A year and a half or so ago I wrote a piece about some of the biblical apocrypha -- books and epistles and letters and whatnot that didn't make the cut to be part of the canonical Bible when the whole thing was hashed out at the Council of Rome (382 C.E.), the Synod of Hippo (393 C.E.), and the Synod of Carthage (397 C.E.), after which the Bible had something close to its current form. (As I mention in the post, the idea that canon was established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 is a commonly-held misconception; Nicaea had nothing to do with decisions about what was scripture and what wasn't, but was about the nature of the Trinity and how to determine the date for Easter.)
What's interesting is that even since all of the late-fourth-century wrangling by the church fathers, there hasn't been an end to what is Holy Writ and what should be written out, because new documents keep popping up. The most famous are the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank; those, although they were certainly a fantastic historical and archaeological discovery, didn't much affect religious belief, because they were mostly composed either of (1) canonical Old Testament books, (2) writings that we already knew about but had been declared non-canonical apocrypha (like the supremely weird Books of Enoch), or (3) descriptions of religious and secular law.
Sometimes, though, a document is discovered that leave both the historians and the devout scrambling for an explanation. And that brings us to the "Mystic Gospel of Mark."
You ready for a tangled tale?
Back in 1958, an American historian named Morton Smith was poring through some old manuscripts at the Monastery of Mar Saba, and found a handwritten Greek text appended to the end of a seventeenth-century printed edition of the writings of Ignatius of Antioch. Smith identified the text as an eighteenth-century copy of a letter from the theologian Clement of Alexandria (150 - 215 C.E.), which made reference to the Gospel of Mark -- not the standard version, but a longer, "secret" gospel (τοῦ Μάρκου τὸ μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον).
Smith hand-transcribed the document, then requested (and was approved) to take the original to the Greek Orthodox Library in Jerusalem. Despite Smith writing a paper on the discovery in 1960, little attention was given to the document; as far as we know, only three other scholars ever set eyes on it, the religious historians David Flusser, Shlomo Pines, and Guy Stroumsa. Stroumsa, who saw it in 1976, appears to be the last person who gave the manuscript a close look. Smith took photographs of the pages in question, but the document itself mysteriously disappeared some time between then and 1990 and hasn't been seen since.
The putative Clement of Alexandria letter included two passages that occur nowhere in the current Gospel of Mark, but were supposedly from the longer "Mystic Gospel." One passage is much lengthier than the other; and it's that one that caused a furor, especially given how Morton Smith translated and interpreted it. Here's Smith's translation:
And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, "Son of David, have mercy on me." But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing only a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.
So yeah. Smith interpreted the naked young man "remaining with Jesus that night" to mean that not only did Jesus condone homosexuality, he participated in it.
You can see why that turned some heads.
Whether this interpretation alone was the cause, historians immediately started claiming the whole thing was a forgery. Quentin Quesnell stopped just short of accusing Smith outright, but said that the "hypothetical forger matched Smith's apparent ability, opportunity, and motivation" (Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 71, no. 4, pp. 353–378). Stephen Carlson went even further, as you might surmise by the title of his book on the subject -- The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark -- and points out that a 1910 catalogue of the holdings of the Mar Saba Monastery Library doesn't list the book where Smith allegedly found the document, and from that (and the book's later mysterious disappearance) Carlson concludes that Smith forged the letter, then made sure the original vanished so that modern hoax-detection techniques such as ink analysis wouldn't reveal what he'd done. Jacob Neusner, a historian specializing in ancient Judaism, called it "the forgery of the century."
Not everyone is so sure, though. There are a good number of historians who point out that the photographs of the document (which still exist) demonstrate a sure hand at writing eighteenth-century Greek calligraphy, and further, that the writing style and word choice is completely consistent with known writings of Clement of Alexandria. Producing such a close match, they say, would have been beyond Morton Smith's knowledge, skill, and ability. New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, in his book Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, writes, "It is true that a modern forgery would be an amazing feat. For this to be forged, someone would have had to imitate an eighteenth-century Greek style of handwriting and to produce a document that is so much like Clement that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Clement, which quotes a previously lost passage from Mark that is so much like Mark that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Mark. If this is forged, it is one of the greatest works of scholarship of the twentieth century, by someone who put an uncanny amount of work into it."
And the historians are still arguing about this. One of those impossible questions to settle, as far as I can see, given that the original document is AWOL, whether by accident or design. Responses by scholars and interested laypeople vary from "it was a hoax from beginning to end, and Smith did it" to "the letter isn't authentic but was an earlier forgery, and Smith got fooled but was acting in good faith" to "the letter was an authentic transcription from Clement, but the passages weren't actually by the Evangelist Mark" to "okay, they're by Mark, but the gay Jesus passage is being mistranslated or misinterpreted" to "yay! Gay Jesus FTW!"
It's hard to escape the conclusion that everyone's taking this and finding ways to use it to support whatever it was they already believed.
The problem here is that the evidence we actually have is somewhere beyond thin -- a photograph of an eighteenth-century transcription (for which the original is lost) of a third-century letter (for which the original is even loster, if it ever existed in the first place) of some extra passages for a Gospel that a even lot of the devout think wasn't itself written until at least three decades after Jesus's death. So from that, you can conclude damn near anything you want.
I mean, I love archaeology and history, but really.
So that's our excursion into the labyrinth of biblical scholarship. Me, I think I'll move on to something I can be more sure about, like quantum physics. At least there, the whole concept of the Uncertainty Principle has a clear definition.
No comments:
Post a Comment