Okay, so if you buy into my argument about LGM 1 it wasn't just 'an addition' to our canonical gospel of Mark. It was something very important. Some might argue that it was 'another baptism' - 'another' when compared to our familiar 'John the Baptist baptism' of Jesus. I think that 'John the Baptist' never existed. It was a screen to flip the original understanding of Jesus coming to baptize little John-Mark. To me it seems strange that rabbinic Judaism doesn't know anything whatsoever about a guy who supposedly baptized 'all the Jews' of the Common Era. But then again I am a Jew. I have learned the bitter lesson time and time again that for most Christian scholars me and my tradition don't count for much when they set out to develop 'the truths' of 'their tradition.'
Whatever the case may be, as I restore LGM 1 to the gospel narrative it became impossible for me NOT TO SEE that it must have been a castration baptism like that which must have been employed by the Marcionites.
The line that drew my attention in LGM 1 was 'and after six days Jesus told him what to do, and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body.'
Yes, to be certain 'Jesus told him what to do' could amount to being just about anything. However Morton Smith has argued very convincingly that what follows is a baptism. If LGM 1 and Secret Mark are thought to have had any real influence over Alexandrian Christianity the only thing that makes sense for us to suppose 'Jesus told him what to do' refers to - in my mind at least - is castration.
Indeed the more I looked it seemed quite apparent that the Apostolic writings must have guided the Marcionites to understanding their castration as the 'true circumcision.'
Yet when I argue furthermore that this 'newly discovered' narrative LGM 1 is the starting point for 'the redemption' ritual mentioned in Irenaeus Against the Heresies i.21, the parallel text of Hippolytus, the Anonymous Treatise on Baptism and various ritual references to the 'baptism on behalf of the dead' (1 Cor 15.29) I don't make the case based for this based on what is represented in the text to Theodore.
There is very little there to suggest that this anything more than a baptism ritual and even that is disputed by a number of scholars.
The basis for my assertion is the close proximity of LGM 1 to Mark x.38 which - as every Patristic writer notes - is the first explicit mention of the coming 'redemption' which Ephrem explicitly identifies with Jesus' resurrection.
The traditional date for Jesus' resurrection in the Alexandrian tradition (and most Patristic writers dependent on that tradition) is March 25th.
If you put all these pieces together, I think that we can actually assign a date for LGM 1 - February 23rd. This date is established by the fact that the 'redemption of the (firstborn) son' occurs exactly thirty days from the circumcision of the child.
If you're looking for some kind of 'smoking gun' on February 23rd, there really is nothing associated with this date anywhere in the surviving literature of Christianity that might lend us to believe it ever had the significance of January 6th (Epiphany/Theophany) or March 25th.
Nothing at all anywhere ...
... except
the feast day of Polycarp of Smyrna.
Oh, that's a coincidence right?
Irenaeus of Lyons teacher being honored on the same day as I propose for the resurrection and 'true circumcision' and baptism of the neaniskos in LGM 1 thirty days before the Passion.
February 23rd.
The same day.
Except the actual account of the martyrdom of Polycarp had to have occurred months later.
Just look at the narrative again:
Now, the blessed Polycarp suffered martyrdom on the second day of the month Xanthicus just begun, the seventh day before the Kalends of May, on the great Sabbath, at the eighth hour. [Mart. Poly 21]
Xanthicus corresponds to the month of Nisan or April. Every Jew knows what a 'great Sabbath' is. It is the Sabbath before Passover. And don't believe the nonsense that Christian scholars try and develop that the identification of 'the Great Sabbath' was only limited to medieval European Jewry. The Samaritans use the same term and they never got anywhere close to Europe and have been separated from Jews for thousands of years.
The term 'great Sabbath' has always meant the Sabbath before Passover. Period.
It is simply amazing to read how Christian scholars try and somehow 'reconcile' the strangeness of Polycarp's feast day being celebrated two months before the actual recorded date of his death.
Indeed as we just saw the narrative of Polycarp's death makes it explicit that his death actually occurred on the 25th of April.
What are we doing celebrating his martyrdom in February, a month which cannot have a Great Sabbath as Passover can fall no earlier than March 25?
Now just for those who don't know better, Polycarp is one of the biggest saints there is in the existing Christian tradition. Basically there's Jesus, Mary, Peter, the rest of the apostles and then Polycarp.
So why was Polycarp's feast day moved from April 25th to February 23rd?
It is difficult to say unless ...
... well, you actually look at who now occupies the proper date of Polycarp's feast.
St. Mark the Evangelist
the guy I and many others think was the neaniskos in Secret Mark ...
Is this just coincidence? Polycarp's feast day was moved to the day that the little neaniskos was resurrected, 'circumcised' and baptized in the Alexandrian calendar and Mark ends up being identified with the day that Polycarp was martyred on a 'Great Sabbath'?
I don't know about you but I think I smell a cover up, a distraction or indeed - quite possibly - a great deal more ...
