My past interests have varied between 'scoring' the most exotic women of all sorts I could possibly find. I had to abandon this pastime when I got married (that's not to say that I did not find my wife beautiful, sexy, attractive or whatever else is important to acknowledge to keep a marriage going - but let's be honest - marriage is marriage). God knows how my wife manages to bear with the person I have become.One could argue that my old habits proved a distraction. I never became what people would call a 'real' academic. Yes I got academic articles published.
I managed to write a book but my book ultimately is too difficult a read to be a 'popular best seller' and was ultimately prevented from having any lasting influence in academia owing to my publishers decision (at the last minute) to cut out seven of my appendices and limit the footnotes (which originally numbered in the thousands) to exactly five hundred (just look at the back at the book and notice the round number).
The reason I included these pictures is because it is important to emphasize how sexuality has become the entire basis to questioning Morton Smith's discovery of To Theodore. If it isn't explicit, it is implicit in frequent allusions to his 'personal quirks' and - in essence - his 'queerness.' I added these pictures from my past in the spirit of Morton Smith. The point is that when we bring salacious details from ANYONE'S past it necessarily distracts from a fair evaluation of a man's life work. Again, do you know how many people have told me how his 'eccentricities' prove that he was a fraud? Ben Witherington is only the most recent telling me how he behaved in front of Jacob Neusner.
My response was that Neusner was an idiot! He deserved whatever it was that Smith did to him. No one has done more of a disservice to Judaism in the last two thousand years than that idiot.
So let me get this straight - bad choice of words. Should someone's personal life or personal eccentricities be the basis to evaluate their work as a scholar? This is ridiculous and dangerous too. I wonder what skeletons lurk in the closet of his critics and indeed all academics if put under a similar microscopic scrutiny.
Yes, sexuality can be distracting - especially to those who aren't getting 'it' ...
Anyway I am not going further down that road. I just wanted to let my own eccentricities 'come out of the closet' as it were to stand in solidarity with Smith (and for me to relive - even for a moment - those days gone by). Getting back to my book, let me say that I am still incredibly proud of the Real Messiah. I think it is an easy read, packed with insight which still manages to deliver a punch even in its current - compromised - form. But until all of you out there experience what it is like to deal with a nervous publisher, trying to create a 'scholarly Da Vinci Code,' you won't know what I went through in the process of getting the idea at the heart of the Real Messiah to market.
With all of this said it is now time for me - a guy without academic credentials, someone who is the furthest thing from an expert on all the arguments for and against the authenticity of the text and a writer WITHOUT a bestseller - in short a 'nobody' who doesn't even have a Wikipedia profile (isn't that the new standard to deciding if you really are a somebody) is going to tell the world at this little blog what I think the arguments against Morton Smith's discovery without merit and only testify to the subjectivity of modern scholarship.
I don't want to go through all the arguments against To Theodore. All the arguments put forward by Carlson amount to yet another attempt to cash in on the Da Vinci Code. I don't blame Carlson for this. I know in my own case, I submitted a manuscript to my publisher and then told me straight out - if I wanted to get my thesis published they would have to write the introduction and it would attempt to connect my book to a 'conspiracy theory' involving the Catholic Church - this even though my basic premise is that Papacy is the core truth of Christianity!
The point is that the difference between my book and Carlson's is that his conspiracy theory makes the eccentric Morton Smith the mystagogue who sprinkles self-references throughout his 'hoax.' So it is that like the Da Vinci Code we are meant to dissect all these clues and we piece together the great mystery that ...
Morton Smith wanted to be recognized as a fraud?
This is so stupid and implausible it doesn't even deserve to be considered. Morton Smith had worked his whole life to build a reputation. It was all he had really. Gay people don't have children to leave as a lasting legacy on this earth. If we are going to try and dissect the psyche of Morton Smith and we are going to bring forward various aspects of his personal life (which I think is ridiculous and unprecedented in the first place) Smith's homosexuality is the worst possible angle to convict him of this sort of conspiracy.
While I imagine that for the minds of most evangelicals and 'religious minded' people homosexuality is proof enough of 'criminality,' the idea that Smith had a hidden desire to destroy his career and expose himself as a fraud can only seem a plausible motivation for those who unconsciously 'hate' the discovery of To Theodore, want to see it go away and transforming this 'sexual deviant' into a self-confessed criminal who wants us to catch his fraudulent behavior Carlson's work is an elaborate exercise in 'wishful thinking.'
The idea that Smith wanted to get caught as a fraud and deliberately arranged a series of clues in To Theodore to help lead to his capture is utterly implausible. Yet a more serious charge would be to simply argue that Smith employed his vast knowledge and expertise of Clement and the Gospel of Mark to develop a 'discovery' which injected all the beliefs and doctrines he claimed were present in the earliest Church - that is abandon all the Da Vinci Code stuff and lay out a case for forgery.
Carlson shies away from the term 'forgery' because this is a far more serious charge than merely arguing that Smith was engaged in a 'creative writing' exercise - a kind of playful or 'gay' bit of mischief. Yet I think we can all see that Carlson's work will open the door to subsequent efforts to prove this.
Yet I wonder how anyone could bring any greater proofs for Morton Smith being the actual scribe who wrote the text into Voss' book and 'smuggled' that text back into the monastery. All of these arguments have been in mind satisfactorily refuted by recent research here, here, here, here, here and here.
Indeed the problem I have with this whole idea is accepting that Smith would have let the 'forged text' sit on the shelf for such a long time allowing for the possibility that someone else might have taken the text to an environment where he couldn't 'steal it back' and ultimate examine the material and realize that it was created by a modern scribe. This is the part I don't understand. A second rate criminal wouldn't attempt such a crime, why someone so respected and whose reputation - remember Smith was a man without children, family or other things we happily married hetrosexuals take for granted - was all he had!
Again if you're a conservative religious mind and you think homosexuals are criminals from the law of God and that enemies of the Church are inspired by Satan to bring down the sanctity of Christ's teachings, this inverse Da Vinci Code makes perfect sense. Yet as some who grew up in a city with a large gay community, as someone who works in field where gays generally outnumber straight people I can safely say that no one takes their career more seriously than gay people. If anything we could more easily develop a theory about a married conservative scholar with three kids under all kinds of financial pressure developing a forgery than someone who only had themselves to worry about.
The married (or divorced) guy under financial pressure is more typical of the white collar criminal than any other. Just look at the news.
Now again this is not something you'd find in an academic article but it simply my take on the criminal pathology which is alleged was 'only natural' for a gay person.
If you are interested in reading how this observation fits within my greater understanding of the workings of Secret Mark WITHIN the contemporary Alexandrian Church please go here
If you want to read more about how Alexandrian Christianity was rooted in the Jewish traditions of Alexandria, Philo of Alexandria and more feel free to purchase my new book here
