Sabar's New Morton Smith Article

[StephenGoranson]

Back to the ms:
"....in fact indicates forgery or imitation of 18th-century Greek script..."

[Secret Alias]

I believe that Ken and Stephen's position can be summarized as follows:

Trust Morton Smith only enough to distrust the Letter to Theodore.

It's complete circularity.

[Secret Alias]

And with respect to Ken's other thread in the "safe place" set up for Neil:

As I said earlier, let's list all the possibilities regarding the authorship of the letter:



I find (3) and (5) the least compelling possibilities. The least likely by a long shot.

Now let's revisit Morton Smith's interpretation of the text. The conspiracy theory has it that Morton Smith knew everything about the document because he was its author. Tselikas isn't just "a" Greek palaeographer Agamemnon Tselikas as you say but THE Greek palaeographer head and shoulders above all the rest by the acknowledgement of every Greek palaeographer I ever consulted with. That's the first thing. Then you cite:
Paananen and Viklund (2015) and A. K. M. Adam (2018) prefer Smith's reading of γυμνὸς γυμνῷ, 'naked man with naked man'.
None of these are in any way "experts" of Byzantine handwriting. Smith acknowledges this and so with the two and a half pages he devoted to the paleography consulted with experts form Greece. Ah, but you and yours say "this was deception." He knew it was a forgery. Ok but Smith acknowledges through this deference to Greek authorities he was not an expert on Byzantine handwriting, faux or otherwise.

But Smith also did not calculate the nomina sacra correctly. In he misrepresents or misreads κυρίου appearing as κου. There is one κυ. I've demonstrated that here before.

So Smith isn't an expert on Byzantine handwriting. He misreads things. The accent is over the iota with respect to whether the word is γυμνὸς or γυμνοὶ. You want it to be γυμνὸς because then the conspiracy theory you believe in remains intact. Tselikas has no dog in this hunt. He bases his entire decision on the number times iota is shaped like the iota in γυμνοὶ.



It is more likely to be γυμνοὶ than γυμνὸς. The only expert who has ever weighed in on the subject reads it as such. He has no dog in the hunt. His opinion is objective. All sides in this idiotic debate have published things to this or that effect and given that scholars can never admit they are wrong they persist.

But let's consider something else.

You in your faux "objectivity" admit it could go either way. It could be γυμνὸς or γυμνοὶ. Why didn't Smith at least acknowledge this. Why wasn't there a discussion about variant possibilities? Oh of course. He wanted it to be "naked man with naked man." Why didn't he just write it then? If the whole point of the conspiracy theory was to establish a gay Jesus, why didn't he establish a gay Jesus? Why didn't he write γυμνὸς γυμνῷ.

Surely he couldn't have had one old book. If he could afford one used and battered Voss he could have afford a few more. Why not pick the forgery where γυμνὸς γυμνῷ appears as γυμνὸς γυμνῷ rather than γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ?

[Peter Kirby]

Why do I have to assume that participants in an open discussion forum "fairly" evaluated evidence? "Fairly" considered what an expert in the field said about a manuscript? Surely experience can have taught me that people basically self-centered animals. That is what experience has taught me about all human beings.

That's why I call it a polite fiction, which is maintained merely by not expressing these opinions to people you're talking with. It's the generally expected little white lie of omission that allows a discussion to stay focused on the subject matter.

[StephenGoranson]

SA, in part:
"I believe that Ken and Stephen's position can be summarized as follows:..."
I won't presume to speak for Ken,
but, no, that is not an accurate summary of my view.

[Secret Alias]

Of course not. It some times feels like you are here because you got stood up on a date with Morton Smith and vowed to spend the rest of your life destroying his reputation. Come on. You just hate Morton Smith. The way Neil hates God, you hate Morton Smith. Anyway, it's kind of cute. Who would think we'd be talking about this skinny weird professor.

[Secret Alias]

That's why I call it a polite fiction, which is maintained merely by not expressing these opinions to people you're talking with. It's the generally expected little white lie of omission that allows a discussion to stay focused on the subject matter.

What's the subject matter? I don't even know any more. Are we really having a conversation about whether this document is a forgery or is it whether Morton Smith is gay or it is Jesus gay or is it could a professor so hate religion and God that he went through a mental Gladiators obstacle course to plant a book with an inscription and "naked man and naked man" written as "nakeds with nakeds" to fool the world? What IS the fucking subject?

After spending many years and even publishing a paper on this subject, I think the real subject is religious scholarship is dead and who gets to preserve the rules for how to study it.

Morton Smith was a real scholar. Like a titan. People think I "like' Smith and Landau because they wrote a book "in favor" of a position I "like." They don't hold a candle to Morton Smith. He was the last of the great scholars from the past. All these people today are mere shopkeepers. Just little men and women cleaning up around the dead corpse of God.

[andrewcriddle]

I'm not entirely sure why γυμνοί is being taken to imply a heterosexual reference, it is a masculine plural, γυμναί would be the feminine plural. Obviously it might have a heterosexual reference but not necessarily.

Andrew Criddle

[Secret Alias]

So you're suggesting that I implied Clement might have said that Jesus was Hugh Hefner?



Come on. I like you Andrew. But we are the only two people at this forum who know the evidence. Citing Gregory for "naked man with naked man" is problematic for your argument too right? I was thinking about this when I woke up. The logical proposition behind the Morton Smith conspiracy theory as we know it is:

IF the reference says "naked man with naked man" and IF Morton Smith was a homosexual THEN Morton Smith was the forger.

But you've just casually let slip that "naked man with naked man" was used in a RELATED (neo-Alexandrian) tradition with a century of Clement's death as something that one Christian could say about another Christian POSITIVELY. So Christians were indeed saying (like the Carpocratians) that I was a "naked man with naked man" with another Christian.

So now we can take the formula one step further:

IF the reference says "naked man with naked man" and Clement wasn't citing the kind of thing that Origenists said to one another and IF Morton Smith was a homosexual THEN Morton Smith was the forger.

I won't get into the fact that there is no actual evidence that Morton Smith had a homosexual relationship with any man. I have had the letter cited read to me over the phone IN FULL and I can tell you that I suspect Sabar doesn't produce the letter because it is not a confession of homosexuality. But be that as it may be, while there was a time that "being a homosexual" put one under suspicion, no less being a communist, a Jew whatever was mistrusted "back then" you have a very weak argument against Morton Smith.

1. the people in the monastery at the time Morton Smith discovered the letter down until 1980s thought the document was authentic.
2. the text does not say "naked man with naked man" but "nakeds with naked man" which agrees with what Clement would say about the Carpocratians and so Clement might actually have said or any forger forging a document in his name.
3. if the text contains a poor rendering of "naked man with naked man" such a phrase is only known from antiquity to refer to a POSITIVE relationship between Origenist Christians. Ancients had different conceptions about nakedness than we do. In my reading of ancient literature nakedness in Greek writing had overtones of "being sympathetic" or returning to nature, a natural state more than it did homosexuality. But if it is a homosexual reference which can't be disproved, it remains one of many interpretations of a phrase which more than likely IS NOT intended by the writer as Tselikas notes it reads "nakeds with naked."

So the forgery case with respect to Morton Smith has been consistently developed with the naive assumption that "the text says naked man with naked man" when it probably does not,that naked man with naked man can only imply a homosexual relationship is a complete misrepresentation which you have confessed you know very well (Gregory was not openly confessing to his Christian audience that he and Basil were gay lovers) i.e. the evidence refutes this suggestion entirely, there is no evidence that Morton Smith was a homosexual and there is clear confessional evidence that Morton Smith was in a heterosexual relationship when he went to Mar Saba and finally that "naked with naked" was the kind of thing Origenists said to one another brings up the uncomfortable fact that "Harpocrates" and "Origen" both make reference to the Egyptian god Horus. Clement might have in mind Origen or his disciples depending on how long we imagine Clement lived and when the letter was written. A young Origen might have been identified by his detractors as Harpocrates.

[StephenGoranson]

SA wrote above, Sat Mar 16, 2024 6:41 am, in part:

"1. the people in the monastery at the time Morton Smith discovered the letter down until 1980s thought the document was authentic."

What is the basis for this claim?