Solo

I think Andrew would be the first one to admit that his study does not prove anything. It's useful as a sanity check and I think most academics take it as such without making large conclusions from it.

But it works both ways: I noticed that my grandma tended to repeat herself more than before when she was over seventy five. Her hand was shakier when she wrote to me. Never occured to me it could have been grandpa taking me for some of the cash I used to send to the old country for her. But suppose it did occur to me: If she was dead he had the ability, he had the opportunity, he had the motive.

Jiri

Roger Viklund

Hi Andrew!

I have tried to read your arguments carefully and hopefully have noticed all your reservations. Under the preconditions you have stated, I cannot really find any basic flaw with your calculations. I would however like to have your opinion on a few issues.

1) Your presupposition is only the relation between words never used and those used only one time before. You never (as far as I can see) deal with the length of the entire text in which you find this relation. Do you find this irrelevant for your calculations?

2) You also (as far as I can see) deal with probabilities as if they would happen by chance, just like throwing a dice. Do you consider conscious human activities as writing, equally possible to statistically calculate for deviations as random events?

3) Since you make the assumption that IF “the chances of genuiness and careful imitation are equal” you reach the conclusion of “a 1/6 chance of the work being authentic and a 5/6 chance of it being an imitation”, would this only be useful IF there is reason to believe that a text is forged?

I am also interested in your reason for claiming this:

Of course, if the letter is not written by Clement, than it is a forgery and thereby there is really no good reason to believe that Secret Mark is genuine. But I never considered Clement and what he says to be the most important part for supporting authenticity. My belief that Secret Mark is genuine is almost entirely built upon how Secret Mark interacts with the Gospel of Mark. I have no problem with accepting that Clement is wrong in many ways. It is the quotes which I find most persuasive and if there is no strong argument against authenticity, like obvious traces of forgery in the handwritings (like Carlson claims) or improbable usage of certain words (like you claim) than I se no reason for suspecting forgery. My view is quite the opposite to yours and I wonder what your reasons are for forming your opinion of authenticity on grounds based almost entirely on Clement.

Kindly, Roger

andrewcriddle

Hi Roger

Reply to 1
The small size of the text of the Mar Saba letter obviously makes the numbers involved small and hence the results statistically less significant. However I don't think the expected average values of the ratios I use are sensitive to text length (for texts small in comparison to an authors known works).

Reply to 2
I agree that the figures probably vary with the deliberate intent of the author. However if anything I would expect the particular circumstances here, (a letter by an author with no other known letters), to make the high observed resemblance to the author's other works less likely rather than more likely.

Reply to 3
The actual figures were, as I warned, given for illustrative purposes only. But I quite agree that my arguments would only persuade someone that the work is probably an imitation if they already thought this was a serious possibility.


IMO if we found on the endpages of an old printed book something like Mark 10 handwritten with the passages mentioned in the Mar Saba letter added at the appropriate places with only a note at the beginning "from the Secret Gospel of Mark" then we would not regard it as at all likely to be a very ancient text.

The context provided by the covering letter supposedly from Clement is IMO essential for a prima facie case that the Secret Gospel is a genuinely ancient text. (And also for establishing why it is an otherwise unknown ancient text. )Hence the case for the antiquity of the Secret Gospel must involve establishing that, despite its lack of provenance, the letter is probably genuinely by Clement.

BTW Have you read the French essay by Annick Martin Sur L'Evangile Secret de Marc from L'Evangile Selon Thomas et ... Nag Hammadi ?

It is a discussion of the historical problems with the Mar Saba letter delivered as a conference paper in 2003 but only recently published.

Andrew Criddle

the_cave

Essential for a prima facie case, yes, but not essential for a case in general. It's certainly not impossible that Theodore could be an ancient forgery (i.e. pseudepigraphia), and yet still contain valuable information about a non-canonical, non-Carpocratian version of Mark.

andrewcriddle

If you are interested in this possibility you really should read the Annick Martin essay. It presents an intriguing scenario for Theodore as possibly an ancient forgery from the period of the Origenist controversy.

Andrew Criddle

Roger Viklund

Hi Andrew!

I notice that you admit that the “small size of the text of the Mar Saba letter … makes … the results statistically less significant” even though you obviously don’t think that it makes that much difference. But I suppose that you agree that the smaller the text, the less statistically significant would the result be.

Further you find it “less likely” to find such “high observed resemblance to the author's other works” in “a letter by an author with no other known letters”. I’m not sure what you mean by “high observed resemblance” apart from the fact that the words and the expressions found in the letter correspond with the way Clement normally expressed himself. Wouldn’t one expect that an author would express himself more or less the same in a letter as in a book? What one could suspect, I think, is that an author would tend to repeat himself in letters, not being so formal. This would, in my opinion, make it more likely that he would use the same words as he used in his books. But then this is just my feeling, as it is yours that the length of the text and “the deliberate intent of the author” wouldn’t in any devastating way affect your result. Finally we agree that your “arguments would only persuade someone that the work is probably an imitation if they already thought this was a serious possibility”, even though I don’t know how significant this is for the result of your study.

We quite disagree on the importance of what Clement says. I think I would have reached more or less the same result “if we found on the endpages of an old printed book something like Mark 10 handwritten with the passages mentioned in the Mar Saba letter added at the appropriate places with only a note at the beginning ‘from the Secret Gospel of Mark’” Of course I would not immediately have thought of the greater mysteries of the Alexandrian church, but I would have thought of at mysterious/hidden symbolic gospel that was the foundation of the Gospel of Mark – and also that it was genuine because of the way the additional material interacts with the rest of the Gospel.

I wish this time that I would have studied French instead of German or that the French essay you refer to was written in Swedish . Unfortunately I’m unable to read what the essay has to say. Could you please enlighten me/us of the essential information, like how one could possibly consider an ancient forgery or how someone in Antiquity could have made a forgery that in the context of the Gospel of Mark created both an intercalation and a framing story?

Kindly, Roger

andrewcriddle

Hi Roger

This part of the Annick Martin essay is primarily concerned with a plausible context for Theodore considered as an ancient pseudepigraph. It suggests that the best option is the period of the Origenist controversy when supporters and followers of Origen were being accused of esotericism and excessive allegorization of Scripture. Theodore would, under the form of attacks on the crude sensual Carpocratians, be condemning the sometimes crude literalists who opposed the Origenist tradition, while, under the form of the supposed practices of Clement and the Alexandrian church of his day, be defending the perennial need for reserve and symbolic interpretation .

I should add that I don't think Annick Martin is particularly convinced of her suggestion. Her argument is in effect
a/ Theodore on historical grounds is unlikely to be by Clement of Alexandria. (She gives various grounds, including the unlikelihood that the origins of the Alexandrian church was, at the time of Clement, already associated with Mark.)
b/ The Origenist controversy seems the best option for an ancient pseudepigraph.
c/ If this is not thought plausible then one is left with the option of a much more recent imitation of Clement.

Andrew

Roger Viklund

Hi again Andrew!

Are you sharing Annick Martin’s ideas?

And if so, are you then not arguing for a preconceived opinion? IF Annick Martin’s proposition is correct, then the entire letter, not just Secret Mark, is a forgery made after Clement’s time but still in the a very ancient time. And then your argument for a forgery accomplished by using Stählin’s concordance is certainly wrong. And IF you can accept this option (maybe you don't), how come you believe it is a modern forgery IF the first option turns out wrong? I wonder this since you then have accepted that it was not a modern forgery, but only if it turns out to be an ancient forgery. Where is the option of the text not being a forgery at all?

In every conception of an ancient forgery we have the problems of accepting that people back then were aware of Mark’s literary techniques, and were able to accomplish both an intercalation and a framing story, apart from imitating “Mark”’s way of writing and also very perfectly imitating Clement’s style – something thought to be extremely difficult to do with such accuracy before Stählin came out with his study in the 1930's.

Kindly, Roger

andrewcriddle

Hi Roger

IMO Theodore is a 20th century imitation. (I thought it was quite clear that that was my position.) IIUC Annick Martin herself thought it quite likely to be a 20th century imitation. I presented her suggestion a/ because you asked me to, b/ because I agree with her that IF Theodore is an ancient pseudepigraph, then her interesting scenario is the most plausible one.

IMHO my arguments from statistics do not require a date after Stählin. However, they probably do cause difficulties with the idea of an ancient pseudepigraph because they imply that the composer was working on the basis of Clement's currently surviving works no more no less. An ancient imitator would have probably worked with a different set of Clement's works.

Andrew Criddle

ETA You are probably right that the idea of Theodore as an ancient pseudepigraph implies that, given such factors as the shortness of the text, neither Morton Smith's argument on stylistic and vocabulary grounds for authenticity, nor my statistical argument against authenticity is really convincing. Annick Martin IIUC took this position and from your earlier post I understood your views to be similar. (Maybe I was misunderstanding you.)

Roger Viklund

Hi Andrew!

Yes I know (or at least should have known) that your position is that the letter to Theodoros “is a 20th century imitation”. I do not believe that to be the case, but consider that option to be the second most likely and the only other realistic possibility apart from it being genuine. If Morton Smith (because he’s the only really possible modern candidate to have made the forgery) did not forge the letter (and I strongly doubt that) then I cannot see how anyone possibly could have done so earlier.

You are of course right that your “arguments from statistics do not require a date after Stählin” but anyone previously “working on the basis of Clement's currently surviving works” would not have made a compilation but instead read Clement a lot and got a feeling or a hunch of how he expressed himself and tried to imitate that. I do find it rather unlikely that someone in the past would have managed to write this letter in such a perfect way. But it could of course theoretically be accomplished so it is impossible to rule out that option.

My own personal belief is that the “secret” material was written by the same person who wrote the Gospel of Mark. To be more precise: The author wrote the longer Gospel of Mark and (either immediately or some time afterwards) he or someone else removed those parts which now is lost and the remaining text became the Gospel that is now in the Bible and known as the Gospel of Mark. I build this conclusion on how the “secret” part interacts with GMark and believe that it was part of Gospel right from the start. I cannot see how the language in itself could prove that either Secret Mark or Clement are genuine. On the other hand could a forger be exposed by linguistic errors, and you and Carlson have both tried to show this. I don’t find any of Carlson’s arguments to be persuasive, but your statistical analysis has some strength, although I do not find it particularly convincing, especially in the light of those arguments in favour of authenticity.

I would be good though if we got a chance to examine the endleaves from the book so that we at least could rule out some of the options, which are.

1) Is the letter really written in the 18th century or is it a modern forgery?
2) If the letter is written in the 18th century, is it then a copy of a genuine letter by Clement or a later forgery?
3) If the letter is a genuine letter by Clement, is then also The Secret Gospel of Mark genuine?
4) If the Secret Gospel of Mark is genuine, in that it was a real existing gospel, was it then written by the author of the Gospel of Mark or is it a Gnostic creation from the second century?

Kindly, Roger