Post by K on Feb 6, 2008 1:16:28 GMT -5
Some background info.
The Strange Case of the Secret Gospel According to Mark:
How Morton Smith's Discovery of a Lost Letter
by Clement of Alexandria Scandalized Biblical Scholarship
by Shawn Eyer
"Dear reader, do not be alarmed at the parallels between... magic and ancient Christianity. Christianity never claimed to be original. It claimed . . . to be true!" With these words in the New York Times Book Review, Pierson Parker reassured the faithful American public that it need not be concerned with the latest news from the obscure and bookish world of New Testament scholarship.[1] It was 1973, and the Biblical studies community, as well as the popular press, was in a stir over a small manuscript discovery that--to judge from the reactions of some--seemingly threatened to call down the apocalypse. A newly-released book by Columbia University's Morton Smith, presenting a translation and interpretation of a fragment of a newly-recovered Secret Gospel of Mark, was at the center of the controversy.
The Discovery (1958-1960)
In the spring of 1958 Smith, then a graduate student in Theology at Columbia University, was invited to catalogue the manuscript holdings in the library of the Mar Saba monastery, located twelve miles south of Jerusalem. Smith had been a guest of the same hermitage years earlier, when he was stranded in Palestine by the conflagrations of the second World War.
What Smith found during his task in the tower library surprised him. He discovered some new scholia of Sophocles, for instance, and dozens of other manuscripts.[2] Despite these finds, however, the beleaguered scholar soon resigned himself to what looked like a reasonable conclusion: he would find nothing of major importance at Mar Saba. His malaise evaporated one day as he first deciphered the manuscript that would always thereafter be identified with him:
[. . . O]ne afternoon near the end of my stay, I found myself in my cell, staring incredulously at a text written in a tiny scrawl. [. . . I]f this writing was what it claimed to be, I had a hitherto unknown text by a writer of major significance for early church history.[3]
What Smith then began photographing was a three-page handwritten addition penned into the endpapers of a printed book, Isaac Voss' 1646 edition of the Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris.[4] It identified itself as a letter by Clement of the Stromateis, i.e., Clement of Alexandria, the second-century church father well-known for his neo-platonic applications of Christian belief. Clement writes "to Theodore," congratulating him for success in his disputes with the Carpocratians, an heterodoxical sect about which little is known. Apparently in their conflict with Theodore, the Carpocratians appealed to Mark's gospel.
Clement responds by recounting a new story about the Gospel. After Peter's death, Mark brought his original gospel to Alexandria and wrote a "more spiritual gospel for the use of those who were being perfected." Clement says this text is kept by the Alexandrian church for use only in the initiation into "the great mysteries."
However, Carpocrates the heretic, by means of magical stealth, obtained a copy and adapted it to his own ends. Because this version of the "secret" or "mystery" gospel had been polluted with "shameless lies," Clement urges Theodore to deny its Markan authorship even under oath. "Not all true things are to be said to all men," he advises.
Theodore has asked questions about particular passages of the special Carpocratian Gospel of Mark, and by way of reply Clement transcribes two sections which he claims have been distorted by the heretics. The first fragment of the Secret Gospel of Mark, meant to be inserted between Mark 10.34 and 35, reads:
They came to Bethany. There was one woman there whose brother had died. She came and prostrated herself before Jesus and spoke to him. "Son of David, pity me!" But the disciples rebuked her. Jesus was angry and went with her into the garden where the tomb was. Immediately a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going up to it, Jesus rolled the stone away from the door of the tomb, and immediately went in where the young man was. Stretching out his hand, he lifted him up, taking hold his hand. And the youth, looking intently at him, loved him and started begging him to let him remain with him. And going out of the tomb, they went into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus gave him an order and, at evening, the young man came to him wearing nothing but a linen cloth. And he stayed with him for the night, because Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And then when he left he went back to the other side of the Jordan.
Then a second fragment of Secret Mark is given, this time to be inserted into Mark 10.46. This has long been recognized as a narrative snag in Mark's Gospel, as it awkwardly reads, "Then they come to Jericho. As he was leaving Jericho with his disciples..." This strange construction is not present in Secret Mark, which reads:
Then he came into Jericho. And the sister of the young man whom Jesus loved was there with his mother and Salome, but Jesus would not receive them.
Just as Clement prepares to reveal the "real interpretation" of these verses to Theodore, the copyist discontinues and Smith's discovery is, sadly, complete.
Smith stopped briefly in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to share his discovery with Gerschom Scholem.[5] He then returned to America where he sought the opinions of his mentors Erwin Goodenough and Arthur Darby Nock. "God knows what you've got hold of," Goodenough said.[6] "They made up all sorts of stuff in the fifth century," said Nock. "But, I say, it is exciting."[7]
At the 1960 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Morton Smith announced his discovery to the scholarly community, openly presenting a translation and discussion of the Clementine letter. A well-written account of his presentation, with a photograph of the Mar Saba monastery, appeared the next morning on the front page of The New York Times.[8] A list of the seventy-five manuscripts Smith catalogued appeared the same year in the journal Archaeology[9] as well as the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate journal, Nea Sion.[10] And Morton Smith embarked on a decade of meticulous investigation into the nature of his find.
The Reaction (1973--1982)
While there may seem nothing particularly scandalous about the apocryphal episodes of Secret Mark in and of themselves, the release of the material to the general public aroused a great deal of popular and scholarly derision. Smith wrote two books on the subject: first, the voluminous and intricate scholarly analysis Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, and then The Secret Gospel, a thin and conversational popular account of the discovery and its interpretation. The first book was delivered to the Harvard University Press in 1966, but was very slow at going through the press.[11] Smith's popular treatment, however, was released by Harper and Row in the summer of 1973. This is the version that most scholars had in their hands first. What did it say that was so shocking?
Smith's analysis of the Secret Mark text--and consequently the wider body of literature bearing on the history of early Christianity--brought him to consider unusual possibilities. Because Secret Mark presents a miracle story, this meant a particular concentration upon material of a like type. Smith was working outside of the traditional school of Biblical criticism which automatically regarded all miracle accounts as mythological inventions of the early Christian communities.[12] Instead of taking as his goal the theological deconstruction of the miracle traditions, Smith asked to what degree the miracle stories of the gospels might in fact be based upon actions of Jesus, much in the same way scholars examine the sayings traditions.
It has been typical for critical scholars of the Bible to reject any historical foundation for the "miracle-worker" stories about Jesus. Because such tales would tend to rely on the supernatural, and scholars seek to understand the origins of the Bible in realistic terms, it is more plausible for the modern critic to propose reasons for which an early Christian community might have come to understand Jesus as a miracle-worker and subsequently engage in the production of mythologies depicting him in that mold. Smith's understanding of the kingdom language in the Christian writings, with its well-known ambivalent eschatological and yet emphatically present or "realized" tendencies, evolved to the conclusion that:
[Jesus] could admit his followers to the kingdom of God, and he could do it in some special way, so that they were not there merely by anticipation, nor by virtue of belief and obedience, nor by some other figure of speech, but were really, actually, in.[13]
Smith held that the best explanation for the literary and historical evidence surrounding the mircles of Jesus was that Jesus himself actually performed--or meant to and was understood to have performed--magical feats. Among these was a baptismal initiation rite through which he was able to "give" his disciples a vision of the heavenly spheres. This was in the form of an altered state of consciousness induced by "the recitation of repetitive, hypnotic prayers and hymns," a technique common in Jewish mystical texts, Qumran material, Greek magical papyri and later Christian practices such as the Byzantine liturgy.[14] This is a radical departure from the mainstream scholarship which seeks to minimize or eliminate altogether any possible "supernatural" elements attached to the Historical Jesus, who is most often understood as a speaker on social issues and applied ethics . . . an Elijahform social worker, if you will.
Morton Smith did not begin with that assumption, nor did his reinterpretation of Christian history arrive at it. Thus, the new theory summarized in his 1973 book for general readership displeased practically everyone:
[. . . F]rom the scattered indications in the canonical Gospels and the secret Gospel of Mark, we can put together a picture of Jesus' baptism, "the mystery of the kingdom of God." It was a water baptism administered by Jesus to chosen disciples, singly and by night. The costume, for the disciple, was a linen cloth worn over the naked body. This cloth was probably removed for the baptism proper, the immersion in water, which was now reduced to a preparatory purification. After that, by unknown ceremonies, the disciple was possessed by Jesus' spirit and so united with Jesus. One with him, he participated by hallucination in Jesus' ascent into the heavens, he entered the kingdom of God, and was thereby set free from the laws ordained for and in the lower world. Freedom from the law may have resulted in completion of the spiritual union by physical union. This certainly occurred in many forms of gnostic Christianity; how early it began there is no telling.[15]
more at:
www.webcom.com/gnosis/library/secm_commentary.htm
The Strange Case of the Secret Gospel According to Mark:
How Morton Smith's Discovery of a Lost Letter
by Clement of Alexandria Scandalized Biblical Scholarship
by Shawn Eyer
"Dear reader, do not be alarmed at the parallels between... magic and ancient Christianity. Christianity never claimed to be original. It claimed . . . to be true!" With these words in the New York Times Book Review, Pierson Parker reassured the faithful American public that it need not be concerned with the latest news from the obscure and bookish world of New Testament scholarship.[1] It was 1973, and the Biblical studies community, as well as the popular press, was in a stir over a small manuscript discovery that--to judge from the reactions of some--seemingly threatened to call down the apocalypse. A newly-released book by Columbia University's Morton Smith, presenting a translation and interpretation of a fragment of a newly-recovered Secret Gospel of Mark, was at the center of the controversy.
The Discovery (1958-1960)
In the spring of 1958 Smith, then a graduate student in Theology at Columbia University, was invited to catalogue the manuscript holdings in the library of the Mar Saba monastery, located twelve miles south of Jerusalem. Smith had been a guest of the same hermitage years earlier, when he was stranded in Palestine by the conflagrations of the second World War.
What Smith found during his task in the tower library surprised him. He discovered some new scholia of Sophocles, for instance, and dozens of other manuscripts.[2] Despite these finds, however, the beleaguered scholar soon resigned himself to what looked like a reasonable conclusion: he would find nothing of major importance at Mar Saba. His malaise evaporated one day as he first deciphered the manuscript that would always thereafter be identified with him:
[. . . O]ne afternoon near the end of my stay, I found myself in my cell, staring incredulously at a text written in a tiny scrawl. [. . . I]f this writing was what it claimed to be, I had a hitherto unknown text by a writer of major significance for early church history.[3]
What Smith then began photographing was a three-page handwritten addition penned into the endpapers of a printed book, Isaac Voss' 1646 edition of the Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris.[4] It identified itself as a letter by Clement of the Stromateis, i.e., Clement of Alexandria, the second-century church father well-known for his neo-platonic applications of Christian belief. Clement writes "to Theodore," congratulating him for success in his disputes with the Carpocratians, an heterodoxical sect about which little is known. Apparently in their conflict with Theodore, the Carpocratians appealed to Mark's gospel.
Clement responds by recounting a new story about the Gospel. After Peter's death, Mark brought his original gospel to Alexandria and wrote a "more spiritual gospel for the use of those who were being perfected." Clement says this text is kept by the Alexandrian church for use only in the initiation into "the great mysteries."
However, Carpocrates the heretic, by means of magical stealth, obtained a copy and adapted it to his own ends. Because this version of the "secret" or "mystery" gospel had been polluted with "shameless lies," Clement urges Theodore to deny its Markan authorship even under oath. "Not all true things are to be said to all men," he advises.
Theodore has asked questions about particular passages of the special Carpocratian Gospel of Mark, and by way of reply Clement transcribes two sections which he claims have been distorted by the heretics. The first fragment of the Secret Gospel of Mark, meant to be inserted between Mark 10.34 and 35, reads:
They came to Bethany. There was one woman there whose brother had died. She came and prostrated herself before Jesus and spoke to him. "Son of David, pity me!" But the disciples rebuked her. Jesus was angry and went with her into the garden where the tomb was. Immediately a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going up to it, Jesus rolled the stone away from the door of the tomb, and immediately went in where the young man was. Stretching out his hand, he lifted him up, taking hold his hand. And the youth, looking intently at him, loved him and started begging him to let him remain with him. And going out of the tomb, they went into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus gave him an order and, at evening, the young man came to him wearing nothing but a linen cloth. And he stayed with him for the night, because Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And then when he left he went back to the other side of the Jordan.
Then a second fragment of Secret Mark is given, this time to be inserted into Mark 10.46. This has long been recognized as a narrative snag in Mark's Gospel, as it awkwardly reads, "Then they come to Jericho. As he was leaving Jericho with his disciples..." This strange construction is not present in Secret Mark, which reads:
Then he came into Jericho. And the sister of the young man whom Jesus loved was there with his mother and Salome, but Jesus would not receive them.
Just as Clement prepares to reveal the "real interpretation" of these verses to Theodore, the copyist discontinues and Smith's discovery is, sadly, complete.
Smith stopped briefly in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to share his discovery with Gerschom Scholem.[5] He then returned to America where he sought the opinions of his mentors Erwin Goodenough and Arthur Darby Nock. "God knows what you've got hold of," Goodenough said.[6] "They made up all sorts of stuff in the fifth century," said Nock. "But, I say, it is exciting."[7]
At the 1960 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Morton Smith announced his discovery to the scholarly community, openly presenting a translation and discussion of the Clementine letter. A well-written account of his presentation, with a photograph of the Mar Saba monastery, appeared the next morning on the front page of The New York Times.[8] A list of the seventy-five manuscripts Smith catalogued appeared the same year in the journal Archaeology[9] as well as the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate journal, Nea Sion.[10] And Morton Smith embarked on a decade of meticulous investigation into the nature of his find.
The Reaction (1973--1982)
While there may seem nothing particularly scandalous about the apocryphal episodes of Secret Mark in and of themselves, the release of the material to the general public aroused a great deal of popular and scholarly derision. Smith wrote two books on the subject: first, the voluminous and intricate scholarly analysis Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, and then The Secret Gospel, a thin and conversational popular account of the discovery and its interpretation. The first book was delivered to the Harvard University Press in 1966, but was very slow at going through the press.[11] Smith's popular treatment, however, was released by Harper and Row in the summer of 1973. This is the version that most scholars had in their hands first. What did it say that was so shocking?
Smith's analysis of the Secret Mark text--and consequently the wider body of literature bearing on the history of early Christianity--brought him to consider unusual possibilities. Because Secret Mark presents a miracle story, this meant a particular concentration upon material of a like type. Smith was working outside of the traditional school of Biblical criticism which automatically regarded all miracle accounts as mythological inventions of the early Christian communities.[12] Instead of taking as his goal the theological deconstruction of the miracle traditions, Smith asked to what degree the miracle stories of the gospels might in fact be based upon actions of Jesus, much in the same way scholars examine the sayings traditions.
It has been typical for critical scholars of the Bible to reject any historical foundation for the "miracle-worker" stories about Jesus. Because such tales would tend to rely on the supernatural, and scholars seek to understand the origins of the Bible in realistic terms, it is more plausible for the modern critic to propose reasons for which an early Christian community might have come to understand Jesus as a miracle-worker and subsequently engage in the production of mythologies depicting him in that mold. Smith's understanding of the kingdom language in the Christian writings, with its well-known ambivalent eschatological and yet emphatically present or "realized" tendencies, evolved to the conclusion that:
[Jesus] could admit his followers to the kingdom of God, and he could do it in some special way, so that they were not there merely by anticipation, nor by virtue of belief and obedience, nor by some other figure of speech, but were really, actually, in.[13]
Smith held that the best explanation for the literary and historical evidence surrounding the mircles of Jesus was that Jesus himself actually performed--or meant to and was understood to have performed--magical feats. Among these was a baptismal initiation rite through which he was able to "give" his disciples a vision of the heavenly spheres. This was in the form of an altered state of consciousness induced by "the recitation of repetitive, hypnotic prayers and hymns," a technique common in Jewish mystical texts, Qumran material, Greek magical papyri and later Christian practices such as the Byzantine liturgy.[14] This is a radical departure from the mainstream scholarship which seeks to minimize or eliminate altogether any possible "supernatural" elements attached to the Historical Jesus, who is most often understood as a speaker on social issues and applied ethics . . . an Elijahform social worker, if you will.
Morton Smith did not begin with that assumption, nor did his reinterpretation of Christian history arrive at it. Thus, the new theory summarized in his 1973 book for general readership displeased practically everyone:
[. . . F]rom the scattered indications in the canonical Gospels and the secret Gospel of Mark, we can put together a picture of Jesus' baptism, "the mystery of the kingdom of God." It was a water baptism administered by Jesus to chosen disciples, singly and by night. The costume, for the disciple, was a linen cloth worn over the naked body. This cloth was probably removed for the baptism proper, the immersion in water, which was now reduced to a preparatory purification. After that, by unknown ceremonies, the disciple was possessed by Jesus' spirit and so united with Jesus. One with him, he participated by hallucination in Jesus' ascent into the heavens, he entered the kingdom of God, and was thereby set free from the laws ordained for and in the lower world. Freedom from the law may have resulted in completion of the spiritual union by physical union. This certainly occurred in many forms of gnostic Christianity; how early it began there is no telling.[15]
more at:
www.webcom.com/gnosis/library/secm_commentary.htm