A Debate on Secret Mark?
Peter Jeffery, author of The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled, added a comment to my post from a few weeks ago on the Secret Mark articles in Biblical Archeological Review. He wrote:
I did not write for BAR because I was never asked to. I didn't know there would be a special issue on the Secret Gospel until it was actually out. If I had been asked and given a reasonable deadline I would have written something. Koester was not on the 2008 SBL panel but spoke from the floor. I was not on that panel either because I wasn't asked to be. Nor was I permitted to publish a response to Brown's RBL review. "When is a real scholarly debate about Secret Mark going to happen?" you ask. When people start including me.
First, my mistake, Koester was not on the panel; he’s just such a big presence, I guess, that my memory elevated him to featured speaker (heh). More to the point, Jeffery’s comment has led me to thinking about what would be an appropriate forum for a full debate on the text. One of the problems with the SBL panel is that the panelists did not adequately respond to one another’s evidence for forgery/hoax—Brown and Pantuck did respond to points previously made by Carlson, but Carlson and the other panelists did not respond to Brown and Pantuck. But to be fair, Carlson et al should be granted opportunity to prepare a cogent rebuttal. Another problem with the panel is that some panelists were not experts on the text nor aware of Brown’s and Pantuck’s published articles that argued against Carlson’s (and Jeffery’s) position.
What is needed is a forum in which the true experts on the text—Brown, Pantuck, Carlson, Jeffery, Charles Hedrick, Guy Stroumsa, Marvin Meyer, and perhaps newcomer Jeff Jay—can communicate with each other effectively. Specifically, a workshop environment with papers prepared and disseminated to participants beforehand, so that time is spent more in fruitful dialogue than in inflammatory attacks. Perhaps then some clarity can be found regarding the arguments for or against the forgery/hoax hypothesis and scholarship on the text can progress in some meaningful direction.
Would this scenario be amenable to the Secret Mark scholars? Would this get the debate started?
People who think balance important will notice that your proposed list of speakers runs 6:2 in favor of authenticity. To some extent this reflects the scholarly situation: people who think the text is fake are less inclined to invest time, effort, and reputation in studying it. This also raises the question of who should be considered an expert, and on what. What about people like Joel Marcus, who has written much on the Gospel of Mark but has never been involved in Secret Gospel discussions? Or John Dart, who thinks he can prove the text is part of Mark but has never been included in anything. Are Pantuck and Stroumsa really experts on the Mar Saba text, or are their publications more about Morton Smith? And so on.
Apart from the question of whom to include, I think there are two ways to try to ensure that the principals actually address each other. One is to have a moderator or editor who is widely regarded as fair-minded but who will keep pushing for engagement. But the other, which I think most important, is to break the whole question down into smaller issues and only talk or write about one of them at a time. When you do that you start to see the real obstacles to resolving the issues. A breakdown might go like this:
1. The physical document (on hold till it turns up).
2. Arguments about handwriting (on hold till the BAR experts weigh in).
3. The relationship to other Gospels: Mark, John, non-canonical etc. The problem with this topic is that people who think SG is a fake generally agree it is derivative of the canonical gospels, mostly Mark. Whereas people who don’t will not agree on a unified position, but have all kinds of theories about synoptic interrelationships and other matters. Compare Koester and Dart for starters. Adding people who mainly specialize in non-Canonical gospels will really make this complicated.
4. The relationship to Clement’s accepted writings. Actually no one who could be considered a “Clement expert” in the strict sense has really been part of the recent conversation. The perception in Biblical studies that Clement people widely accept the authenticity of the letter does not seem to me to be true, however. Issues about what kind of mystery or initiation rite Clement is describing could go here, as could discussion of the Carpocratians and other groups he opposed. But this is a conversation that has barely gotten started at best.
5. Morton Smith, with at least three sub-questions. (1) Would such a forgery have exceeded his competence? I don’t think there is any way to answer that question definitively. (2) Does the text reveal features he could not have known enough to insert given the state of scholarship in the 1950s? So say Jay, Koester, and Dart, among others. (3) Did he have the motive? If people aren’t satisfied by his legendary hostility to religious belief in general and Christianity in particular, then the problem is that Morton Smith Studies has barely gotten off the ground as a field, and there are way too many aspects of his life that are not well understood. Why, as a priest, was he suddenly transferred from Philadelphia to Baltimore? Why did he leave the active ministry? What happened at Brown that caused so many people to feel alienated and want him out of there? How did he get to be the misanthropic personality revealed in his book Hope and History? A definitive, unanswerable solution to this question would require a biography, which no one is now writing.
In short, 1 and 2 are on hold. In 3, only the pro-forgery party can field a unified team. In 4 there are no experts among the people you list or otherwise immediately in evidence, and in 5 the research hasn’t been done yet. In spite of all that, if you’re really thinking about organizing something, I recommend taking one topic at a time and putting a strong but fair moderator or editor in charge of it.
pj
Peter,
Thanks for the feedback. I will pursue this further shortly, but one point about the selection of scholars that I listed. I listed only those scholars who have published something significant on the text and are therefore what we might call “experts.” You are right that it is unbalanced and that could be addressed but the goal there was to avoid having someone involved who is not conversant with the previous (or present) scholarship as we had at SBL.
Tony
If “published something significant” is the criterion, then surely Andrew Criddle and Charles Murgia should be invited, if not Bart Ehrman. And if you really want to make progress, the overall question should be broken down into smaller ones and dealt with one at a time. Then you have everyone dealing with the specific area in which they are an expert, and nobody can hide. Issues like “the relationship to canonical Mark and other gospels,” “the relationship to Clement’s writings and opponents” “Morton Smith’s competencies, trustworthiness and possible motives,” should be treated separately, each with its own panel.
pj
Just a word on the ‘other guy’ who has promoted the idea that ‘Secret Mark’ is a forgery – Stephen Carlson.
It seems that everyone took Carlson at his word but no one bothered to check the methodology for his greatest proof.
http://salainenevankelista.blogspot.com/2009/12/tremors-or-just-optical-illusion.html
The forger’s tremor was the one piece of evidence which gave me pause. Now it is gone. So according to my reckoning there is no reason any long to think that it is a forgery. Even Birger Pearson questions Carlson’s methodology now after reading that article
http://stephanhuller.blogspot.com/2009/12/birger-pearson-says-it-best-it-is.html
There is nothing gay about Secret Mark; the only thing that was queer was Carlson’s methodology (and again that not one scholar bothered to check it … until now).
I think it’s important to give the most weight to interlocutors who actually have experience, training, expertise in whatever sub-topic is being discussed. In the case of the handwriting issues, Carlson has genuine background in this, while the many who have tried to discredit his handwriting arguments do not. I suggest we wait and see what the two experts hired by BAR will say. I don’t know what they will conclude or even if they will agree with each other, but I contributed to the fund to pay them because I think consulting the qualified is the right move, and from what BAR says they appear to be the most credentialed people who have ever looked at this question. The authenticity (or not) of the Mar Saba text is not going to be established by amateurs and people who don’t know what they’re talking about because they’ve never really studied these subjects.
Similarly with the other issues, such as the relationships to the gospels and to the writings of Clement. I support everyone’s right to chime in, but I give greater credence to people who have training, experience, and publications in whichever area it is. That is why one can hardly regard the blogs you cite as closing the question.
Since Professor Jeffery is so concerned about academic integrity, I assume that he will happily reveal the primary sources he used when confirming Morton Smith’s homosexuality. It is revealed rather late in his book that he didn’t know Smith personally, so where did his information about Smith’s sexuality come from? I can only assume Professor Jeffery wasn’t repeating rumors and innuendos in his book or that he didn’t simply assume Smith’s sexuality to advance his argument. As far as Carlson’s qualifications as a document examiner or his qualifications as an expert on Greek handwriting, I (among many others) eagerly await the publication of his transcripts on those subjects. I assume that as an attorney Carlson knows about the recommended course of study for document examiners and the fact that a minimum of two years of apprenticeship under a qualified examiner is the recognized norm. Granted, I may be assuming too much.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36964375/A-Letter-to-Theodore-The-Secret-Gospel-of-Mark