And They Call This 'Higher Learning' ...

I don't know to say this but ...

If you were a member of the faculty at Brown University's Religious Studies department in the 1970s and 1980s and had good memories of Professor Jacob 'Jack' Neusner please drop me a line.

If you were an associate of Morton Smith in the same period and had suspicions that he was a homosexual please send me an email as well.

I am trying to be fair and not arrive at the very conclusions I went into with this discovery process. Indeed I have been investigating every possible angle of the transformation of Neusner's opinion regarding Morton Smith, the Mar Saba document and his Jesus the Magician book and I keep coming up with the same story over and over and over again. I don't even know how to proceed because I can't find a single person who presents a different picture of what was going on at Brown University in this period.

It is the stuff that so crazy and unbelievable that if you put it in a movie they'd say - 'this didn't happen, you made it up.' It's that bizarre. The closest thing I can liken it to is if they made a situation comedy called 'University' and they had to invent a foil to help move the plot in the show. You know like Herb Tarlek of WKRP in Cincinatti, Frank Burns of M.A.S.H. etc. I truly don't know how to describe what I was hearing today. After three hours of phone conversations it's seems totally surreal. My head is still spinning.

Now people are going to say that all of the Mar Saba controversy doesn't necessarily come down to a split between two professors in the 1980s. Okay but where's the controversy about Mar Saba 65 if we don't have a certain someone saying libelous things about Smith (if he were alive)? Indeed who are the other sources of this claim that Smith was this or that? I can't find anyone else.

I have spent days talking to colleagues of Morton Smith at Columbia and Brown and I don't get any of the sensational stuff that you read about in Chilton, Jeffrey or Carlson's book. Where is this coming from? Not from the people who had any day to day contact with Smith, accept one obvious candidate.

I haven't heard a single person affirm the homosexual rumor. I have been on the phone with these people for over an hour at times and I ask the same thing in different ways - did you think he was gay, did anyone else think he was gay, did he invite you over to his place and he showed up at the door wearing just a bath towel and a glass of wine in his hand?

Nothing. Nobody. Nowhere. Never. Yet these books make these wild claims and they are all unreferenced. Yes, it's true that these authors will say 'claiming someone is gay is no longer grounds for libel.' Okay fair enough. But doesn't it matter if it is actually true? Shouldn't I find at least one person who will tell me 100 crazy things that happened at Brown University in the period and then add something like - 'yeah, but that thing about Smith being gay is true.'

I haven't heard that once yet. Seriously. And it's not like everyone I am speaking with were Smith's friends or that Smith was Mister Congeniality. The same people that say he was 'prickly' will be just as adamant to say it would be 'impossible' to believe that he was gay. I asked for him to clarify this statement and my source refused to say anything more.

I have no interest in belittling anyone. I just want to know who are the sources for these outlandish stories about Smith which contradicts everything that I have heard and keep hearing as I go down my call sheets.

The only people who will tell you that Smith was gay were people who didn't know him or ...