The Secret Gospel of Mark:
Y. Kuchinsky against forgery 1998
Date: Mon,
13 Apr 1998 13:47:33 -0400
From:y.kuchinskX@utoronto.ca
To: crosstalk <crosstalX@info.harpercollins.com>
Subject: SecMk is authentic
Yuri Kuchinsky - Toronto, Canada says; "[This is a well
written post arguing for authenticity. I agree with most of
it. It has been written before Yuri went at odds with everybody.]"
Why it is impossible that Morton Smith could have forged Clement's
letter & the SecMk fragment.
Now
I have revisited this old controversy. In the course of my recent
research re: the compositional history of the Gospel of Mark,
I have reread Morton Smith's two books on the subject, after
many years. I was interested primarily by what SecMk can tell
us about the history of early Christianity.
I
certainly don't agree with Smith in everything he says. In fact,
I see quite a few areas where Smith seems rather off base in
his interpretations of early Christian history. In particular,
I'm much more sceptical than he in attributing the events SecMk
narrates directly to the events in life of the Historical Jesus.
SecMk seems to me more like a later gnostic-oriented expansion,
while still produced within the Markan community. Nevertheless,
Smith had done a huge amount of background research in this
area, and his book reveals many unexpected surprises on my later
rereading.
Speculation
has been rife in recent years that Smith was the forger of this
intriguing document, or else was in charge of a criminal conspiracy
to produce this forgery. Such speculation has been broadcast
of late especially by the famous scholar Prof. Jack Neusner,
the former student of Smith turned his enemy (this happened
for reasons entirely unconnected with the ms). Neusner is of
course a very influential man in the biblical field, and his
views cannot be disregarded. Some other scholars also tended
to lend support to such accusations.
It
is my purpose to show in this article that these accusations
are entirely without merit, and that, if anything, they may
only raise doubts about the professional competence of those
making them.
It
needs to be noted, of course, that there are many responsible
scholars who are sceptical about this SecMk fragment, and who
suspect it is a forgery. But generally these sceptics consider
that this was an old forgery of some sort. Some maintain it
is a forgery produced in the 18th century; others say it was
produced any time in between the 2nd and the 18th centuries.
Prima
facie, that this is an old forgery is not impossible, of course.
And academic discussions of such scenarios have been going on
for great many years, ever since the discovery of the fragment
was announced by Smith, first privately to some scholars in
1958, and then publicly in 1960. This is a very complex debate,
and I will not be able to deal with it now. The purpose of this
article is merely to defend Smith from what I see as entirely
unjustified accusations of wrongdoing. He was an honest scholar
who happened to come across a mysterious manuscript, and who
devoted many years of his life to trying to understand its meaning.
He did not deserve these sordid accusations.
While,
as I show further, it would have been impossible for Smith to
have accomplished such a forgery, the same arguments should
apply to a lesser extent to other theories of forgery not involving
Smith. Myself, I have looked at length into these debates and
into various versions offered by different scholars, and my
view is that the balance of the evidence points to Clement's
letter fragment as being genuine, i.e. authored by Clement himself.
I think the whole ms is exactly what it claims to be, i.e it
is a letter of Clement containing what Clement thinks is part
of a secret version of Mk's gospel, as used in the Church of
Alexandria. (By the way, it also seems likely to me that Clement's
version of the textual development of Mk as given in the letter
is not entirely accurate, for whatever reasons.)
MANUSCRIPT
ITSELF
It
seems like most serious opponents of SecMk in the last few years
have been focusing their criticism on the fact that the manuscript
has been seen by so few. There was some mystery about this manuscript.
Where is it? How come basic tests on paper, ink, or other such
tests have not been conducted? The piece of information Mahlon
Smith have supplied recently on Crosstalk list about the manuscript
having been seen recently after all by a credible witness is
very important in this respect, to help put some of these doubts
to rest.
I've
suggested before that perhaps the main reason the manuscript
has been seen by so few was that so few were really so interested
in seeing it. Certainly it is a lot easier to spread groundless
rumours behind people's backs than to go out and actually do
such field research, which, needless to say, may involve such
complications as having to pack your suitcase and do a bit of
travel for a change... It is to the credit of Charles Hedrick
that he did go out and take his time to look up the ms, instead
of just talking endlessly about how few have seen it, and what
all this may signify...
THREE
FORGERIES IN ONE
Now,
to begin my case for authenticity, I would like to stress that
we are actually talking about _three_ separate hypothetical
forgeries here. Let's keep this in mind. In other words, in
order for Smith to have accomplished such a highly complex forgery,
he would have had to have done the following.
He
would have needed to forge not one but two documents:
1.
The letter of Clement itself.
2.
The two SecMk gospel fragments.
And
also, the third item that he would have needed to have pulled
off.
3.
To have found a scribe, really a genius of a scribe, who would
have been able to forge some very unique and specialized 18th
century Greek scribal handwriting, and to forge it flawlessly,
with all its highly unique abbreviations and complexities. Nobody
in their right mind would try to suggest that Smith was an expert
scribe himself. Not quite. He would have certainly needed an
accomplice for this.
Since
these two texts, the letter itself, and the gospel fragments
as given by Clement, are composed in completely different styles,
and using very different vocabularies, in order to forge them
Smith would have had to be an expert on both Clement and Mk.
He was neither, certainly not before 1958.
So,
now, let's consider these 3 items in order.
1.
The excerpt from the letter of Clement, itself, is much longer
than the gospel fragments, and it would have been a lot harder
to forge credibly. As Thomas Talley, one serious investigator
of this problem, indicated, at this time only a small handful
of scholars still dispute that the letter represents an authentic
tradition from Clement of Alexandria. Every word and sentence
of the Clementine portion of this ms has been put under the
microscope and compared in minutest detail to the extant undisputed
Clementine texts, of which we have quite a lot. And every comparison
has basically held up. These detailed studies are many and freely
available for perusal by interested parties.
Out
of the fourteen leading Clementine scholars Smith consulted
originally, only two had some reservations, and Smith had dealt
with their quite minor technical objections in detail, and showed
them insufficient to cause doubt as to authenticity.
It
is important for our case that the letter has been included
in the standard edition of the Alexandrian father's writings
since 1980. [Talley, Thomas. "Liturgical Time in the Ancient
Church: The State of Research." Studia Liturgica 14 (1982),
p. 45] And this should speak better than anything else about
where the consensus of the Clementine scholars is now in regard
to this matter.
This
first item alone should make it appear highly unlikely that
Smith could have pulled it off, i.e. could have fooled the whole
world of scholarship to such an extent.
2.
Now, the SecMk fragment, in itself, presents us with a very
special set of highly complicated problems of its own. On purely
linguistic basis, scholars have been arguing whether or not
the fragment could have been put together merely from scraps
of the canonical material. (Since almost every serious opponent
of SecMk thinks this would have been an ancient forgery, the
debate has been conducted primarily in this context.) The balance
of evidence seems to point to the fragment being based on an
original tradition, separate from and prior to the canonical
traditions. But a definitive judgement here on purely stylistic
grounds is quite a tough call, since the fragment is rather
short. In any case, Smith not being known as a Mk scholar prior
to his discovery, very few indeed suggested that he, himself,
could have created the fragment ex nihilo.
Now,
the next and a separate question about this SecMk fragment should
be, Supposing it's genuine, how does it fit together with the
canonical gospels? I.e. what about the contents of this fragment,
rather than just the style of writing? Because, it is important
to note, the parallels must be considered not only with the
rest of Mk, but also with Jn, since the SecMk fragment narrates
the raising of a young man that is very close to the raising
of Lazarus in the Fourth Gospel.
And
not only that, there's yet another complicated matter to consider
here. Smith has also suggested in his two books that there are
also other and more significant structural parallels between
Mk and Jn, the parallels going far beyond the fragment.
According
to Smith, his thinking in this area was stimulated by the research
associated with the fragment. Once he saw the parallels between
the SecMk fragment and Jn, he also began to see much greater
parallels between large parts of Mk (beginning at 6:32; cf.
p. 56 in SECRET GOSPEL) and large parts of Jn (beginning at
6:1). He bases his theories in this area in part on the work
of some scholars who were working early in this century, and
who suggested compatible theories re: the redactional history
of Jn, and Jn's possible use of Mk -- among them Bultmann, N.
Huffmann, and especially Charles Dodd. (CLEMENT, p. 146ff.)
It
is not possible to deal here now with all these complex relationships.
Their full consideration should involve,
the
proto Mk theories of Helmut Koester, and of Alfred Loisy,
other controversial wider theories about how Jn, Lk, and Mt
relate to Mk (was Jn really influenced by Mk's structure?),
Smith's own views on the matter that were clearly evolving and
changing over time, as his published work indicates,
the question of how many other commentators, such as Crossan,
evaluated this evidence,
possible Aramaic proto-sources (Smith favoured this idea, but
received little support from other scholars on this),
and much more besides.
All that needs to be said at this point is that for Smith to
have managed to accomplish this second forgery, and to accomplish
it in such a way that scholars are still debating the matter
hotly after 40 years, would be nothing short of miraculous.
And, generally, I don't believe in such unlikely miracles.
EPIGRAPHY
LEAVES LITTLE ROOM FOR DOUBT
3.
And, finally, the handwriting. As Smith details in his book,
the near consensus of all the top palaeographic experts he consulted
both in Greece and the US was that the manuscript dates to the
18th century (on pp. 22-23 of his SECRET GOSPEL, Smith gives
the long list of the names of these experts).
Certainly
the opinion of these competent scholars should not be taken
lightly. We are talking here about some highly specialized criteria
that they take into consideration, such as the use of special
scribal ligatures, of subscripts, of very complex abbreviations,
both medial and terminal, the use of the coronis, and other
such matters comprehensible for the most part only to experts.
And
also Smith reports in his CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA that a rare
manuscript was found that is remarkably close in appearance
to our ms. Smith writes that a Greek scholar, Professor Scouvaras,
has discovered
"...an
eighteenth-century ecclesiastical document in a native Greek
hand strikingly similar to that of our manuscript. [It is reproduced
on Plate IV in Smith's book] ... [It is] an autograph codex
of the Oecumenical Patriarch Callinicus III and was written
about 1760 in the Phanariot hand which had been formed in Constantinople
shortly before that time." (p. 2)
So
here we are, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Three forgeries
in one, Smith's critics would like to charge him with. Two unique
ancient texts, so different in style and content, _plus_ finding
an epigraphic genius forger to put them down on paper. Does
this stray far beyond the realm of reality? I sure think so.
AN
IMPOSSIBLE SCENARIO
And
now let's look at what Smith would have had to do to put it
all together. To remind, his discovery was made when he was
doing the job of cataloguing odd mss in the rather neglected
library of the great Greek Orthodox desert monastery of Mar
Saba, near Jerusalem. Presumably, the critics charge, Smith
would have planted the book with the text already written into
it while he was doing that job. This means that he would have
had to have spent years of his life previously to that getting
himself totally immersed into Clement and Mk, becoming a "secret
world-class expert" in these two highly complex areas.
And
when he finally accomplished that task, and composed the two
texts, next he would have had to find the "Genius Scribe",
his presumed accomplice. (Or did he find this accomplice even
before he embarked on his nefarious course?) So they pulled
it off, and produced the flawless forgery. Then he goes to Mar
Saba and plants the mss. From then on, the story unfolds as
previously known.
An
obvious question needs to be asked here. Is there any evidence
that Smith knew far in advance that he would be doing this two-week
job at Mar Saba in 1958? Actually, according to his CLEMENT
OF ALEXANDRIA, p. ix, Smith was given permission by Benedict,
Patriarch of Jerusalem, to catalogue the library when he was
already in Jerusalem in 1958.
In
my opinion, it is this premeditation part of this supposed plot
to forge these documents that makes it really quite fantastic.
He had this idea, "I will produce this forgery and will
plant this book in this library." And then he devotes years
of his life to this, working in the highest secrecy... Does
this sound like a light-hearted prank that some suggested as
his motivation?
And
it also needs to be noted here that if Smith managed to "plant"
this particular manuscript in any other library other than Mar
Saba, the case for authenticiy would have been rather weaker.
This is because there's a recorded tradition that a collection
of Clement's letters _has been attested_ in Mar Saba during
the Middle Ages. So such a discovery in Mar Saba was not totally
unpredictable, after all...
Smith
devoted many well-documented years of his life on an academic
study of the ms he discovered. Some commentators have actually
suggested half-jokingly that the amount of effort he put into
all this was almost inexplicable. After reading his two books,
it indeed seems like Smith was genuinely obsessed with his discovery.
So
Neusner and Co. would presumably claim that Smith did all this
background research _before_ he "discovered" the ms?
And then he "pretended" to do all this work later?
But he repeatedly consulted dozens of noted scholars later and
not before! Many of these scholars are still around to tell
their side of the story...
To
summarize. To accomplish _the three_ such highly complex forgeries,
and not to have been caught, would have been beyond the power
of one man. To have even _attempted_ such a hopeless task, a
task both so hopeless and so time-consuming, would have been
quite silly, and Smith was generally not thought of as silly.
And
finally, when Smith's discovery is looked at dispassionately,
there's really not much there on the surface. What kind of an
earth-shaking reaction did he accomplish? Not much really beyond
some obscure disputes among professional text crunchers. It's
not like the ms just comes out and says, "Jesus was a homosexual,
and the whole of Christian religion is a hoax"... Not at
all. All it really says is that the Carpocratian heretics were
perverts and twisted the Scriptures. But this was already well
known before. So, in other words, the pay-off from such a monumental
forgery would have been not all that much in any case.
To
conclude, the mss is genuine.
And
for any who still have doubts, by all means, lobby for the tests
on the ink of the mss. Such tests should surely remove all doubt
as to the authenticity of this, on the whole, certainly very
intriguing, and probably highly revealing document.
Regards,
Yuri.
Yuri
Kuchinsky || Toronto
