Why Peter Jeffery's (and Morton Smith's) Arguments About the Alexandrian Liturgy Are Essentially Stupid But Ultimately Led Me to the Truth

My favorite saying in any book by the ancient Church Fathers is the one which Celsus of Rome, the great pagan critic of Christianity, characterizes the many of arguments WITHIN the second century Church as amounting to little more than fights "over the shadow of an ass.' [iii.1] That's how I feel about Jeffrey's central proof that To Theodore is a forgery. It's much ado about nothing.

So once we go beyond the scurrilous attacks against Morton Smith's character and the fact that Jeffrey's begins with an assumption that to Theodore is a forgery without presenting so much as a scrap of evidence to prove that claim, the question we are left with is there anything of substance in his book The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled (Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery)?

I am trying to be charitable to Professor Jeffrey and the one thing I can say that he has any (presumed) authority to write about is the relationship between ancient Christian liturgy and Smith's (and subsequently Talley's) implausible attempts to make Secret Mark 'fit' within the forty day fast which preceded Easter Sunday. If he had written a book debunking this essentially stupid argument put forward by these two men I would have credited his book as representing an important contribution to the literature on Secret Mark and the Letter to Theodore.

Nevertheless, as Jeffrey does throughout his book, he presents the fact that Morton Smith comes up with a stupid argument as proof that To Theodore is a forgery which is the yet another stupid argument - but this time a stupid argument with malice as it attached to all the inflammatory nonsense cited earlier. It is not the kind of thing you'd expect from an otherwise respected professor who teaches at a respected university like Notre Dame but then again stupidity laced with malice can appear anywhere I suppose.

I can't account for why Morton Smith and Thomas Talley attempt to tie the first addition to the Gospel of Mark mentioned in the Letter to Theodore (hereafter referred to as 'LGM 1') directly to the existing liturgy of the Church. As I said it is a stupid argument because the existing liturgy was created in the post-Nicene period, centuries after the time Clement was writing.

The point however is that I don't need to explain this line of reasoning. It has nothing to do with the question of whether or not To Theodore is a forgery. Indeed as Jeffrey again presents no convincing evidence for anyone to doubt that To Theodore was anything other than Smith claimed it was - i.e. an ancient letter that he found written into a book in the library at the Mar Saba monastery, we should let the discovery stand until something can actually prove its authenticity.

It was very difficult for me to get through Jeffrey's book for this reason alone. I am used to reading texts with substantive arguments laid out in a logical manner. As Jeffrey himself admits his arguments are cumbersome and his points are laid out in a manner which makes them almost impossible to read. Of course - as is always with the case in Jeffrey's book - he finds away to turn around these short-comings as yet another proof for To Theodore being a forgery:

I had great difficulty organizing this book; in some ways it was the most difficult thing I have ever tried to write. Almost every section of the book as it now stands was somewhere else in an earlier draft. Eventually I came to the conclusion that, since the subject was an act of deception, it was bound to keep collapsing in on itself. A 'real' subject, I think, would have an inherent structure, so that one could write a coherent narrative simply by describing that structure." (p. 241)

It is logic like this which had most of the people I have ever known to attempt to read this book wanting to put it down. A discernibly circular logic is present throughout - everything strange about Smith or his discovery To Theodore leads us back to the 'fact' that the work is a forgery. It is the point where Jeffrey's begins and ends each thought, each point throughout the book. It's something of a 'perverted obsession' on the part of the book's author.

Indeed since Jeffrey's recent presentation on Secret Mark at the SBL was heavily indebted to a psychological examination of Morton Smith, let me - as someone whose original major was psychology - offer up a psychological assessment of the difficulties that ALL scholars - both those FOR and AGAINST the authenticity of To Theodore have had with matching LGM 1 with any existing liturgy.

Jeffrey and scholarship in general naturally assume that what has survived as 'Christianity' is 'Christianity as it has always been.' This is stupid. Nevertheless it is a stupidity which anyone who has had to suffer through countless books on the origins of Christianity has had to endure. The Christianity of the apostolic period was certainly not that of the late second century period nor again was the faith of this period the same as that of the fourth and so on down to the present day. The only reason that anyone would seriously entertain a stupid idea like that is because it appeals to the selfish need of those who study religion to 'strengthen their faith.'

I have a tip for those people - study less and go to Church more.

Whatever the case may be the result of this projection of what each of us WANTS TO BE TRUE about earliest Christianity is always the same - we feel are shocked when a document like To Theodore is discovered because it completely challenges those presuppositions nurtured by our selfish needs as believers.

To this end we use words like 'strange' or 'dangerous' to describe things that are really only different. Jeffrey's does exactly this when on p 61 he says "if this story [in Secret Mark] does reflect an early Christian initiation rite, it was a very odd one [emphasis mine], lacking many of the ritual elements that occur in other early liturgical sources." [p. 61]

Notice the emphasis on the word 'very odd.' If I was to count the number of times that Jeffrey's identifies Smith or the letter to Theodore as 'strange,' 'odd' or 'bizarre' I would have almost as many entries as there are Smiths in the phone book.

This is the way that Jeffrey choses to develop his argument and there can be no doubt that a number of scholars go along with him (although it must be said that the majority of the 'hoaxers' in academia prefer Carlson's approach) yet it is difficult for me not to see parallels between the language that the ancient heresiologists like Irenaeus of Rome used to attack those traditions outside of the Catholic Church.

The Marcionites are accused of 'forgery' when they happen to possess a gospel text which differs from what is deemed acceptable or orthodox. Instead of speaking in a scientific manner and acknowledging that DIFFERENCES exist between the Orthodox canon and that of the Marcionites Irenaeus anticipates Jeffrey's approach and accuses them of something nefarious - 'he [Marcion] mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke, removing all that is written respecting the generation of the Lord, and setting aside a great deal of the teaching of the Lord, in which the Lord is recorded as most dearly confessing that the Maker of this universe is His Father.' [Irenaeus AH i.27]

Hippolytus points to an identical 'corrupting' effort on the part of 'Marcion' (it is again impossible for this follower of Irenaeus to even consider that the Marcionite gospel is an INNOCENT text which displays textual variants from our existing gospels) but again specifies that these 'corruptions' were made in relation to the gospel of Mark - 'When, therefore, Marcion or some one of his hounds barks against the Demiurge, and adduces reasons from a comparison of what is good and bad, we ought to say to them, that neither Paul the apostle nor Mark, he of the maimed finger, announced such (tenets). For none of these (doctrines) has been written in the Gospel according to Mark.' [Hippolytus AH vii.18]

I have noted time and again that in the same way that Irenaeus and Tertullian argue on behalf of a Marcionite corruption of the Gospel of Luke, Hippolytus and Adamantius develop an argument that the Marcionites corrupted the Gospel of Mark. The latter claims are ignored by scholars for a simple PSYCHOLOGICAL reason - the need for order and the unconscious need to affirm the accepted assumptions of 'the herd.' In the field of animal behavioral sciences this used to be called 'the herd mentality.'

As Marcion and the Marcionites became little more than a caricature (I am not sure that the sect was anything more than a caricature from the very beginning) the idea that the Marcionites corrupted 'Luke' became firmly established and the the other suggestion was ignored. The deciding factor in my mind is the fact that Ulrich Schmid and other experts have long noted is that the majority of those 'variants in Luke' which Tertullian and Epiphanius point to suddenly become a whole lot bizarre when you compare them against so-called 'western readings' of the Gospel of Mark.

In other words, the Marcionite gospel when compared against Luke looks like a hack job. When a line by line comparison with the Gospel of Mark is undertaken the Marcionite gospel looks in many ways like an unremarkable western text of this gospel with 'additional material' from other sources added to it. My overview of Schmid's findings are presented here for the serious reader.

The moral of the story is that if we want to truly understand Secret Mark we can't simply begin by assuming that everything we have inherited from the Catholic Church is true and that everything else is false. We can't begin by calling people and texts names - i.e. 'weird,' 'very odd' etc. either. With either approach we are demonstrating our lack of objectivity and all pretense that we are employing something approaching a 'scientific methodology' is severely compromised.

Jeffrey and Carlson begin by wanting to press charges against Smith without demonstrating any crime has been committed. They act like Irenaeus insofar as the 'crime' in the case of both Smith and the letter to Theodore is that they are contradicting our inherited assumptions and established 'faith' about the way the Church and its canon developed.

If Smith were alive and these people were to have put him on trial it would properly have been called a 'witch hunt.' There is again no evidence that a crime has been committed. The whole purpose of either author is to maintain the original orthodoxy which Smith's discovery has challenged.

Getting back to our discussion of Jeffrey's attempt to attack Smith (and Talley's) attempt to reconcile LGM 1 with the established liturgical practices of Alexandria, what ALL these writers - Jeffrey, Smith and Talley - have failed to take into account thoroughly enough is that NO ONE thinks that the forty day fast which preceded Lent was in use by anyone in Alexandria before the fourth century.

Jeffrey begins the fourth chapter of his book with the blunt statement that 'the Secret Gosepl cannot be made to fit into the history of nocturnal worship or Christian initiation in Alexandria.' [p. 71] Taken as a bald statement - and identifying 'history' as written documents that have come down to us from the earliest period - Jeffrey's statement is indeed correct. He is right for taking to task Smith and Talley for trying to reconcile to reconcile the two. I also take them to task for this attempt because it is a very stupid argument.

Yet as is true for the whole of Jeffrey's work there is a (deliberate) conflation here where disproving Morton Smith's INTERPRETATION of Secret Mark is taken to be the same as disproving the Letter to Theodore. Jeffrey's cannot produce one shred of evidence that to Theodore is a fake or - using our earlier analogy - that a crime has been committed. In other words, there is nothing in any page of Jeffrey's book that suggests that Smith just happened to do a bad job interpreting a text he happened to have discovered quite innocently.

Indeed there is a strange tautology here which Carlson neatly manages to avoid. If as Jeffrey's infers that Smith was some delusional madman who made essentially stupid misguided interpretations of Secret Mark which DID NOT MATCH the reality of Alexandrian liturgical practice, this would seem to suggest that he was incapable of pulling off the meticulous work necessary for the manufacture of a text which perfectly resembles (a) the letter writing habits of people at the time of Clement of Alexandria (b) the language of Clement of Alexandria in introducing Secret Mark in To Theodore and (c) the language of Secret Mark which so closely resembles what is represented in the Gospel of Mark.

As many before me have noted, the manufacture of To Theodore was a superhuman effort, hardly the thing that the 'insane' person that Jeffrey portrays in his book could have pulled off. I was stunned by the insight of Helmut Koester's argument in the recent BAR issue. He tells of Smith's struggle to understand his discovery based on his unfamiliarity (and hostility) to the methods of form criticism - the very skill necessary to pull off the forgery. It seems ludicrous to me to suggest that if Smith miraculously obtained these skills through some supernatural event (radioactive spider bite, gamma rays etc) that he would even have bothered to develop the utterly unnecessary argument of attempting to reconcile the contents of the letter with the existing Alexandrian liturgy.

As Koester notes it took Smith so long to actually explain his discovery because he didn't have the necessary tools needed for manufacturing it. This struggle is also witnessed in his many letters to Scholem.

Now the purpose of my writing this post wasn't to stop here at what is in fact the original stalemate. I want us to go back to Jeffrey's initial observation that "if this story [in Secret Mark] does reflect an early Christian initiation rite, it was a very odd one, lacking many of the ritual elements that occur in other early liturgical sources." Irenaeus happens to mention a sect which had what he also identified as an 'odd' baptismal practice a group which Irenaeus gives the name 'Marcosians' (the name is translated as 'Markite' in Hippolytus) and a sect to which Clement certainly belonged.

The point then is that Irenaeus' comments against 'those of Mark' are unquestionably directed against the very Alexandrian community of St. Mark for which Clement was a spokesman in the late second century, early third century. If the reader doesn't want to take my word for it here is a sampling of how other scholars have tried to 'downplay' the original association between Clement and the Marcosians:

" ... for on comparison of the sections just cited from Clement and from Irenaeus [regarding the Marcosians] the coincidences are found to be such as to put it beyond doubt that Clement in his account of the number six makes an unacknowledged use of the same [Marcosian] writing as were employed by Irenaeus." [William Smith A Dictionary of Christian Biography p. 161]

"Clement of Alexandria, himself infected with Gnosticism, actually uses Marcus number system though without acknowledgement (Strom, VI, xvi)." [Arendzen JP. Marcus. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume IX]

"Irenaeus gives an account of Marcus and the Marcosians in 1.13 - 21 ... Hippolytus and Epiphanius (Haer 34) copy their accounts from Irenaeus, and probably had no direct knowledge of the works of Marcus or of his sect. Clement of Alexandria, however, knew and used his writings." [Philip Schaff note on Eusebius Church History iv.11.4]

So we have already moved beyond the myopic arguments which Jeffrey question Smith's attempts to fit LGM 1 within the existing Alexandrian liturgy. Smith was stupid. The text goes back to a much earlier period witnessed by the testimony of Irenaeus and the practices of a sect he identifies as 'Marcosian.' Clement was indeed a Marcosian. Jeffrey should acknowledge this in the same way as he would undoubtedly accuse someone who engaged in sodomy of being a homosexual. As such Clement's repeated use of ideas and texts associated with 'the Marcosians' warrants our identification of him as a 'Marcosian'.

I would go one step further and identify Marcus as St. Mark and the Marcosians as the Alexandrian mystical tradition associated with the same Evangelist but the reader will have to evaluate my arguments in that regard at the previously mentioned post.

The point of course is that with our identification of Clement as maintain the beliefs of the Marcosians, the reference of LGM 1 and its baptism ritual immediately become easily identifiable as 'the redemption' ritual which Irenaeus connects with Mark chapter 10 - the exact place where LGM 1 appears in Secret Mark. We read Irenaeus remark that:

it happens that their (i.e. Marcosian) tradition respecting redemption is invisible and incomprehensible, as being the mother of things which are incomprehensible and invisible; and on this account, since it is fluctuating, it is impossible simply and all at once to make known its nature, for every one of them hands it down just as his own inclination prompts. Thus there are as many schemes of "redemption" as there are teachers of these mystical opinions. And when we come to refute them, we shall show in its fitting-place, that this class of men have been instigated by Satan to a denial of that baptism which is regeneration to God, and thus to a renunciation of the whole faith.

They maintain that those who have attained to perfect knowledge must of necessity be regenerated into that power which is above all. For it is otherwise impossible to find admittance within the Pleroma, since this [regeneration] it is which leads them down into the depths of Bythus. For the baptism instituted by the visible Jesus was for the remission of sins, but the redemption brought in by that Christ who descended upon Him, was for perfection; and they allege that the former is animal, but the latter spiritual. And the baptism of John was proclaimed with a view to repentance, but the redemption by Christ was brought in for the sake of perfection. And to this He refers when He says, "And I have another baptism to be baptized with, and I hasten eagerly towards it."(Mark x.38) Moreover, they affirm that the Lord added this redemption to the sons of Zebedee, when their mother asked that they might sit, the one on His right hand, and the other on His left, in His kingdom, saying, "Can ye be baptized with the baptism which I shall be baptized with?"(ibid) Paul, too, they declare, has often set forth, in express terms, the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; and this was the same which is handed down by them in so varied and discordant forms. [Irenaeus Against the Heresies i.20]

I am sorry people but Jeffrey's argument is stupid. I have just disproved it in less than a few paragraphs and it is actually uncanny how closely his characterization of To Theodore's ritual resembles that which appears in Irenaeus' description of the Marcosian baptism.

Just as Jeffrey identifies LGM 1 as a 'very odd one lacking many of the ritual elements that occur in other early liturgical sources,' Irenaeus begins his analysis of the Marcosian ritual as being 'incomprehensible' and that the Marcosians are a 'class of men have been instigated by Satan to a denial of that baptism which is regeneration to God, and thus to a renunciation of the whole faith.' I would make go on to suggest that Jeffrey's demonization of Morton Smith develops from the exact same sensibility - Jeffrey is above all else a believer who THINKS like Irenaeus when he comes across a description of the very same ritual which prompted the Church Father to lash out against Clement's sect.

To use the language of the period - the 'spirit' of Irenaeus pervades Jeffrey's approach to the same material.

Now I don't want to perpetuate a personal attack against Jeffrey but his argument is stupid and ultimately maliciously so. A smart man like him should have at least considered the possibility that just because he couldn't find a pre-existent liturgical use of LGM 1 didn't mean there wasn't one out there. There is a strange arrogance in Jeffrey's thought that all that there is to be known about Christianity is already established and To Theodore CAN ONLY represent something falsified - either by the Devil or one of his agents.

It just so happens that I have indeed found the original context both for Irenaeus' attack against the Marcosian 'redemption' ritual and LGM 1 in the Letter to Theodore. I think the evidence suggests that the two were one and the same thing.

In my estimation the evidence does indeed suggest that there really was a secret Gospel of Mark held by the Alexandrian Church of St Mark and that this text did indeed make mention Jesus baptizing one of his disciples in the period leading up to the Passover when Jesus was crucified. The fact that this goes against our accepted notions of how 'the liturgy is supposed to look' and we suppose ritual baptism is supposed to be placed in relation to that liturgy is utterly irrelevant.

As many scholars have noted before me, there was ALWAYS great variation among the various surviving Christian traditions. Some organized the baptizing of the catechumen in relation to the Epiphany, others in relation to Passover.

Jeffrey ignores the fact (or just isn't aware) that Manichaeans maintained a thirty day fast before Passover just as the thirty day Islamic fast of Ramadan originally coincided with Passover. Indeed I happen to think there is good circumstantial evidence to suggest that the 'Marcosians' (i.e. the original followers of St. Mark) had a thirty day fast before Easter and that the first day of this thirty day fast would correspond with the Jewish celebration of Purim. As I have again noted such an association would explain why the thirty day period was called 'the redemption' as Sephardic custom (i.e. the Jewish traditions of the Middle East) connect Purim to Passover as 'redemption to redemption.'

In short it is a 'redemption' period where - in those thirty days - the community prepares for the ultimate redemption of the people of the Israel.

I have written about these arguments extensively at this post but I would like to clarify that I have yet to write an academic article on the subject. The exact nature of how the thirty day 'redemption' to 'redemption' developed into the thirty day fast period of the followers of Mark, Mani and Mohammed is still nothing more than speculative research.

The point I want to make again is that Jeffrey's attempt to simply dismiss the details of Secret Mark merely because they don't fit into HIS inherited presuppositions or those of his Church is a very dangerous development in scholarship. It reminds me of those trials faced by the very 'heresies' in the fourth and fifth centuries. There can be no question that To Theodore is an INNOCENT reporting of a variant gospel of Mark which was indeed used as part of a variant liturgy in Alexandria exactly as the text suggests. The facts of the matter that Irenaeus reports the same thing about the use of Mark chapter 10 and a baptism ritual that no longer appears their in our canon and the 'Marcosian' community which is universally regarded by scholarship on the sect as having developed from Egypt.

I would however like to take matters one step further and turn Jeffrey's argument around against him.

As I am a Jew I find all this talk about liturgy relating to scripture as very puzzling as - it is clear from the earliest sources - baptism is identified by the Apostle in relation to one scriptural event which happened AFTER Passover - i.e. the baptism into the sea. In Jewish tradition the event occurred on the shvi'i shel Pesach (שביעי של פסח "seventh [day] of Passover").

The Israelites came to the sea crossing after three days of travel (Ex. 12-14, confirmed by Num. 33:5-8) but as Steve Mason notes tradition declares that they only "actually crossed it on the second feast (that is, on the seventh day of Passover)."

I don't want to get into a detailed account of the idea that Christian baptism practices were organized BEFORE Easter but they are thoroughly refuted by Maxwell E Johnson here. It is only worth citing his conclusion "prior to the post-Nicene context of the fourth century, the Alexandrian tradition knew neither Easter baptism knew neither a pre-paschal Lent longer than one week of the Paschal feast .... only in the Post-Nicene context of the fourth century does Paschal baptism along with a Roman 6 re-interpretation as incorporation into the death and resurrection of Christ, become a near universal Christian idea. Even then it does not appear to become the only dominant custom outside of Rome or northern Italy." [emphasis his p. 209 - 210]

The point of course is that no one knows when, how or what the pre-Nicene Paschal liturgy looked like or when, how or what the Alexandrian baptismal initiation looked like. Jeffrey can attempt to impose his inherited model on that blind spot in our knowledge but it is of little use for serious scholars in the field. I however can offer up a little insight into the redemption ritual of the Marcosian heretics and demonstrate that they match perfectly the understanding developed by Irenaeus.

Let me start with the attack against those who calculated Easter according to the Jewish method (the so-called Quartodecimianist heresy). Scholars have long suspected that the 'heresy' here went beyond whether or not Easter fell on Sunday. One might well imagine that use of a Jewish calendar to CALCULATE Easter extended into an identification of baptism on twenty first of Nisan. For when you look again at the Apostle's words in the letter to the Corinthians it is impossible to imagine that he could have imagined it otherwise:

For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was XC. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert. Now these things occurred as types (for us) [1 Cor 1 - 5]

Yet how is the baptism into the cloud in the sea a 'type' for the post-Nicene model for baptism when Christians baptize on a day OTHER THAN WHAT Scripture dictates. It makes no sense at all. Indeed it seems to be utterly illogical that the Apostle could announce that events in the Jewish liturgical year on 21 Nisan represented a 'type' for the community BUT SOMEHOW the first Jewish converts to Christianity KNEW that they shouldn't have maintained their baptism rituals on 21 Nisan.

Indeed it might be worth noting to my readers that a little earlier in the same letter there is clear evidence that the Marcionionites might well have identified something significant occurred at the end on the seventh day. The received text of 1 Cor 5:6 - 8 reads

Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast leavens the whole lump? Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.

Epiphanius clearly testifies to the fact that the Marcionite reading was different the underlying sense being that adding 'leaven' to the festival of the unleavened bread was corruption. So:

Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast corrupts the whole lump?

I can't believe that a hundred years of Marcionite scholarship hasn't recognized that the Marcionite text is undoubtedly arguing on behalf of the original integrity of the feast of unleavened bread WITHIN the Christian liturgy. It is worth noting that Tertullian's version of 1 Corinthians AGREED with the Marcionite variant:

he [the Apostle] subjoins: "Know ye not, that a little leaven spoileth the savour of the whole lump? [On Modesty]

This is undoubtedly WHY Tertullian never even bothers to cite this 'Marcionite variant' as a variant. The Montanist and Marcionite canons agreed AGAINST Irenaeus' reading.

My suggestion of course is that the original ALEXANDRIAN reading of 1 Cor 5: 6- 8 simply said:

Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast corrupts the whole lump? Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. Let us keep the feast not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

Indeed the fact that the Apostle was originally understood to be talking about a Christian adoption of the Jewish Feast of Unleavened Bread is acknowledged by Origen who, in his Commentary on Matthew, identifies the 'leaven' here as Jewish sectarian teaching - viz. "it is the mark of the clear-sighted and careful to separate the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees and every food that is not of "the unleavened-bread of sincerity and truth from the living bread, even that which came down from heaven, so that no one who eats may adopt the things of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but by eating the living and true bread may strengthen his soul " [Comm. Matt. xvi.5] but nonetheless understands the apostle to advocating the tradition Jewish Festival of Unleavened Bread as part of the Christian liturgical year. We read:

Another feature of the Jewish festival [of Passover] is unleavened bread; all leaven is made to disappear out of their houses; but we keep the feast [1 Corinthians 5:8] not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth." Whether there be any passover and any feast of leaven beyond the two we have mentioned, is a point we must examine more carefully, since these serve for a pattern and a shadow of the heavenly ones we spoke of, and not only such things as food and drink and new moons and sabbaths, but the festivals also, are a shadow of the things to come. In the first place, when the Apostle says, Our passover is sacrificed, Christ, one may feel with regard to this such doubts as these. If the sheep with the Jews is a type of the sacrifice of Christ, then one should have been offered and not a multitude, as Christ is one; or if many sheep were offered it is to follow out the type, as if many Christs were sacrificed. But not to dwell on this ... [Comm. John. x.13]

As I have said time and again the ignorance about Jewish practices continues to hinder the development of an accurate understanding of their tradition. Origen is of course very elusive about what the exact relationship his Alexandrian tradition presumes to be between 'Passover' (which he acknowledges INCLUDES the seven days of the Festival of the Unleavened Bread') and the Christian Easter service. The only clue he gives is a word which will show up later in the same letter by the Apostle - i.e. type or typos.

Origen says that just as there was only one lamb established as a typos for all the lambs sacrificed later in all the homes of the Israelites but goes out of his way to deny the idea that the passover slaughter was a 'type' of the Passion. This is because - while commenting on this same section of text - reasons:

the lamb [of Passover] is sacrificed by the saints or the Nazarites while the Savior is sacrificed by criminals and sinners ... [so] the Passover is indeed a type of Christ but not of his Passion [kai tupos men XC estin to pascha] [Peri Pass. xii. 25]

I think this is a critical distinction as the Apostle - as we shall see - later identifies the parting of the Sea of Reeds as a 'typos' of baptism.

Indeed I don't want to get to far a field from my original purpose but - ALL commentators have acknowledged that only Holy Week seems to have been maintained by the Alexandrians from the very beginning. How interesting then is Origen's seems to hint at a baptism a week after Easter in his one and only attempt to divulge the sacred mysteries of the Alexandrian community. He writes:

I will therefore try, with God's grace, to expound the spiritual meaning [of the Christian adoption of Passover] in order that the power of salvation accomplished in Christ may become manifest to those who love instruction, as it is written: To all who received him, he gave power to become children of God; who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:12 - 13) For adoption in Christ has given us the power of so tremendous a salvation, we who are not born of the blood and the will of man and women, and whom He recognizes as His brothers ... [alluded to by] the words up to the fourteenth (cf. Exod. 12.6) a number of the second week, this signifies a repose of two weeks which came between the first creation (i.e. seven days) i.e. the invisible one, and the second creation the visible one. [Peri Pasch. 40.34 - 41.11; 42.15 - 22)

I am beginning to suspect that Holy Week was in Alexandria followed by a second week which corresponded to old Festival of the Unleavened Bread of the Jews on 21 Nisan. This why Origen stresses time and again that the Passion IS NOT A TYPE of the Passover. The Alexandrians must have celebrated Holy Week in the week ending on 14 Nisan and then followed that with an adaptation of the seven days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread culminating in their 'redemption' ritual.

In order to get to solidify this understanding we need to accept the Marcionites as a(nother) heretical Markan sect (or indeed the same sect reported by different Church Fathers). Origen's patron Ambrose was a (reformed) Marcionite and he secretly adopts many of the central tenets of their redemption theology. As we have seen at least half the early Church identified them as using a variant text of Mark. As I have demonstrated from my ongoing correspondence with Professor Rory Boid of Monash University the name 'Marcionite' is an Aramaism, it means 'those of Mark.' The Marcionites consistently identified Jesus as 'Chrestos' rather than 'Christos' and this distinction will ultimately help us crack the 'redemption code' as it were which has so dogged these ignorant Gentiles.

The ignorant Gentiles have typically followed the Church Fathers in translating the use of the Marcionite title for Jesus as 'good.' This displays once again a jarring lack of understanding for Jewish tradition. Look at the passage cited above in the letter to the Corinthians. XC - a nomen sacrum which original meant chrestos among the Greeks (it was used to mark manuscripts where readings were 'correct' and later adapted by Catholics to denote 'Christ' or christos - clearly does not mean 'Christ' or messiah here.

Getting beyond the issue that no Jew ever could believe that someone like Jesus was the messiah, no Jewish person would ever imagine that the messiah would be standing beside Moses directing the people out of Israel. The term obviously means chrestos here. This exactly how the Marcionites would have read their manuscripts and it clearly demonstrates how the title Chrestos developed from the Hebrew word yashar as attested in numerous LXX witnesses. This argument is laid out here.

The point again is that given Paul's earliest reference to baptism as involving XC guiding the Israelites through the sea any Jewish person would immediately recognize the identity of this supernatural figure EVEN WITHOUT THE LXX MEANING OF CHRESTOS. Jesus is called yashar because he is angel Israel, the supernatural 'column' identified in Exodus 13:21 -22 "the LORD preceded them, in the daytime by means of a column of cloud to show them the way, and at night by means of a column of fire to give them light. Thus they could travel both day and night. Neither the column of cloud by day nor the column of fire by night ever left its place in front of the people."

Again the point isn't what Jeffrey's Roman tradition holds to be true when trying to sort out the authenticity of To Theodore but what bits and pieces we can grab to make sense of the text from the writings of Irenaeus on the Marcosians (of which Clement was again a member).

There can be no doubt that Irenaeus writes that "Paul, too, they declare, has often set forth, in express terms, the redemption which is in Christ" [AH i.20] It has also been noted that Irenaeus reports the Marcosians use the same language when they talk about their redemption baptism INTO Jesus as Paul does about the ancient Israelites.

Paul says that the Israelites were baptized "into the cloud and in the sea" just as the Marcosians lead their catechumen "to water, and while they baptize them they repeat the following words: Into the name of the unknown father of the universe, into truth, the mother of all things, into the one that descended, into Jesus." [εἰς τὸν κατελθόντα εἰς τὸν ᾽Ιησοῦν] [Eusebius/Book IV/Chapter 11;AH. i. 21. 3] I have noted elsewhere that all studies of the redemption ritual from references in the Excerpts of Theodotus and the Nag Hammadi literature have identified it as an angelic baptism where those of us 'dead' mortals receive 'aeonic' or angelic life through union with the angel Jesus in the water.

Of course a careful scrutiny of Clement's writings reveals the one instance when he cites the words of 1 Corinthians 10 he does so in a context which - in my mind at least - reinforces that it was done IN RELATION to the Jewish dating of the event on the seventh day of Passover. After criticizing the heretics for ignoring the Old Testament Clement writes:

Our Gnostic then alone, having grown old in the Scriptures, and maintaining apostolic and ecclesiastic orthodoxy in doctrines, lives most correctly in accordance with the Gospel, and discovers the proofs, for which he may have made search (sent forth as he is by the Lord), from the law and the prophets [emphasis mine]. For the life of the Gnostic, in my view, is nothing but deeds and words corresponding to the tradition of the Lord. But “all have not knowledge. For I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren,” says the apostle, “that all were under the cloud, and partook of spiritual meat and drink;”[1 Cor. x. 1, 3, 4] clearly affirming that all who heard the word did not take in the magnitude of knowledge in deed and word. [Strom 7.16]

I have repeated over and over here that regardless what Jeffrey's Roman tradition held regarding the ritual of baptism I strongly suggest that the original force of the writings of Paul, the Marcosian appeal to the Apostle as a witness for their redemption baptism and Clement of Alexandria's distinction between the heretics who ignore 'the Law and the prophets' and the true understanding of Paul's words in 1 Corinthians chapter 10 which develop from traditional Jewish usage means the most likely date for the Marcosian baptism occurred on the seventh day of Passover.

Of course, I might be wrong about this. This is still a working hypothesis but more information on my understanding of the Markan tradition appears here. However Jeffrey's whole approach of attacking Morton Smith's INTERPRETATION of the Letter to Theodore and presenting that as clear proof that the letter itself is 'very odd' is down right stupid. Smith, Talley and Jeffrey are wrong in attempting to link the description of Secret Mark to the Paschal liturgy. After all, Jesus' baptism had nothing to do with the Paschal liturgy why should LGM 1? It is an unnecessary assumption, a stupid assumption and one which Smith, Talley and Jeffrey should never have made given the reality of Alexandrian tradition.