arguments have been produced. He sounds throughout like an advocate trying to browbeat a witness, not an impartial judge.

No insinuation is too petty for him: he finds fault with Smith for supposedly not remembering in 1973 what time the monks of Mar Saba ate lunch in 1941. More seriously, he runs together and confuses the question of the authenticity of the text and the validity of Smith's interpretations of it. Smith believed, for instance, that what took place in the secret gospel, in the passage quoted above, was a baptismal rite, and Jeffery is at pains to show that this theory is implausible -but the text itself contains no such theory.

So Jeffery is his own enemy. ...

The homoerotic argument does not work either. The notion that Smith wrote the Mar Saba document with the purpose of "creat(ing) the impression that Jesus practised homosexuality" is patently silly. ...

It is Jeffery, not Smith, who is obsessed with the possible sex between Jesus and the young man he had brought back to life. This leads him to the conclusion that the Mar Saba document must be a forgery because no young Judaean man would have approached an older man for sex, since that was contrary to the ethics of classical Athens four centuries earlier. But the secret gospel makes no such statement.

In the end, however, ... the probability is that the Mar Saba document is ancient and was written by Clement. A successful attack would have to be vastly more dispassionate than The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled.

The author says of Smith that he was "an angry person willing to utter any insult that might stick, no matter how far-fetched". That judgement is not completely mistaken, but it also reflects the man who delivered it.

__________

All the best,

Yuri.

JoeWallack

JW:
Yes, what are the odds that a closet homosexual outed Jesus as a closet homosexual but couldn't find the original? Probably the same as an orthodox father outing an orthodox Gospel without having the original. What's important here is not whether Jesus only took advantage of his female party disciples (which he did ) but just how important motive and opportunity are regarding religious assertions.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

the_cave

Ok, I'll just ask a few obvious questions:

What resurrection symbolism? Or, even if you can explain it, let me quote from Jeffery (which I have in front of me):

"Instead of death and resurrection motifs, the Epiphany model emphasized themes of blessing the waters and of creation, of rebirth and divine sonship..." (p. 68)

So let me get this straight--Clement's model wasn't about resurrection--it was about rebirth!

So...how does that one work?

First of all, that is the Anglican liturgy after the liturgical renewal! Second, Jeffery himself admits "Clement is one of many early Christian witnesses to tell us that a lot of worship took place at night." (p. 69) A footnote refers to Stromata, and indeed there we read:

The best Jeffery can do in response is pass off an explanation until publication of his next book. Which is not a very convincing argument.

No--read the text! The initiate in Secret Mark wears a linen cloth. Nothing about white cloths anywhere. Jeffrey talks about white cloths, yes. But in doing so, he reads his own error into the text.

Wrong--as Jeffery notes, the Anglican Paschal Vigil liturgy had moved to an afternoon service (p. 64). Unclear when they restored it to a night service, but Jeffery dates it to the 20th c.

Secret Mark does not have any motifs! Where are these Pauline associations between baptism and resurrection?

I hate to ask an obvious question, but I have to: what homoeroticism in Secret Mark?

Very true! And yet...somehow this is evidence of homoeroticism??

Again--no, he simply doesn't. Read the text of Clement as presented by Smith. The word "veils" is an insertion by Smith. Smith says so. Does it make sense? Sure. So would "doors" "seals" "heavens" "angels" "gates" and so on. Maybe Wilde was just the reason Smith thought of "veils" first.

Indeed, it turns out that Tractate Kethutboth says the Jerusalem temple itself had seven gates (http://www.come-and-hear.com/kethubo...uboth_106.html) including a curtain for each. Tractate Middoth 1.4 also says there were seven gates (http://www.bible-history.com/court-o...h_middoth.html).

Seems like a perfectly reasonable metaphor for Clement to use.

Can you name more than these two examples? It is riddled with allusions, after all...they should be easy to find (Trying not to tease too much--I don't think you're being unreasonable. I just think Jeffery is wrong.)

And where in pp. 226-231 does Jeffery make this claim?

I'm by no means defending Smith here, but Smith just doesn't say this. He says he spent "most of his time in his cell", not that he "stopped attending religious services".

Seems to me that it wasn't a dispute about whether Clement believed that, since he clearly says so in Stromata (second paragraph on this page: http://www.logoslibrary.org/clement/stromata/709.html) So the letter to Theodore doesn't answer the question at all; instead, it's perfectly consistent with Clement's ethics!

I have to say I am coming around to the view that the effort being put into supposedly debunking Secret Mark will come to be seen as one of the odder detours that scholarship has taken in recent years.

Smith was in fact wrong about what Secret Mark meant. I can't speculate as to why he arrived at his conclusions, but it looks to me like it was simply an imaginary hypothesis that couln't be sustained by the evidence. It's not the first time that's happened. And it doesn't mean Secret Mark is inauthentic. Instead, it's sad that Smith chose to use his apparently real discovery to try and prove something that just wasn't there.

Though FWIW, I do agree with what you say about attention to liturgical practices

andrewcriddle

Hi the_cave

Before making a proper resonse I would like to clarify what you are saying.

I think you are suggesting that there is no homoeroticism in Secret Mark and what both Morton Smith and Peter Jeffery are reading something into the text that isn't there.

However I'm not sure of your position on the alleged baptismal allusions in Secret Mark. Are you holding that despite the arguments of Peter Jeffery the case for baptismal allusions remains plausible or are you arguing with Scott Brown and the reviewer quoted by Yuri that in this case as well both Morton Smith and Peter Jeffery are reading something into the text that isn't there ?

Andrew Criddle

Yuri Kuchinsky

There's nothing in Mar Saba MS to indicate that Jesus was a closet homosexual.

Yuri.

Yuri Kuchinsky

LOL!

Never mind, cave, here I'm making a firm prediction that the true believers like Prof. Jeffery will still continue to badmouth Smith for generations to come -- regardless of any reason or logic that might stand in their way.

Come to think of it, they don't like Clement of Alexandria very much, either -- that's why he's not a Saint Clement...

Cheers,

Yuri.

the_cave

Yes, this is my view.

I think the baptismal allusions are ambiguous. I don't know what the "mystery of the kingdom of God" was--it may have been baptismal, but maybe not. The question is, what was the significance of wearing a single linen robe? Was it a practical preparation for baptism? Was the baptism spiritual? Did it represent the humility of the believer? Or his poverty, whether spiritual or material? I don't see a decisive argument one way or the other, so I find Jeffrey's protests that the baptismal symbolism is all wrong to be lacking--IOW, a) we don't know that this was a baptismal ritual at all, and b) even if it was, we have no idea what was involved.

So, it could still be a baptismal ritual. But Jeffrey is a) wrong to assume that it was, and b) even if he's right, he's wrong to assume that the symbolism in Secret Mark is obvious. It isn't.