Robert said
Robert said
Can you elaborate on how puzzles of Mark are resolved and how canonical Mark is dependent on it thematically? About the only thing I can think of is the issue of what, if anything, Jesus may have done while passing through Jericho. But that’s not really much of a problem in Mark.
CEJ said
Mysteries in Mark? Sure, the Jericho lacuna. SM fills that gap …
I want to return to this point. Filling a gap, as you yourself put it, can just as well be a sign of a secondary addition rather than a later removal of something that was previously there. The reason I say this is not really much of a problem in Mark is that, as Marcus notes in opposition to Koester (I, 49), Mark does this elsewhere, eg, in 7,31 and 11,11. Another point Marcus makes here is that the young man is introduced in 14,51 as if for the first time (a certain young man), not as someone who had been already been introduced in a previous story and then again mentioned, before appearing for a third time in 14,51.
Sorry. I haven’t read the material. But there is no doubt that the text Clement said goes in the Jericho lacuna could have been designed to take advantage of that hole in the narrative. Alternatively, it could be what was originally there but removed, just as Clement claimed. Very bright people have come to opposite conclusions in that regard.
Other folks have discussed the chapter 14 intro of the young man. Philip Sellew does a good job covering the topic in Secret Mark and the History of Canonical Mark, an essay in The Future of Christianity. His best guess? [I]t would not be surprising that someone who took the trouble to excise the story at 10:32 would also alter the wording in 14:51.” No astounding revelation there, huh?
Robert said
Multiplying hypotheses upon hypotheses can support anything.
That’s a tad hyperbolic, Robert, don’t you think?
Someone who yanked chunks of the youth’s story out of Mark might well have noticed the need to introduce him in ch. 14. If he didn’t, a later redactor in the chain of custody could have.
This hardly requires the introduction of multiplication tables into the discussion — which is a good thing, given my limited math skills.
Robert said
Not really. You’re hypothesizing that a questionable manuscript only seen by one person, thought by many to be a forgery, which disputes the originality of a Carpocratian version, actually bears indirect witness to the originality of that disputed Carpocratian version, and that a further hypothetical emendation would allow this Carpocratian text to be considered original, even ‘though the scholar you’re relying on for sound reasoning disagrees with every one of these hypotheses and even his opinion is not only a minority position but perhaps uniquely his own, and yet he’s the best you’ve got apparently.
I can’t even puzzle through this response. But I will start with your claim that we’re discussing “a questionable manuscript only seen by one person”. If you mean Smith, yes, he is the person who took the black and white photos of the manuscript. He did not take the color photos. The history of what happened to that manuscript after Smith found and left it in the Mar Saba library is not reasonably disputed. It involved not just the color photographer, but numerous folks.
Robert said
OK, my knowledge of this find may be more dated than yours. You’re apparently saying that this letter has been seen and photographed by a second person. But not yet examined by any paleographers??
This is not new information. In 1977, the Voss text with Secret Mark scribbled in the back was moved to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate Library in Jerusalem. The pages with the SM text were removed from the Voss text by the library and photographed by Kallistos Dourvas. This was not generally known until 2000, when Charles Hedrick published his account of tracking the color photos down in The Fourth R.
I have been able to identify a number of forgeries of Edgar Allan Poe documents from good photographs, but usually because there is an obvious problem with the context of the content (such as the wrong version for the date provided) or other features of the presentation of the document. (The appearance in a letter, for example, of a name in the form G—–, instead of being fully written out as Griswold, was a misunderstanding that many early biographies of Poe printed names that way to obscure them a bit, while Poe never wrote it that way in his actual letters. Joseph Cosey, the best of the Poe forgers, also had a tendency for very heavy-handed name-dropping of various big names of people and/or writings, clearly with the intent of catching the eye of a collector and usually with no internal logic for their presence other than making an appearance.)
But without such clear elements, one always wants to be able to see the original, and, ideally, handle the paper and look at the ink closely. Dealing with more ancient documents, of course, presents its own complications which, fortunately, have not been operable in my main area of specialty.
PS – and if, for a Poe document, one only has a signature, or a few words, it can be very hard to judge purely based on the handwriting (unless it is really terrible, and can be eliminated for obvious problems). Without a good and verifiable provenance, one must often admit that one cannot really be sure.
Robert said
CEJ said
Robert said
And that doesn’t make you a little suspicious?
Suspicious of what? That the Illuminati hid the pages?
Are you off your meds again, Robert?
There’s lots of reasons to be suspicious of the letter; the fact that it’s unavailable for examination by experts does not help. Do you find nothing at all suspicious about it? But, aside from any doubts about the letter’s authenticity, I’ve yet to see a good case for considering the Carpocratian version to be original.
There are plenty of reasons for approaching Secret Mark with skepticism. The church’s inability or unwillingness to make Smith’s find available for examination is not one of those reasons in my estimation. It merely limits what we can know about that find.
Schenke argues for the Carpocratian version’s priority in The Mystery of the Gospel of Mark. I don’t think I have argued here for its priority but merely raised the question. It is a reasonable question to which there likely will never be a conclusive answer.
Robert said
You raised the question to support your pederastic interpretation….
My interpretation? You don’t know my interpretation. From one of my earlier post on this thread:
CEJ said
And then the question is, what is the nature of the relationship between Jesus and the unnamed young man in Secret Mark? Was it a pederastic relationship or not? Or more precisely, how did the author intend the reader to view that relationship?Many commentators — probably most that I have read — view the relationship as pederastic. But other folks think that is not what is portrayed; e.g., Scott G. Brown, “Mark’s Other Gospel”.
And that is why this discussion is becoming tiresome.
Robert said
….If I understand Schenke’s view of the development of the gospel of Mark, he too, like Koester, believes in “the Alexandrian addition” to earlier stages of a proto-Mark. Unlike Koester he sees this addition as already including the Carpocratian element, but it is an addition nonetheless.
Schenke sees his view as an modification of Koester’s:
Schenke wrote
[W]e would have to extend Koester’s hypothesis on canonical Mark as a purified abbreviation of the Secret Gospel of Mark. We would modify Koester’s thesis to say that canonical Mark is a later version of the “Carpocratian” Gospel of Mark, purified and shortened in two phases. Or to be more precise, we should say that canonical Mark is a later version of the Gospel that was peculiar to the early unorthodox Christianity of Alexandria.
They both see SM preceding canonical Mark, but Schenke sees a Carpocration version of SM preceding Clement’s version before arriving at the gospel in the canon. Schenke does not see either version of SM as the original Mark.
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