A Suggestion for Revising the Early Writings' Entry for Secret Mark

[Secret Alias]

And it doesn't even phase these characters that after 40 years of this shit all they can keep coming up with is ad hominem attacks. This is supposed to be a forgery debate. Do you maybe think that after 40 years it might be time to develop ... actual forgery arguments? You know, evidence from the photographs of the manuscript. Nah, it's too much fun ridiculing a guy for never getting married, for being gay without having any evidence he was, for having a 'strange' interest in Jewish mysticism, for being 'mentally unbalanced' and rigging an SBL panel with partisans of the forgery position to achieve that end, for being a devotee of Aleister Crowley without actually demonstrating he was in fact a devotee of Aleister Crowley, for reading books he can never be demonstrated to have read, for being bald, for having a name that happens to be the same as a Salt Company and all the other shit these academics have time to waste on. We're going to get around to providing proof of forgery ... once we get all these important ad hominems out of the way. If you are friends with scholars you see they spend half their day pissing around on Facebook. I guess they consider these things productive by comparison ...

[Roger Viklund]

Here’s the real problem with the Smith forgery hypothesis, and the thing the forgery advocators have to deal with, unless of course, they do like they do most of the time, ignore the facts. Here’s the real problem with Criddle’s theory in his 1995 study.

According to Criddle the letter has too many words previously used only once by Clement and too few words never before used by him. This suggests that a forger created the letter by using Stählin’s Clement concordance which came out in 1936. This means that the letter must have been composed after 1936. We have accordingly two options, either Smith forged it and only claimed to have found it in 1958, or someone else forged it in the time between 1936 and 1958 and placed it in the Mar Saba library where Smith found it. That’s the only two options because before 1936 there was no Clement concordance to use in order to gather the words Clement has used only once.

Option 1) According to this option we would have a master forger who would spend an immense amount of time learning patristic Greek and especially the style of Clement and his way of thinking and expressing himself. He or she would also learn to master the very difficult monastic 18th-century handwriting in order to write the letter in the book. That someone would have skills that by far would surpass those of Smith and on top of that be a skilled master scribe forger. Who would that be? Perhaps Murgia, Nock? It had to be someone at least as skilled as they were or even someone more skilled. More knowledgable than Smith. Or should we envision that the forgery was accomplished by a team of experts who when they had created their masterpiece somehow (I don’t know how) managed to smuggle the book into the Mar Saba library where they put it on some dusty shelf or threw it among the other books on the floor with the expectation that sometime someone would find the book, realize what it was, and make it public so that they could have a good laugh at it while never revealing their hoax. Now, either you believe this, or it’s option two.

Option 2) Smith forged the letter into the book, planted it in the library and claimed to have found what he had himself forged. He then spent six to seven years of his academic career studying the letter in order to find out whether it was genuine or not; defending the authenticity vigorously while never revealing that he had forged it. He would have forged it even though those who knew him well and worked with him ruled out the possibility that he was capable of forging the letter. That included Charles Murgia, who claimed that Smith’s knowledge of Greek was insufficient, Helmut Koester who claimed that it would have been completely beyond Smith’s ability to forge the text and Roy Kotansky, who worked with Smith on translating Greek, and who claimed that Smith certainly could not have produced the Mar Saba manuscript’s grammatical text. According to Kotansky, few are up to this sort of task, and Smith certainly wasn’t. Many people don’t seem to understand how extremely difficult it is to forge a text by a famous writer writing in a language which you yourself has learned as an adult. Consider what Ehrman writes: “I can read Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and well, a range of other languages. But if you ask me to compose a letter in any of these languages, forget it!” https://ehrmanblog.org/seriously-how-ma ... uld-write/ And then we have the handwriting. Although one can never prove such a thing, the only real analysis made of Smith’s ability to imitate the cursive script of the letter was done by Anastasopoulou, and she claimed that it was highly unlikely that Smith could have written it. In her opinion the writing was done unconsciously by someone used to write in this style. So, the forgery proponents then claim that Smith must have had help with the task. However, then we’re entering the real territory of conspiracy. And who would his co-collaborators be? Murgia and some Greek who had spent his life learning to write like 18th century monks?

The theory of a modern forgery supposes, like Criddle suggests, that the forgery was done after 1936 and that leaves us with only two options, both so unlikely that they’re almost impossible.

[Secret Alias]

But still where is the evidence or even the proof that the text is a forgery? A test that Criddle developed AFTER he saw an alleged anomaly which can't predict Shakespeare? I don't see that as being enough evidence for forgery. Surely every text if examined statistically will have certain deviations from the expected result. Have people made the same sort of examinations with other authors? All of this research seems to me to begin with the assumption of guilt and then whatever 'evidence' - even slight anomalies - are rushed to the fore as 'proof.' There is a case in Italy now where someone is claiming a bank overpaid for an MS and that it is really a forgery of Simonides. It is to this level that the arguments have to rise. They have to stand up to sort of criminal threshold. It can't just be about 'suspicion.' I think scholars are used to developing these short of shitty subjective arguments in the humanities. But to effectively outlaw a text you have to rise to evidence that would stand up in court.

Again Criddle published that in 1995. It's now 2019. We're still acting as if there is some basis for the claim that the text is a forgery and no one can point to any actual evidence. All we've got it personal attacks against Smith after 40 years of these guys working at it.

[Charles Wilson]

Have people made the same sort of examinations with other authors?

Actually, yes. Spend a good afternoon with John Ross Wilson critiquing Annals.

For years, I worried about Annals and its authenticity. "After all, it was discovered in the 1500s when forgeries were rampant."
Annals certainly helped me understand a lot about the Roman Thesis. I'm glad that Linguistic Analysis has determined that authorship by Tacitus is highly probable.

We may have another go at this type of thing with Secret Mark and it may be too soon (By a century or 2) before we have a definitive Opinion. Whether You-Know-Who was G-E-Y-Y or not is a bit frothy right now it appears to me.

However, to your question SA, we most certainly have seen other material challenged as Real or not.

CW

[Secret Alias]

Unfortunately you dont know what has been going on since Smith's death in 1991. This was a "team" takedown and a "team" resurrection of his reputation. Nothing like this in the history of scholarship. The effort against Smith coincided with the conservative revolution of Ronald Reagan. Neusner sat on the NEA. Wouldn't help out Theodore Gaster so Smith's break with Neusner became inevitable at the SBL. Neusner slinks off to South Florida after Brown finally gets tired of him http://stephanhuller.blogspot.com/2011/ ... e.html?m=1. Neusner plots his revenge http://stephanhuller.blogspot.com/2011/ ... r.html?m=1 . Becomes the beating heart of the - whatever you want to call it. In the middle of it Quesnell goes to see the MS and tells almost no one and drops out of sight. But throughout the 90s momentum builds. A reaction against the text brews in conservative circles. Freedom of Information requests. Private detectives. And then the Gospel Hoax built as it was on a mistake. He used poor quality images to help "find" the long awaited proof of forgery. Conservatives pounce. It's not that long until "peak Secret Mark" when a one-sided SBL panel post-humously declares Smith mentally unbalanced. And then, Quesnell of all people - quite against his will set the ball rolling in the other direction. When he walks away from the library in Jerusalem. He suppresses the photos. But he didn't count on the library keeping the negatives and producing photos from his efforts for Hedrick. That was the game changer. And then slowly the tide has gone the other way ever since. Back to the way it was before 1982.

But no there has never EVER been anything like the efforts perpetrated against Morton Smith and his discovery. Nothing.

[DCHindley]

Now in the past I had sepent a bit of time reading Stylometric studies as they relate to Pauline studies Starting with Andrew Queen Morton's Paul the Man and the Myth (1966). Then I went on to read The Authenticity of the Pauline Epistles (1990) by Kenneth J Neumann.

Seeing other studies mentioned in the notes, I checked out library books by Mosteller (Federalist papers, Inference, 1960s) and some others. Not being an expert on stylometry or statistics in general, I got a copy of The Computation of Style by Anthony Kenny (1982) for the "basics."

Now one thing I noted was how simplistic Morton's study was (sentence length). Of course there was no punctuation in Paul's day, so he settled for sentences measured as the interval between "hard" breaks in Greek as punctuated in the British Bible Society's critical edition. I created a number of graphs by entering his data (in the back of the book) into an Excel spreadsheet, which I found amusing. The relationships in sentence lengths between works, including some non-Christian ancient Greek letters serving as controls, were very diverse and surprising.

In contrast to this Neumann describes the vast improvements in Stylometric analysis that had evolved since Morton's study, now involving hundreds, even thousands, of stylistic markers. He thinks we need to expand the range of factors under consideretion, we're not quite there yet.

I believe the latest analysis trend involves N-Grams based on interval numbers of letters (every block of 4 letters, or 5 letters, not to be confused with # of words, although some use that as a definition as well). The idea is that rather than try to measure, and then correlate, a seemingly infinite number of criteria, it is better to reduce it to its basic elements, the grammatical letters themselves, hash them to death, and find "style" in there like the good taste of potatoes mashed with herbs and fresh butter (my apologies to the vegans among us). I'm curious about it, but I also notice many researchers who have added N-Grams to their lists of pronouns, adjectives, cdonjunctions, etc., making N-Grams just another indicator.

So why are we going back to single indicators, like haplax and all? Smith's fragment is an awfully small sample size to garner really meaningful results. Where are the control groups? There are dozens of Greek letters and books by Plato in circulation in antiquity (the Dialogues, and several letters). We can even weed out the ones that modern scholars generally consider to be inauthentic. I'd be curious to see how such a study compares to studies on the books and letters of church fathers, and Pauline letters.

DCH

Edit 10/25/2020: I am adding a PDF document with Morton's statistics and resulting frequency distributions:

[Peter Kirby]

a. forger's tremor
b. too Clementine for Clement nonsense

In the abstract, I like both of these arguments very much, because they attempt to deal with aspects of the facts that are both publicly accessible and directly relevant to authenticity. If there is a phenomenon of forgers demonstrating a tremor when imitating a hand and we can spot that, it's a good way to distinguish between a hand forged-to-look-18th-century-Greek and an 18th century Greek hand. If there is a way to measure whether a text is overly-drawn from the existing known words in the Clementine corpus (or something along those lines), rather than a distribution expected for a new text actually from Clement, that would be a good way to tell a Clementine work from a forged-to-look-like-Clement work.

Another thing that I like about these arguments is how reversible they are. They really set up the contest in terms of providing evidence for one alternative or another. If you believe in forger tremors and we don't find them, that's good evidence for authenticity. If you believe in the statistical analysis and the letter holds up, that's good evidence for authenticity.

These are exactly the kinds of arguments that I would encourage people to come up with & investigate.

The "too Clementine for Clement" thing makes perfect sense to me - in the abstract, anyway. People have a habit, when trying to imitate a statistical phenomenon, of overshooting in one direction and forgetting that being too extreme either way is also to fail to be typical of the distribution. One example of this is if you ask someone to produce a sequence of 0s and 1s (a Bernoulli process, p=0.5). They'll tend to alternate a lot, like this:

010010110110100101001010100110010101101001101010010011

But in the effort to look "random," they'll often avoid strings of three-in-a-row or four-in-a-row or more, making it very unlikely to be random.

While not discouraging this kind of argument, I'm also not saying they're successful. But they're completely legit and have potential.

[DCHindley]

Wait a minute, I'm beginning to see parallels!

Andrew Queen Morton = Seeks stylometric indicators for comparitive studies. predictably, he finds what he suspected all along, that the Letters to Churches are authentic, and most all the letters to individuals seem to be pseudepigraphs.
Andrew = Andrew Criddle, who proposed a stylometric test for the fragment to compare it's style to Clement's undoubted works, finding what he suspected, that Smith probably faked it.
Queen = Old fashioned term for a flamboyant homosexual.
Morton = Morton Salt = Morton Smith, the flamboyant homosexual who wasn't flamboyant, and probably wasn't homosexual.

Andrew, the proof by uncanny correlation is in, you are tied to Morton Smiths Mar Saba fake letter! It is just such a powerful correlation, I am haunted by it! Of course, Andrew might rightfully dispute these undisputable facts, as they are completely random facts. But I think Stephan Alias may be correct that too many of us (including me) like to find exactly what we want to find.

FWIW, the "magic" of Crowley was no more real than the "ektoplasm" of stiritualist seances.

DCH

PS: Is it me, or is spell check turned off? Would that be Browser specific? I just changed browsers about a month ago, but maybe I hadn't noticed it until now. Or is it a feature of the phpBB software that is turned off for some reason?

[Peter Kirby]

PS: Is it me, or is spell check turned off? Would that be Browser specific? I just changed browsers about a month ago, but maybe I hadn't noticed it until now. Or is it a feature of the phpBB software that is turned off for some reason?

Spell check is provided either by the browser or by the operating system, not by the forum.

[John2]

What is so "gay" about Secret Mark? Here is Smith's translation (and I will underline what I gather are interpreted as being the "gay" parts):

And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, 'Son of David, have mercy on me.' But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near, Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb, they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do, and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.

Jesus also refers to "the mystery of the kingdom of God" in Mk. 4:10-11:

As soon as Jesus was alone with the Twelve and those around Him, they asked Him about the parable. He replied, “The mystery of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to those on the outside, everything is expressed in parables ..."

Does anyone interpret this to mean that Jesus had homosexual relations with "the Twelve and those around him" when he was alone with them? It looks to me like it only means that he spoke to them plainly, unlike outsiders who were given parables.

And regarding the youth wanting to "be with" Jesus, I don't know what the Greek is for that, but other people are said to have "been with" Jesus.

Mk. 3:14:

And he appointed twelve, that they might be with him ...

Mk. 5:18:

And as he was entering into the boat, he that had been possessed with demons besought him that he might be with him.

And so what if the youth was "wearing a linen cloth over his naked body"? I gather this is the same youth mentioned in Mk. 14:51-52 and 16:5-7:

One young man who had been following Jesus was wearing a linen cloth around his body. They caught hold of him, but he pulled free of the linen cloth and ran away naked.

When they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here! See the place where they laid Him. But go, tell His disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see Him, just as He told you.’”

Since the youth had presumably been alone with Jesus in the tomb because he knew that he had "risen" (and which is presumably a "mystery of God") and was privy to Jesus "going ahead of you into Galilee," did the resurrected Jesus have homosexual relations with him in the tomb?

I think what could have happened is that Mark (or some copies of Mark) said some things, like in Secret Mark, that some Christians interpreted as being homosexual, so they were removed from Mark. But even Clement (if the Mar Saba letter is genuine) says there was nothing homosexual about Secret Mark.

But "naked man with naked man," and the other things about which you wrote, are not found.