Originally Posted by Yuri Kuchinsky

Greetings, all,

I finally wrote a review of Carlson's debunking of Secret Mark, and posted it on my webpage,

http://www.trends.ca/~yuku/bbl/secmk.htm

So here's what I wrote there.

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It will soon be about a year since the following book came out,

Stephen Carlson, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005.

And yet, it is safe to say that, so far, the public reaction to S. Carlson's book hasn't exactly been that of overwhelming acceptance... The reviews in academic journals have been slow in coming.

In any case, in my view, Carlson's book is quite unpersuasive. He really didn't make a very strong case against Dr. Smith. There are a lot of insinuations, but nothing definite.

It is really very serious charges that Carlson is making against Dr. Smith -- the charges that, had they been proven true at the time, would have no doubt destroyed Morton Smith's academic career. And yet, Carlson is making it sound as if these are just innocent, childhood-like fun and games... There's this strange and rather amoral atmosphere that seems to pervade this book through and through.

Smith is a genius, but utterly twisted and even irrational. He did everything he could to make his plot succeed, and yet deliberately left all sorts of clues, to make plain his nefarious machinations. He deceived everyone, and yet he didn't. Deception is of course bad, but sometimes it might be good and even admirable. What he did was a forgery, and yet it was not.

So these are just some of the strange ambiguities -- both logical and ethical -- that seem to pervade Carlson's book.

The motivation of Smith's plot is never really quite clear. To benefit scholarship or to hurt and derail scholarship? To teach his enemies a lesson, or perhaps to prove them right? (Indeed, nothing would have pleased his enemies -- the conservatives, presumably? -- more than his being caught and exposed...)

Did he just want to have some innocent fun and games -- or perhaps to undermine the Christian religion, and thus to maliciously insult millions of people? Was he trying to prove himself smarter than anyone else, or in fact to expose his own rank stupidity (by putting his academic career and livelihood on the line for no apparent reason)?

And so, the Morton Smith that Carlson constructs for us in the pages of his book is really quite a strange and irrational figure. It's nothing more than a cardboard cut-out -- not connected in any real way to the world around him.

All through his book, Carlson alternates between building Smith up, and then tearing him down. Of course, to begin with, Smith needs to be portrayed as a great genius, and a top-notch academic -- an unheralded master of many rather obscure and specialised fields of scholarship... Otherwise, how could he get away with his hoax/forgery -- as multidisciplinary as it was! -- for over 40 years? And yet, quite obviously, the plot that Smith concocted was also extremely dumb and even harebrained -- it was all but guaranteed discovery! The only way that Smith avoided exposure was because, in the end, the monks covered up for him.

So there you have it, folks. A hoaxer/forger who's a genius and yet utterly stupid... But his plot succeeded in spite of everything -- because the monks taking care of Mar Saba library were even more stupid and incompetent!

So how likely is such a scenario in real life? Doesn't seem all that likely to me...

....

Originally Posted by jakejonesiv

Hi Yuri,

I think you are mischaracterizing Stephen Carlson's book.

Originally Posted by jakejonesiv

Hi Yuri,

I think you are mischaracterizing Stephen Carlson's book. It is well written, well argued, and remarkably restrained. The fact that Stepehen gives wide berth to the rumors of Smith's alleged sexual orientation shows that he is not only a scholar, but a gentleman.

Your review, as presented here, is mostly an argument from personal incredulity.

Jake Jones IV

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Peter Jeffery is due to be published in December. ISBN 0300117604

Jeffery argues that Morton Smith was the author of Secret Mark but apparently puts particular emphasis on discrepancies between the Mar Saba letter and our other evidence about early Christian liturgy.

Originally Posted by S.C.Carlson

I've been discovering that different people personally find different parts of the book to be the most persuasive

Originally Posted by Yuri Kuchinsky

I suppose the desired result would have been for different people to find some key part(s) of the book to be totally persuasive. Nevertheless, this doesn't seem to be the case...

Originally Posted by Chris Weimer

What really stood out to me was the handwriting analysis.