Secret Mark at the 2008 SBL Annual Meeting
I was a rather bad boy at this year’s SBL, attending only one day of the conference, the day that comprised my own paper on the Syriac tradition of Infancy Thomas and the afternoon session on Secret Mark (“Secret Mark after Fifty Years”). I decided to compose a post on the session because of the text’s importance for those who study the Christian Apocrypha and because of the session’s relation to my recent article and postings on conservative scholars’ approaches to the CA (Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium). My apologies in advance for any infelicities in recording and summarizing the event.
The session was chaired by Mark Goodacre and featured two pairs of scholars: Stephen Carlson (known for his book The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark) and Birger Pearson, who deny the text’s authenticity, and Scott Brown (known for his own monograph on Secret Mark, Mark’s Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith’s Controversial Discovery, and for his responses to Carlson’s book) and Allan Pantuck, who believe it to be an authentic ancient text. There were also two respondents: Charles Hedrick who supported Brown’s and Pantuck’s position, and Bart Ehrman who sided with Carlson and Pearson.
Pearson’s presentation, “The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Twentieth-Century Fake,” offered a selective overview of research on the text—selective, that is, in that it focused on the scholarship that convinced Pearson to go from a supporter of its authenticity to a critic. He cited particularly Per Beskow’s Strange …