Two Recent Discussions of Secret Mark

November 14, 2011 by Tony

Recently I have read two treatments of the Secret Gospel of Mark, one brief (a few pages from Robert M. Price’s Secret Scrolls: Revelations from the Lost Gospel Novels [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011]) and one more detailed (Edward Reaugh Smith’s The Temple Sleep of the Rich Young Ruler: How Lazarus Became the Evangelist John [Great Barrington, Mass.: SteinerBooks, 2011]). One merely presents old and erroneous arguments for the forgery of the gospel, the other offers a thorough overview of recent developments in the study of the text.

Price’s book is a comprehensive study of novels based on the notion of the possible impact on Christianity of the discovery of a lost gospel. It is a sequel of sorts of his earlier book The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church was Left Behind (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2007). In chapter three Price discusses J. H. Hunter’s 1940 novel The Mystery of Mar Saba, which Price and others (notably Craig Evans in his paper for the Secret Mark Symposium back in April; summarized HERE) believe gave Smith “the idea for a real live ‘lost gospel’ hoax of his own” (p. 28). Despite acknowledging the existence of photographs of the manuscript, Price remains “unconvinced” of the genuineness of the text. He postulates: “Suppose Smith found some blank pages at the end of that library book, and they spoke eloquently to him nonetheless, whispering to him of an opportunity for a rich joke. And then perhaps he got to work …

Reflections on “Erasure History”

November 14, 2011 by Tony

This past weekend I participated in John Marshall’s Erasure History workshop at the University of Toronto. The event featured papers by some fine scholars—including John Gager, Eldon Epp, Nicola Denzey Lewis, John Kloppenborg, and Mark Goodacre—which led to eye-opening discussion about the reception and perception of some of the ancient texts that are near and dear to our hearts.

First, what is “Erasure History”? The workshop program defines it as: “the effort to think through significant historical problems as if a crucial surviving source were instead among the lost. This endeavour of programmatically holding data in abeyance is meant to illuminate the conditions under which we actually labour and to facilitate fresh consideration of, and renewed humility before, the generative problems of Western historical scholarship. “ It may seem an odd exercise; as Mark Goodacre said in his presentation, perhaps our efforts are best put to examining the texts that we do have. But he concluded that the exercise does lead to some insights about how we approach lost, found, and rediscovered texts from antiquity.

I’m going to limit my comments to insights related to apocryphal texts (though this is due in part to missing several of the papers thanks to traffic problems; don’t get me started). The first paper to touch on the apocrypha was Mark Goodacre’s “A World Without Mark” (Mark likely will discuss the paper on his own blog within the next few days; check NT Blog). Mark approached his task in three ways: imagining that …