When Morton Smith studied the to Theodore fragment he compared the addition to Secret Mark with what immediately preceded it (Mark 10:17 - 31) but what about the material which immediately precedes that in chapter 10:
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Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” “What did Moses command you?” he replied. They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.” “It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her."[Mark 10:2 - 11]
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Origen tells us that 'in the house' distinguishes public from secret teaching. In other words Jesus tells 'the average Joe' marriage is forever but to his 'brothers' - according to the heretics - he gives another message. But what does he say?
Clement gives us some clues in Book Three of the Stromata:
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Is it not possible to practice self-discipline within marriage without trying to pull apart "that which God has joined"? That is the sort of thing taught by the dissolvers of the marriage bond. Through them the name of Christian comes into bad repute. These people say that sexual intercourse is polluted. Yet they owe their existence to sexual intercourse! Must they not be polluted? Personally, I think that the seed coming from consecrated people is sacred too. [Strom 3.46]
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So it isn't that they cut the material out of their gospel; they looked at the words of the narrative and noticed that Jesus doesn't say 'what God put together is inviolable' but 'no man can tear it apart.'
Jesus is God and the gospel is filled with things the Pentateuch God said were inviolable (honoring the Sabbath) and now put aside. But as Epiphanius notes in his study of the gnostic Ptolemy, the heretics followed the rabbinic distinction of a threefold division of commandments - (1) things God said (= ten utterances), (2) things Moses said (the rest of the commandments) and (3) things the fathers said.
Further there is consistent sense that 'the Law' is taken as a woman, a female hypostasis. As Pagels notes "divorce his wife, marry another' likely relates to the Law. It was at the cornerstone of the antinomian doctrine. So let's see the next reference which helps clarify things even more:
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If, as they claim, they have already attained the state of resurrection, and for that reason repudiate marriage, they should stop eating and drinking. For the Apostle said that the stomach and food would be dispensed with in the resurrection. Then how can they hunger and thirst and suffer the flesh and all the other things from which the person who has attained through Christ the fullness of the expected resurrection will be free? [48]
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So when Jesus says that in the age of the resurrection men won't marry women but be like the angels, the heretics thought that with baptism they had died and been resurrected. This is certainly reminiscent of the narrative in Secret Mark and also the emphasis on 'being free.'
In what immediately follows we read:
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There are those who say openly that marriage is fornication. They lay it down as a dogma that it was instituted by the devil. They are arrogant and claim to be emulating the Lord who did not marry and had no worldly possessions. It is their boast to have a profounder understanding of the gospel than anyone else. To them Scripture says, "God is against the proud and gives grace to the humble." Next, they do not know the reason why the Lord did not marry. In the first place, he had his own bride, the Church. Secondly, he was not a common man to need a physical partner. Further, he did not have an obligation to produce children; he was born God’s only Son and survives eternally. [49]
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Clearly one can intimate that what Jesus tells his brothers 'in the house' in private is taken to mean not only divorce yourself from the Law but don't marry a women. Be like the (masculine) angels who united themselves male with each other.
It is interesting to note the Diatessaron inserts Jesus's discussion of eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven in this passage. Jesus spells out even clearer what he means by this in what follows:
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But when a person has risen above temper and desire, when he shows an actual love for the creation, for the sake of God the maker of all things, then he will live a life of true knowledge effortlessly embracing the state of self-control following the likeness of the Savior, bringing knowledge, faith, and love into a single unity. From that point he is single in judgment and genuinely spiritual. He is totally closed to thoughts which arise from temper or desire. He is being brought to perfection according to the image of the Lord by the actual craftsman, becoming a fully mature human being, at last worthy to be called brother by the Lord. He is at once friend and son to him. In this way the two or three are gathered into the same point, the truly Gnostic human being.
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Isn't this what is described as following in Secret Mark with the disciple going to Jesus with the linen cloth? I don't get why this doesn't work.
And in his discussion of marriage he explains the business of "anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her" as being a metaphor for the mystical marriage discussion in the Pauline writings:
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How can marriage in the past be a mere invention of the Law, and marriage as ordained by our Lord be different, when it is the same God whom we worship? "Man must not pull apart that which God has joined together." That is reasonable. Far more so that that Son will preserve the things which the Father has ordained. If the Law and gospel come from the same being, the Son cannot fight against himself. The Law is alive because it is spiritual, 330 if we interpret it in the light of true knowledge. But we "have died to the Law through Christ’s body with a view to belonging to another, the one who was raised from the dead," the one who was prophesied by the Law, "so that we may bear fruit for God."
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Am I really the only one who sees the addition in Secret Mark as fitting perfectly with all of what precedes it in Mark chapter 10?
10-07-2012, 11:04 PM
Another Path to Understand Secret Mark As Belonging in Mark chapter 10
