I Guess Morton Smith Must Have 'Just Got Lucky' With This One (No, This Doesn't Involve a Bathroom Stall and Some Astroglide)

Some of you might be wondering why I have such an interest in Secret Mark. After all it only forms a small part of my 'meta-theory' that St. Mark developed Christianity as a religion about himself as the awaited messiah of Israel (and where Jesus was just divinity secretly acknowledging his messiahood).

Why not talk about who I think Mark was? Or why not talk about why I think St. Berenice was his sister or that St. Titus was his best friend?

There are more than enough 'crazy' ideas to go around. Why limit myself to just a few?

Well, to be honest with you I have my book to do all of that. My 'meta-theory' is on sale at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Chapters (it's been so long since I've been in Canada that I am not sure where it is called that any more) and a number of other stores.

In fact as a way of getting around people accusing of me of doing all of this to plug my book - and in honor of my landing a big contract in my 'day job' - I am going to extend an offer to BUY ANYONE THAT WANTS A COPY OF MY BOOK, A COPY OF MY BOOK.

Just send me an email and - for all of February 'the month of love' - I will order you a book from Amazon, from my credit card to your doorstep. Just find my email at my Blogger profile and I will send you a copy.

It's my way of 'giving back' (lol).

Anyway, let me explain my motivation. I was just talking with one of the readers of my blog today (most people email me questions rather than post them on my blog - go figure) and he told me wasn't sure why I organized my blog the way I do.

I should 'systematize' things better because there were so many interesting observations. It was impossible to read all of them given the volume of posts at my site (1400 in just less than half a year).

Well, let me tell you what I told him. When I started my blog I figured that my book would be a bestseller by now.

No that's not true.

I started the blog when I saw that the publisher limited the footnotes to just 500 (count 'em and see). I knew I would have do something to help 'fill in the blanks' for people who wondered where I got the idea for my 'radical theory.'

So like any good writer (or someone pretending to be a good writer) I figured I had to start somewhere. That's why I began blogging about the Mar Saba document. I figured it is the one controversy that anyone in the blogging world might care about.

It also probably didn't hurt that the principle advocate for the 'hoax proposition' happened to be a prominent 'Biblioblogger.' When I learned that Stephen Carlson had a blog, I kind of thought it might be neat to compare our respective blogs ranking at the Alexa site.

I think he is up at the moment when compared to mine - 1,666,707 to 1,885,685 - but notice the '666' in his number (lol).

In any event, the truth is that I am nothing like Stephen Carlson. He is going to be a professor at a prestigious university, something I will never even attempt in this or any other lifetime.

If that alone determines who people should listen to about shut matters - I direct people to his site, Timo's blog and countless others who are 'professionals' in the field of speculating about the origins of Christianity.

There isn't much that I can say in my favor other than I have a lot of good ideas and I think BECAUSE OF MY SEMITIC ANCESTRY I understand the forces that led to the development of Christianity.

I think that it is because of that pedigree that I developed an interest in the Diatessaron. I happen to also believe that the Diatessaron is related to Secret Mark and that this relationship was one of the factors which led me to conclude that Mark wasn't establishing the central document in a 'Jesus religion' but a tradition which secretly held that Jesus established Mark as the messiah.

So this is how it all came together.

I couldn't help but notice that Christians from the part of the world THAT MY ANCESTORS CAME FROM had only this single gospel tradition. Whether the Diatessaron, the gospel of Marcion or the Ebionites - the Semitic people held fast to one holy text because the were waiting for one like Moses to come as a restorer of all that the prophet represented.

The fourfold gospel of the Europeans seemed - at least to me - to be a deliberate distraction away from that original expectation.

Could it be that the Roman Empire felt threatened by the hope of Semitic people for 'one like Moses'? It doesn't seem unreasonable to me but then again I see things from the 'other side' of the fence.

There can be no denying at the very least that it took all the king's horses and all the king's men (and the threat of severe beatings and death) to finally get Christians in Jesus' part of the world in the fifth century to abandon the 'one, true gospel' tradition and adopt the European man's quaternion.

In the end, I was still in university when I stumbled upon the idea of a single, long gospel in Alexandria written by Mark. I read about it in Morton Smith's 1973 book (which I bought secondhand at Atticus a used academic book store in Toronto).

I thought this is about as close to making intuitive 'sense' as anything in earliest Christianity. Almost all of the surviving fragments of early gospels come from Egypt. The gospels (especially the opening words of 'John' have an unmistakable 'Alexandrianism' about them.

I also always felt that Mark seemed to be the 'realest' of the evangelists. After all, if he wrote the first gospel all the others end up looking like later forgeries (no let me correct that - they are ALL forgeries of his lost original work).

I don't know what attracted me to Secret Mark but maybe it just seemed more tangible and 'real' than Q. Hopefully you saw what I wrote in my last post. I guess I never quite understood how we can be so certain about Q and uncertain about something that we found and can touch with our hands.

I also don't happen to be part of a belief system that prefers things I can't understand to things I can.

In any event, one of my first discoveries about Secret Mark developed my interest in the Semitic gospel tradition - viz. the Diatessaron. I happened to be VERY familiar with its contents and when I read the SECOND of the two citations of Secret Mark (the one no one pays attention to) I thought to myself Morton Smith couldn't have deliberately manufactured a text to so resemble an ignored feature of the Diatessaron.

Let me show you what I mean.

The Diatessaron squeezes (at least if you think in the familiar terms of our existing canon) a story in the exactly place that this second story in Secret Mark gets squeezed into 'canonical Mark.' So we read:

And when Jesus entered and passed through Jericho, there was a man named Zacchaeus, rich, and chief of the publicans. And he desired to see Jesus who he was; and he was not able for the pressure of the crowd, because Zacchaeus was little of stature. Arabic, And he hastened, and went before Jesus, and went up into an unripe fig tree to see Jesus: for he was to pass thus. And when Jesus came to that place, he saw him, and said unto him, Make haste, and come down, Zacchaeus: to-day I must be in thy house. And he hastened, and came down, and received him joyfully. And when they all saw, they murmured, and said, He hath gone in and lodged with a man that is a sinner. So Zacchaeus stood, and said unto Jesus, My Lord, now half of my possessions I give to the poor, and what I have unjustly taken from every man I give him fourfold. Jesus said unto him, Today is salvation come to this house, because this man also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man came to seek and save the thing that was lost. And when Jesus went out of Jericho, he and his disciples, there came after him a great multitude. And there was a blind man[Diat. XXXI 15 - 25]

Compare with what appears in Secret Mark:

And he comes into Jericho and the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them

We don't know what followed 'Jesus did not receive them.' It could be the rest of Mark i.e.

And when Jesus went out of Jericho, he and his disciples

Or indeed - as I suspect Clement's gospel inserted the same story as the Diatessaron - i.e. the Zacchaeus narrative.

So let's put have the hoaxers explain how Morton Smith when he 'forged' the letter to Theodore HAPPENED TO INSERT LGM 2 IN THE EXACT PLACE THAT THE DIATESSARON 'INSERTED' THE ZACCHAEUS NARRATIVE.

In other words, either there was a tradition that 'something belonged' between Jesus entering and leaving Jericho or Morton Smith 'just got lucky' with that one.

Now I won't get into where else I think Clement references a gospel of Mark which resembled the Diatessaron. This will come in a subsequent post where I demonstrate that (a) both he and Origen know a gospel like the Diatessaron in the material which PRECEDES this section of Mark and (b) the teaching in Who is the Rich Man That Shall be Saved CAN ONLY MAKE SENSE IF CLEMENT KNEW A GOSPEL OF MARK WHERE THE ZACCHAEUS NARRATIVE IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED THE SECTION FROM MARK THAT HE CITES IN THAT WORK (i.e. Mark x.17 - 31).

Indeed it was for these and many other reasons that started having me suspect that the text behind the Diatessaron was a longer, fuller version of the gospel of Mark. Not only did the Diatessaron still retain Mark 1:1 as its opening words (and thus 'the gospel of IC XC' must have formed its original title) but the acrostic,l written by a later scribe in several of the editions makes this original authorship absolutely explicit:

Matthew the elect, whose symbol is M, Mark the chosen, whose symbol is R, Luke the approved, whose symbol is K, and John the beloved, whose symbol is H

The acrostic originally spelled out Marqe, the form of the name 'Marcus' as it is preserved in Samaritan Aramaic - Marqe. The Old Latin Gospel Harmony spells it out Marka. All of them undoubtedly go back to a form:

M a tt ai = 'Matthew'
m R q s = 'Mark'
l u Q a = 'Luke'
y o n H = 'John'

I couldn't believe that Morton Smith was so clever as to deliberately manufacture his 'invention' of longer Mark to resemble the Diatessaron. As such I began to believe in the authenticity of his discovery.

None of this should be taken to represent what I think are THE STRONGEST REASONS for accepting the authenticity of Morton Smith's discovery. They instead represent something far more personal - they are MY REASONS for rejecting the call to doubt another scholars claim to have discovered this truly amazing document ...