Having It Both Ways With Secret Mark

[Peter Kirby]

His joke, though, is not by Clement, as has been shown by Andrew and by multiple others. Typing out bibliography, again, will not matter to anyone committed to be oblivious.

So do it for the rest of the lurkers. Otherwise you just sound dogmatic and committed, yourself.

[StephenGoranson]

Unfortunately, the zoom presentation by Geoffrey Smith, which used to be available at https://www.lmwsymposium.com/ is not longer there. We (that is, some of us) will have to wait for the book, which I guess will also again show that the Letter was not by Clement, the bibliographic reference of which I have given here multiple times. Again:
Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Rogue Scholar, A Controversial Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (under contract; forthcoming [maybe 2021, though 2022 may seem more likely by now?])
No documentation may change impervious S. Alias. Some others here may be more open to observations. Probably, if there were one, even a filmed, signed, notarized confession taking credit for the joke might not do in such circumstance. (....How would we know he wasn't, say, forced at gunpoint?) Such exceedingly extraordinary imperviousness itself may serve, for some, as a hint.

[StephenGoranson]

If you were going to copy a letter, and the version you had stopped suddenly, at a climactic moment, would you note that your copy ended there? A chain of improbabilities, which truthfully ....

[brewskiMarc]

If you were going to copy a letter, and the version you had stopped suddenly, at a climactic moment, would you note that your copy ended there? A chain of improbabilities, which truthfully ....

That's a very good point.

[Secret Alias]

Clement was a heretic (by later standards of orthodoxy). Modern scholars have even set up 'trials' for Clement to determine his orthodoxy. The standards of orthodoxy keep changing and getting so specific that any old text had to be changed to remove the shroud of suspicion from the writer. Maybe Clement says something stupid thereafter. Something which would automatically lead the document to be burned (according to later standards of orthodoxy). We experience something similar today where movies (Gone with the Wind) have scenes which make them 'problematic' because the world finds them 'offensive.' https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/ ... sic-movies

The idea that gospel texts had original exemplars behind them belonging to old communities was not in itself heretical. Matthew's (alleged) relationship to the Gospel of the Hebrews is the obvious example. The idea that Mark went to Alexandria and wrote a gospel for the community there was not in itself heresy. If Clement goes on to talk about things which were obvious 'no nos' (things mention Clement held or talked about in Photius, Arian sounding stuff, even Platonic, homoerotic language like Origen hints at using David and Jonathan in his letter to Theodore) that would have been a problem. It could also be that the fragment stops at this point. A friend of mine really did just win over $200000 at a Vegas casino by doubling down after every bet and then leaving the table. Not everything in life is ordinary. The extraordinary does happen from time to time. Life isn't always boring although the conviction to disenchant the universe can make boring seem like a kind a 'rule' to those who buy into this mandated disenchantment.

The bottom line still is however that there is no specific evidence which justifies denying to Theodore as an ancient text. If you feel it is to good to be true, maybe the problem is with you.

[Secret Alias]

The bottom line (as I tell my son almost every day) is that you can't think you know everything. Not to bring up his football training, but I keep telling him - you have to reach out for the extraordinary. You can't just settle for being 'average.' Greatness is attainable if you prepare yourself for it. I tell him, look after your technique and the results will take care of themselves. You can't control the outcome but you can limit your errors by adhering to proper form. In the same way, if there are no 'technical errors' with the document, that's a good sign that there is nothing wrong with the content. It doesn't mean that we can be certain that the document is 'authentic.' But the fact that there aren't 'technical errors' - that 9 out of 10 experts on Byzantine texts look at it in a blind test and see it as an authentic 17th or 18th century document - all signs point to the fact that 'it has good form' which (in athletic terms) increases the likelihood that the 'hit' is good, that it is 'authentic,' true, veracious.

[mbuckley3]

A sidelight on Enrico Tuccinardi's stylometric analysis.

Apart from Andrew, I expect only Peter on this forum has the math to do a proper appraisal of its methodology ( as if he has time for that ! ). Obvious questions are : does it 'work' across a spectrum of confirmed authors ? is it a 'fair' sampling of Clement, or have the selection and/or criteria been 'rigged' to produce a particular result ?

It's interesting to compare his two other published papers on forgery. Pliny's Ep.10.96, the letter to Trajan about Christians, he subjects to a stylometric analysis. The conclusion is that it is, at the very least, massively interpolated, if not an outright forgery. His piece on the 'Nazareth' inscription from Caesarea Maritima is more accessible, in that there is a ( fragmentary ) physical object to view, an exact source-text for the ( restored ) inscription, a documented chain of events, and - gloriously - the prime involvement of a 'biblical archaeologist' who later 'discovered' non-existent 'microletters' naming Jesus on ancient coinage.

In short, Tuccinardi might be inclined - for good circumstantial reasons - to suspect forgery. That the results of his analysis of the Letter to Theodore are, in Andrew's words, 'peculiar' but 'ambiguous', means that , in comparison, the Letter has emerged relatively unscathed. Which will leave both sides frustrated in this unending trench warfare !

[Paul the Uncertain]

If I understand the point you are raising I don't regard the idea that the author was using a list of words and phrases from Clement's authentic works as an additional hypothesis to the hypothesis that the work is non-authentic. If the work is non-authentic then the author must have used data from Clement in order to imitate him. There is no other way to do a plausible imitation. (I may be misunderstanding your point and if so I apologise.)

The idea that the received text involves an intent to deceive (and thus attempted "plausible imitation") seems integral to the hypothesis that Morton Smith is the true author of the text. Smith promoted the text as authentic, which would be deception, plain and simple, if Smith were the author (or a conspirator with the authors).

However, it is uncertain whether Morton Smith is the true author of the text. For hypotheses about alternative inauthetic authors, generally anonymous, finding an intent to deceive would be an additional hypothesis. An example of a different intention from "plausible imitation" is caricature.

One possible difference between a successful caricature and a failed facsimile may be how much the author must have used data from Clement.

Without firm support for an intention to deceive, it seems circular to conclude that the text is a modern product, made sometime after comprehensive word-level data about Clement's writings would have been available, in order for those data to have been used unsuccessfully to deceive modern users of such data.

[Secret Alias]

I think those who hold to the forgery proposition have a 'gut feeling' about the text which is supported by the 'gut feelings' of like-minded people. The fact that so many people share this 'gut feeling' gives them confidence to develop theories justifying their intuition. Then they slap each other on the back and feel like 'progress is being made' in exposing the text as a forgery. But there still is no actual evidence of forgery just more and more reassurances that something is there. Not sure what anyone can do to convince people who put stock in their 'gut' to stop doing that and stick to the actual evidence. The evidence suggests the manuscript was written in the 17th or 18th century and that the original material comes from either Clement or someone who does an amazing job sounding like Clement. That's all the evidence says.

[lsayre]

The letter seems to get abruptly cut off at an all too conveniently perfect juncture.