How I Got Thrown Out of the Secret Mark Cabal

For about two weeks I was part of the 'inner circle' of those who argue for the authenticity of Secret Mark. It was an unusual position for me to find myself in but of course in no time I made myself unwelcomed. One of the guys - we'll call him 'Barrie' because he lives in a city of this name with his mother - has always disliked me. You see there is a kind of unwritten rule that you worship 'Barrie' because he wrote the first dissertation defending the authenticity of the document. A work of utter genius. Such insight, such brilliance on every page. Daddy must be so proud.

I used to walk by Daddy's office all the time. I remember it well.

My parents were simply working class people. World War II decimated Europe. My mother and father ended up in a working class neighborhood in Toronto. They just wanted their son to get an education and he did. I actually really loved learning. I used to make pilgrimages to the University of Toronto (because his marks weren't good enough to get in). I went to Glendon College of York University instead and still managed to get a fine education just the same.

Yet on my own time, without any thought to getting a career in academia I used to go to the academic libraries in the University of Toronto. There were rules about keeping people like him - outsiders - from seeing the books. But I always managed to find a way to get in. False names, false identity cards. There were whole sections of the library that were off limits to undergraduates too. I managed to get into those places too.

I remember the feeling of managing to get ancient manuscripts in my hand for the first time. It is a very strange feeling. There is a connection with the past that you can't get when you read mere translations.

I also discovered the office where Barrie's father had an office. It was a most amazing place. On every wall there hung manuscripts and relics from ancient cultures, many Christian some Jewish. The more I used to steal my way into the libraries to come into contact with knowledge the more the idea grew in my head to break into that office and steal everyone of those seeming precious relics.

I remember the surname of Barrie's father because it was so strange to me. It meant 'scholar' in my mother tongue. I remember thinking how Barrie's father must have had parents who were scholars and they set the occupation of their son from birth. And now I see the same thing happened to Barrie.

Canada is such a wonderful country. There is an island of liberal white people who decided to let in hard working immigrants with lots of cash to help keeping the social services solvent. Everything is very class structured. 'Barrie' learned the trade of scholarship, like the son of a cobbler learns to make shoes. The only difference that there is a real elitism among the intelligencia.

Someone like 'Barrie' would honestly believe that he was better, 'whiter' (there is always a sense of this latent and unspoken racism in backwater colonial bastions like Canada) than someone like me. You have to live there to understand the stifling small-mindedness. The dispassionate irrationality that comes from living in a waste land that even the British didn't want to own any longer.

I really had nothing against Barrie when I first came into contact with him. I wanted him to help me get one of my papers published. He was polite enough. Canadians are always polite. Americans always mistake Canadians for being 'nice people' because they are so used to colorful characters. Canadians just seem so agreeable by comparison - it must be because they are 'nice' people.

In any event, Barrie has a typically Canadian approach to Secret Mark - play for a draw. Hockey is the only North American sport that can end in a tie. Indeed it is the whole strategy of his solid but utterly unremarkable book is to make the case over and over again that Morton Smith's interpretation of the text isn't the same as the text itself. 

Brilliant.  That's your contribution to scholarship summed up in a single sentence.  Hallelujah.  For people like me its the back of the bus (or in Canada the working class neighborhoods assigned for the newly arrived immigrants. 

My purpose has always been to argue on behalf of what the Letter to Theodore is actually saying. That is the kind of argument that won't make you any friends in scholarship. It puts your balls on the chopping block and this kind of 'recklessness' only demonstrates that you shouldn't be taken seriously by people like 'Barrie.'

Oh Barrie.  What an honor to be one of the educated white elites in Canada.  You've made it, buddy and you did it by defending a text you can't explain.  Your like the kid who came in first place at the science fair with a project that obvious had adult supervision. 

Congratulations.  Daddy showed you what his grandfather first taught him - how to succeed at the business of scholarship.  Now you have emerged as the 'leading expert' on Secret Mark at the age of thirty, all this without having any clue what the document is saying, how it fits in with the writings of Clement, the contemporary Church Fathers and the history of Christianity. 

When I am going to learn?  This isn't how scholarship works.  It works in little secret cabals of the 'for' and 'against' camps plotting against one another, organizing 'conferences' with unmistakable agendas (like the one at SBL a year ago). 

All of this may seem like some petty griping on my part. Maybe even sour grapes. But what really pissed me off is what got me thrown out of the secret cabal. I can't tell everyone exactly what the dispute is over. But let's just say that if anyone is organizing a conference on Secret Mark after this one in Toronto I have an amazing speaker from Greece with great ties to the Patriarchate who thinks he can prove that the Mar Saba document is a fake. He's also a widely respected paleographer who even has a new magazine article coming out in a prominent journal.

Apparently he's not welcomed in Toronto in May, 2011.

There is only one way to find the Mar Saba document and that is through a door marked Τσελίκας ...