DCHindley

The Secret Gospel was directed to the general public, who are prone to making all sorts of erroneous connections. I think a warning was justified.

The "veil" (or "curtain") motif is rather well known in Jewish mysticism from early times. Personally I think it is derived from the use of a veil [ Heb. "poreketh" = Lxx "katapetasma" = "curtain/veil"] in the temple to obscure the inside of the holy of holies (Ex 26:33). Moses is said to have hidden his face with a veil ("macveh" veil/covering = Lxx "kalumma", see below) after descending from Mt Sinai (Ex 34:33). Some merkabah texts speak of the first heaven as a veil ("Wilon" from Latin "velum", "curtain"). In 3 Enoch the entrances between the other heavens or celestial palaces are spoken of as "doors" (I could not determine the Hebrew words used) which are guarded and form a kind of barrier. God's throne (merkabah) and/or face is surrounded by a veil ("pargod").

Origen, in Contra Celsum 6:24-28, says the Ophites (the Naasenes of Hippolytus were a sub-group of Ophites) taught that after death, a soul tries to ascend to heaven. "To reach its goal in the realm of the Father and the Son the soul had to pass through a 'Barrier [Greek "fragmos" I believe] of Evil' which is defined as 'the gates of the archons which are shut forever' (6:31)" Origen says there were seven archons controlling these gates, and this is also found in 3rd (Hebrew) Enoch 18:1-4, and also Hekalot Rabbati, etc. "Fragmos" means literally "a shutting up, blocking up; fencing, partition." (L&S short)

The letter of Theodore has "ths eptakis kekalummenhs alhqeias" (the seven veiled truth). The word "kekalummenhs" is a participle of the verb "kaluptw" (genitive feminine singular perfect middle voice), and means basically "cover, wrap". The proper word for a woman's veil is "kaluptra" per L&S, although it too is derived from the verb "kaluptw".

Since Ophites (and Naasenes) were Jewish Gnostics, "pargod" may have been variously translated into Greek as "barrier" ("phragmos") as well as "veil" (kalumma) as it passed into magical lore as well as Hellenistic gnosticism in general. This is also probably how the symbolism gets into that Coptic phylactery that I mentioned in my previous post to Andrew C, in which is summoned a power that is "the invisible one within the seven veils" (pp. 131 & 132). In that same source is an erotic spell of "Cyprian of Antioch" (yes, the Christian bishop, who legend says tried to seduce a virgin using the spell before his conversion) which appeals to an entity who is "the father within the seven veils" (pg 155). BTW, I do not know what Coptic word(s) were behind these English translations of "veil".

From this, I can see how medieval mystics (including magicians and alchemists) could have picked up the idea of a "seven veiled" truth about the soul, as they incorporated a great deal of magical lore along with Jewish mysticism of the sort represented by Sepher ha Razim. Could these traditions have spilled over into the debates between Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists and Humanists of the 16th to 18th century? I think that is a definite possibility, especially before higher criticism developed in the 19th century. Mysticism and related "philosophies" heavily influenced the "philosophs" and rationalists of the time, and still continued to do so for some higher critics into the present, IMHO (although some might not even realize it).

Sorry for the length, as some of this is aimed at Andrew C as a sidebar to our exchanges.

DCH

Yuri Kuchinsky

Here's the translation by Andrew Bernhard,

http://web.archive.org/web/200710210...anslation.html

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 Kuchinsky

Although I agree with this, lots of people certainly will not...

The evidence is in the canonical gospels, and form criticism, as Koester and others have argued.

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.

the_cave

Dividing this response in two, to keep the discussions of manageable length and complexity.

I see--I guess was a little confused, then, but I then wonder why a forger would choose to over-sample uniquely Clementine terms on the one hand, but also use prepositions in a correctly Clementine manner? If he were doing the latter, shouldn't we expect him to over-sample the non-unique vocabulary (in order to appear appropriately Clementine)?

I would also wonder, with Shandruk, whether the Mar Saba fragment is too short to produce the expected ratios. Indeed, should we expect fragments of longer works to display the same vocabulary ratios as those longer works? Authors use different vocabulary for different purposes in different sections of their works, at times innovating, at times relying on familiar language.

This leads me to another caveat--the author of the Mar Saba fragment is trying to defend church teaching, relying on the reassurance of familiar metaphors to bolster his case. It seems to me to be a perfectly natural place to find the reuse of vocabulary, and not a very good place to introduce an abundance of terms he may be unfamiliar with.

Possibly a fruitful test would run as follows:

1) Sample a section from the known works of Clement roughly equal in length to the Mar Saba fragment.
2) For each section, remove any unique terms from the Stahlin index, and remove the occurrences of each non-unique term (thus possibly producing a new set of unique Clementine terms in the new pseudo-Stahlin index). In other words, treat the Clementine corpus as though the sample selection were not included in it.
3) Run the sample through the analysis you ran the Mar Saba letter through, and see what ratios are produced.
4) Repeat 1)-3) at least until the ratios start to converge on a single value.

We would at least get a rough expectation of the statistical distribution of vocabulary ratios in Clementine passages of the same length as the Mar Saba letter. Then we could see if the Mar Saba letter was unusual.

Or, a way to informally test would be to look for sections of the known Clementine corpus (searching for them deliberately) where the ratio of unique terms to twice-used terms is excessive. If they exist, that would suggest that passages like the Mar Saba fragment (displaying the excess in the reverse direction) are not unexpected.

the_cave

And now part 2--

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.

But, he does--he not only has the Carpocratian gospel, he now has information about the accurate contents of Secret Mark.

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.

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.

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.

Well, Clement was just doing his best. So what if it wasn't good enough?

Oh, I don't see that. Again, I see nothing shocking in Secret Mark. Clement just says "Well, look, there are these extra stories from Mark, and it's nothing to worry about, see? All the other business is heretical apocrypha. But it's no use explaining the truth to the heretics, because they'll just take advantage of it, so you might as well lie to them."

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).

What can I say--I'm reasonable that way

Yuri Kuchinsky

Hello, all,

Since I see here a discussion of Andrew Criddle's old statistical study of Mar Saba MS (ON THE MAR SABA LETTER ATTRIBUTED TO CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, JECS 3 (1995)), perhaps now is a good time to post Scott Brown's latest take on it.

This comes from his long review of Jeffery's book,

Scott G. Brown, THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK UNVEILED, RBL 09/2007
http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/5627_5944.pdf

I've now reformatted the PDF text so I can post it here. I've included the notes within the text. Mr. Carlson's views of Criddle's study also come in for attention.

All in all, the whole story is quite instructive "of how academic folklore evolves"...

[begin quote from Scott Brown]
http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/5627_5944.pdf

Jeffery’s claim that the "Letter to Theodore", too, is a pastiche of phrases from Clement’s undisputed works is likewise supported by quotations from scholars who have proved nothing of the sort. The history behind this idea provides an interesting example of how academic folklore evolves.

We start with a few sentences in a statistical study by Andrew Criddle. Criddle estimated from an (incomplete) index of Clement’s undisputed writings the percentage of words that occur only once (37.5 percent). Applying an existing statistical model to this datum, he determined that any previously unknown work of Clement should have a particular ratio of new words to words Clement used only once before. After eliminating several of the letter’s new words on questionable grounds, he asserted that the letter had fewer new words than would be expected from a random sample.

Criddle could have interpreted this fact in a variety of ways. He chose, however, to interpret it in terms of forgery, postulating that “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.”

[note 71= Andrew H. Criddle, “On the Mar Saba Letter Attributed to Clement of Alexandria,” JECS 3 (1995): 215–20, at 218, as cited by Jeffery (99).]

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.

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.]

Unfortunately, the people who appeal to Criddle’s study tend to confuse the data with Criddle’s interpretation of the data and to interpret his interpretation in terms of how they themselves imagine that a forger would go about imitating Clement. Supposing, quite naturally, that a forger would imitate Clement’s favorite words and phrases, they take note of Criddle’s unwarranted reference to “phrases” but overlook the modifier “rare,” then suppose that Criddle had proved that the letter has a higher than usual percentage of Clement’s favorite words and phrases. Consider how Bart Ehrman summarized Criddle’s study:

[note 73 = Bart D. Ehrman, “The Forgery of an Ancient Discovery? Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark,” in idem, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 67–89, quoting 85–86.]

Which of Clement’s favorite words are used too frequently in this letter? When you recall that Criddle’s statistical analysis examined only two kinds of words—the ones Clement never used before and the ones he previously used only once—you realize how questionable this is as a characterization of Criddle’s finding. One cannot demonstrate from a study of Clement’s _least used_ words that the letter sounds more like Clement than Clement ever sounded.

The next step in the evolution of this folklore is rhetorical exaggeration. Hence, Stephen C. Carlson refers to “Criddle’s finding of a hyper-Clementine style in [the Letter to] Theodore” and to “the excessively Clementine nature of Theodore.”

[note 74 = Stephen C. Carlson, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2005), 52, 53. Carlson goes on to claim that “similar problems exist in Theodore’s use of prepositions and his [sic] biblical citations” (52). I disagree. Criddle did not perform any statistical analysis on the prepositions but merely suggested, with no theoretical justification, that “the fact that all the prepositions common in Clement appear at least once in this letter and that no other prepositions do, seems too good to be true” (“On the Mar Saba Letter,” 218). This is an unsubstantiated impression, not a finding. Likewise, Criddle’s claim that the letter does not have enough new biblical citations rests on his exclusion from the data of the letter’s two longer Gospel excerpts _and_ its three citations of their contexts in canonical Mark (2:21–22; 3:11–12; 3:14) on the grounds that these “are irrelevant to Clement’s citation practice in free composition” (219). However, Clement’s citation practice included not only “free” citations of scriptures as they occurred to him but also more purposeful citations of scriptures that prove or illustrate a point. As with the letter, Clement quoted passages used by heretics to justify their practices (e.g., Strom. 3.6.50.1; 3.6.54.1; 3.8.61.1), and he also quoted phrases from the larger contexts of those passages as part of his own exegesis of their true meaning (e.g., 3.6.50.2; 3.6.54.1–3; 3.8.61.2). All these forms of citation are lumped together in the index of Clement’s scriptural citations from which Criddle derives his figures, so there is no legitimate reason to exclude the five Markan excerpts in the letter. When these are included, the ratio of scriptures previously quoted once to previously unquoted becomes what Criddle claims it should be: “less than half” (4:9). Whether there is any significance to this depends on whether this model, which measures diversity of words, is a valid measure of diversity of quotations from a particular body of writings. This needs to be established rather than presumed, especially since the model has proved unreliable in the application for which it was devised.]

It is hard to imagine a less accurate characterization of Criddle’s study, but Jeffery goes one step further ...

[end quote]

All the best,

Yuri.

Solo

Hear me out, DCH: there is only one Salome named in Mark. That the daughter of Herodias was also named Salome, we only know through Josephus' Antiquities. I am completely baffled by Smith's handling of Salome (the disciple) in the early Christian and gnostic tradition on pages 69-70 of the Secret Gospel. Smith cautions the reader not to confuse the two Salomes, but he himself sows the confusion by claiming that "this non-dancing" Salome was a dubious character and that Matthew, Luke and John "deleted her name from their Gospels". Curious, isn't it ? It is not the name of the Salome, the necrophiliac seductress, who bewitched Herod and made him execute a holy man, that was expunged. It was the "shady lady's" name who in the Protangelion delivered Jesus, and in the canon witnessed his passion and discovered the empty tomb.
Smith goes on: "All sorts of heretics, but worst of all the Carpocratians, appealed to her as an authority. We have one story that she tempted Jesus (how, is not told), another that she inquired about his getting into her bed....". One would not guess from this resume that Salome was in many (most ?) early Christian communities celebrated as an ascetic saint and matron to midwives. It is this tradition of Salome that Clement was addressing in Stromateis. I could not see anything there (in Book 3) that could prompt Smith to opine the SM line mentioning Salome was "cut out" from the authorized version of Mark, to "discredit her".

I am ok with the rest you wrote - whether for me or Andrew - it actually strengthens the enigma and disconnect between Smith's mention of Wilde's Salome and the "seven-veiled truth" in Clement's letter.

Jiri

andrewcriddle

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

andrewcriddle

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.

andrewcriddle

There may be over-sampling of the non-unique vocabulary. It is difficult to determine and my analysis did not attempt to do so.
The problem is that the content of the letter is actually rather new. However the writer is saying this new stuff using almost entirely old vocabulary, vocabulary often previously used in quite different contexts.

Andrew Criddle