The letter and the labyrinth

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.

One of Smith's photographs of the alleged "Mystic Gospel of Mark" document [Image is in the Public Domain]

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.

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Awaiting angelic intervention

As I write this, I'm waiting for the Rapture (it was supposed to happen on Tuesday, but evidently got postponed a few days), so I figured to while away the time until the holy are bodily assumed into heaven and the rest of us slobs get visited by the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons and the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and the Beast and various other special offers, I'd consider the question of how this stuff got included in the Bible in the first place.

The Book of Revelation is one of the parts of the Bible that some True Believers embrace enthusiastically, while if you ask others, they'll shift in their seats and laugh uncomfortably and mumble something about "symbolic... metaphors... not meant to be taken literally..." and then change the subject.  What's interesting, though, is that this is far from the weirdest piece of writing that was considered to be part of scripture.  Back in the fourth century, there were so many gospels and epistles and books and letters and assorted miscellany that church leaders finally had to hold a series of meetings to try to figure out what was canonical and what wasn't.

So they got together at the Council of Rome (382 C.E.), the Synod of Hippo (393 C.E.), and the Synod of Carthage (397 C.E.), and after that the Bible had something close to its current form.  (Interestingly, the idea that canon was established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 is a 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.)  In any case, what's fascinating here is that the church fathers had their work cut out for them, because there were tons of manuscripts to sift through.

And when you start looking through the ones that didn't make the cut -- the ones now labeled "apocrypha" -- you find out that by comparison to some of them, the Book of Revelation comes across as blander than Fun With Dick and Jane.

First, let's consider the Books of Enoch, of which there are three.  1 Enoch especially is a trip, and is also interesting because a lot of what angel enthusiasts chatter on about comes right from there.  You might not know that there are only five angels mentioned by name in the standard Bible -- three good guys, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, and two fallen angels, Lucifer and Abbadon.  That's it.  All the rest come from the apocrypha, or from People Making Shit Up, which even many religious people agree pretty much amounts to the same thing.

Another thing about 1 Enoch you might find entertaining is that this is also where most of the nonsense about the Nephilim comes from.  The Nephilim were created when angels came down to Earth and had lots of sex with human women, and the result was the women giving birth to babies who grew up into giant "men of renown."  The Nephilim get a passing, and rather vague, mention in Genesis 6 and Numbers 13, but 1 Enoch really gives details.  They were "three hundred ells tall" -- that'd be something on the order of two hundred meters -- and given to doing some seriously bad shit:

And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three hundred ells, [and] who consumed all the acquisitions of men.  And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.  And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood.

So that's kind of nasty.  Fortunately, God commanded the unfallen angels -- the ones who hadn't been canoodling with human women -- to do battle with the Nephilim, and the Nephilim lost big time.  They were all cast into the fiery abyss, where they dwelleth lo unto this very day.

Then there's a weird passage about farm animals doing stuff:

And that sheep whose eyes were opened saw that ram, which was amongst the sheep, till it forsook its glory and began to butt those sheep, and trampled upon them, and behaved itself unseemly.  And the Lord of the sheep sent the lamb to another lamb and raised it to being a ram and leader of the sheep instead of that ram which had forsaken its glory...  And I saw that a great sword was given to the sheep, and the sheep proceeded against all the beasts of the field to slay them, and all the beasts and the birds of the heaven fled before their face.

Ha-ha, yeah... *shifts uncomfortably*  Metaphor... um... symbols...

But if you think that's weird, what's even wilder is what ultimately happens to Enoch.  A passage in 3 Enoch tells us that he's brought up to heaven, and transformed into the angel Metatron, in a process that sounds really fucking uncomfortable:

At once my flesh turned to flame, my sinews to blazing fire, my bones to juniper coals, my eyelashes to lightning flashes, my eyeballs to fiery torches, the hairs of my head to hot flames, all my limbs to wings of burning fire, and the substance of my body to blazing fire. On my right— those who cleave flames of fire—on my left—burning brands—round about me swept wind, tempest, and storm; and the roar of earthquake upon earthquake was before and behind me.

So when you think of Metatron, if you picture the kind, avuncular Derek Jacobi in Good Omens or the snide, wry, world-weary Alan Rickman in Dogma, you might want to revise that image.

And this is just the Books of Enoch.  If you want some even wackier stuff, check out the Gospel of Thomas, which recounts the childhood of Jesus and depicts him as some sort of super-powerful spoiled brat.  (Reading it made me wonder if this is where the expression "holy terror" comes from.)  Amongst many other atrocities, at age one Baby Jesus curses another kid and makes him "wither into a corpse." Later he kills a neighbor kid for spilling water he'd drawn up from a well, and offs a different kid for bumping into him.

When the neighbors complain, he strikes them blind.

The general impression is more gangsta rap than it is "holy infant, so tender and mild."

Then there's the Apocalypse of Ezra, in which God has an argument with the prophet Ezra wherein Ezra says that since God created the Apple and the Serpent, he's responsible for humanity becoming sinful, so he can't rightfully punish people for doing bad shit.  Which seems like a legit objection to me.  But God shows Ezra the fiery tortures of hell, and says, basically, "What now, Ezra?  Any other questions?" and Ezra says, "Oh, okay, I see your point" and the book ends with a score of God 1, Ezra 0.

In any case, what strikes me about all this is that when it came time to sift through all the hundreds of manuscripts and decide what was canonical and what wasn't, the decision wasn't made by any kind of holy agency.  It was just a bunch of guys arguing about it and finally whittling the list down by about half to what we have today.  (And there are still disagreements -- that's why the various Orthodox sects, Catholicism, and Protestant denominations all have a slightly different set of books in their bibles.)

Of course, the apologists say the decision was made by people who were divinely motivated.  As the Christian site Got Questions puts it, "There are no 'lost books' of the Bible, or books that were taken out of the Bible, or books missing from the Bible.  Every book that God intended to be in the Bible is in the Bible.  There are many legends and rumors of lost books of the Bible, but the books were not, in fact, lost.  Rather, they were rejected...  These books were not inspired by God."

So that's convenient.  Me, I find the whole thing bizarre and a little mystifying, which I suppose is unsurprising.

Anyhow, here I sit, drinking my coffee and waiting for the Rapture.  By the time y'all read this, it'll either have happened or it won't, so if I get Raptured I won't be around to read your comments.  (Admittedly, this is unlikely given my history, and if there was any doubt in the minds of the Heavenly Judges, the fact that I just wrote this post probably sealed the deal.)  If I'm still here, we'll see what's going on in the world.  My guess is that regardless, there won't be any angelic intervention by Enoch-Metatron or Gangsta Baby Jesus or anyone else, and we'll all just have to keep plodding forward as usual.

But if sheep start running around swinging swords, or whatnot, I'll happily eat my words.

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Angels on ice

I guess it's natural enough to ascribe all sorts of bizarre stuff to places we don't know much about.  And top of the list of places we don't know much about is Antarctica.

The first recorded landing on the shores of Antarctica by humans (you'll see why I added "by humans" in a moment) was in 1821, when the American seal-hunting ship Cecilia, under Captain John Davis, anchored in Hughes Bay, between Cape Sterneck and Cape Murray along the west coast of the continent.  There's a possibility that the Māori discovered it first, perhaps as far back as the seventh century C.E., but that's based only on their legends and at this point is pure conjecture.

Since that time, there's been a good bit of exploration of the place, but there's a ton we still don't know.  The reason for this is not only its inaccessibility, but its ridiculously cold temperatures; the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was on July 21, 1983, when in Vostok Station, Antarctica it reached just this side of -90 C.  (For reference, carbon dioxide freezes at -78.5 C, so some of the white stuff on the ground there was dry ice.)

The mystery and inhospitable conditions just invite speculation, not to mention outright invention.  Perhaps the most famous story set in Antarctica is H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," in which a team of explorers finds the remnants of monumental architecture that predates the earliest humans by a good hundred million years -- at which time Antarctica was a tropical rainforest.  (What's most fascinating about this story is that Antarctica was a tropical rainforest at one point, when the continent was a great deal farther north, and that Lovecraft had conjectured this a good forty years before plate tectonics was discovered.)  Of course, being a story by HPL, it wouldn't be complete without monsters, and the unfortunate explorers discover that the place is still inhabited, and by the time it's over most of them have been eaten by Shoggoths.

Interestingly, this leads us right into the story that spawned today's post, because although most people know that Lovecraft's stories and others of their type are fiction, there are some for whom that distinction has never really taken hold.  I found out about this because a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that had popped up on Ranker called "These Fallen Angels Might Have Been Imprisoned in Antarctica," about a fellow named Steven Ben-Nun who claims that according to the Book of Enoch (a Jewish text dated to somewhere between 200 and 100 B.C.E., which is considered apocryphal by most Christian sects) when the angels fell, they didn't go to hell, they went to Antarctica.

Which, I suppose, is hellish enough.

Ben-Nun (and Enoch) give a great many details.  Apparently there were a bunch of angels called the Watchers, who became enamored of humans, and not just of watching, if you get my drift.  They came down to Earth and immediately taught humans "unholy ways" that apparently involved lots and lots of sex.  This resulted in lots and lots of babies, who were half-angel and half-human, and these are the Nephilim, about whom the conspiracy theorists still babble, lo unto this very day.

If this nineteenth-century marble statue of a fallen angel by Belgian sculptor Joseph Geefs is accurate, you can see why humans were tempted.  I wouldn't have said no either.

But new and fun sexual diversions weren't the only thing the angels taught humans.  According to the article:

Azazel, the leader of the Watchers, taught men to make tools for war and women to make themselves more attractive with jewelry and cosmetics.  Shemyaza taught magical spells; Armaros taught the banishment of those spells; the angel Baraqijal taught astrology; Kokabiel gave humans knowledge of astronomy; Chazaqiel taught them about weather; Shamsiel gave humans knowledge of the sun cycles; Sariel taught them the lunar cycles; Penemuel instructed humanity to read and write, and Kashdejan gave humanity the knowledge [of] medicine.

Well, all this was unacceptable to the Old Testament God, who above all seemed to resent it whenever he saw humans learning stuff or enjoying themselves.  So he and the unfallen angels (who presumably were just fine with humans not knowing about astronomy and weather and reading and writing and sex) waged war, and the Watchers were defeated.  At that point, Ben-Nun says, God looked about for the worst place possible to put them, and decided, understandably enough, on Antarctica.

And there they still reside, frozen underneath Wilkes Land.  Why specifically Wilkes Land, you might ask?  Well, it's because that's where the Wilkes Land Gravitational Anomaly is, the conventional explanation for which is that it's the site of an impact crater from a meteorite that hit about 250 million years ago.

But you can see how that explanation leads directly to the conclusion, "... so there must be a hundred fallen angels frozen under here somewhere."

Other than that, the claim doesn't have much going for it, and I don't think the scientists need to worry about waking up a bunch of Watchers.  The Lovecraftian cyclopean architecture is kind of a non-starter, too.  Too bad, because otherwise, most of Antarctica seems like nothing much more than rocks and ice.  It could use a few Shoggoths or hot-looking scantily-clad angels to liven thing up a bit.

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