I happened to have read Watson's opining about Paul along time before he ever wrote the piece on Secret Mark in the Journal of Theological Studies. Watson is among the silliest theologians I have ever read. His basic point throughout his writings is that we have to abandon historical criticism of 'scripture' because - well - it all gets in the way of allowing traditional dogma to dominate its exegesis. Francis Watson sees contemporary Biblical scholarship in terms of a clash between modernity and rationalism versus tradition. Yet a tradition which paradoxically excludes Marcion the earliest exegete of Paul from any role in determining who the 'real Paul' was.
I truly despise scholars who lack the imagination to consider the blind spots in our knowledge. Indeed I am all for restricting the influence of modernity in the study of ancient texts but we moderns owe it to the truth to consider and strive to become acquainted with the traditions which were left behind and especially Marcionitism. I don't see how someone like Watson can claim to reconstruct who the real Paul was without spending years - not minutes - attempting to reconstruct the original Marcionite paradigm. Yet this is the whole point of Watson's dishonesty. Beneath all the veils of fancy words and polysyllabic nonsense, Watson is really only a pimp for the inherited tradition of the Catholic Church Fathers. He is not interested in things which challenge what he inherited from his culture, from his Mommy and Daddy and so he pushes Marcion to the side and anything else which he sees challenging the authority of his inherited 'truth.'
Of course Watson can't claim that Marcion was a 'hoax' because Marcion is referenced and rejected in the writings of his beloved Church Fathers. However Watson refuses at the same time to go beyond the caricature that the same Church Fathers present for their 'Marcion.' The Church Fathers are the beginning, middle and end of Christianity for Watson and because the Church Fathers do not make explicit reference to a 'Letter to Theodore' or a 'mystic gospel of Mark' Watson knows with absolute certainty that the document discovered by Morton Smith is a fake.
I can't say enough about how absurd Watson's position is with respect to the Mar Saba document. A text has been photographed by two different people. It presents what is purported to be a letter written by the late second century Church Father Clement of Alexandria. The starting point of any investigation into this discovery has to be whether or not this letter is really written by Clement. However Watson and others want us to start somewhere else. As a well respected professor at Harvard University recently noted to me in a private conversation, they can't impugn the discovery so they attack Morton Smith instead.
It is simply absurd to develop a paper which starts with a conclusion and then works its way back to a pretense of investigation. In order to get to the proof that Morton Smith forged the Mar Saba document you first have to establish that the document isn't exactly what it seems to be - an otherwise unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria. Even if you could determine that the letter wasn't Clementine - and let's not forget Watson and other partisans completely sidestep this question - you'd have to prove that the text isn't an ancient forgery rather than a modern one.
We have all become more familiar with Morton Smith's life 'behind the scenes' than any other scholar of his generation. Yet even with this deliberate attempt to put 'Morton Smith' under the microscope, these hoaxers have done nothing to advance the forgery proposition other than with like-minded cranks. Pantuck's original BAR paper was wonderful because it showed how delving into a scholars personal writings can shine light on his development as a thinker. The Mar Saba document changed Morton Smith. It challenged him to think about the core Christian concepts in different ways than he was used to. This is a powerful argument in favor of Morton Smith not being the author of the text, especially when taken alongside other obvious signs which point to the same conclusion (see previous posts).
Of course Francis Watson doesn't want to even consider any other possibility than Morton Smith as the forger of the text. It is the exact same way as we saw with respect to his approach to the 'historical Paul' - i.e. that Marcion, the earliest authority on Paul might have something to contribute to the discussion. All Watson seems to care about is that Pantuck hasn't taken the time to respond to all the idiotic formulations that went into his original article. As a result of Pantuck's undeserved brevity, Watson has decided to only devote the equivalent of two and a half pages for his response. Pantuck's analysis of Morton Smith's development as a thinker after discovering the Mar Saba document warrants only a paragraph, the rest of this paper - apparently jotted on the back of a cocktail napkin - recycles the same arguments in his original journal article.
I should spend a few minutes defending my characterization of many of Watson's arguments as downright stupid. I know many of my readers might write this off as me acting in a partisan manner. Yet this is the furthest thing from the truth. Watson's original paper had a disproportionate number of truly stupid arguments. Instead of appealing to people who share the same mindset with respect to the authenticity of the Letter to Theodore I will instead make my appeal to the other side as it were, and bring forward the eminently evangelistic New Testament authority Peter Head's observation about the original Watson article.
The original article at Evangelical Textual Criticism is here and if you look to the comments section of the original post on Watson's article Mark Goodacre asks Head to clarify what he found 'ridiculous' about the paper. Here is Head's response:
Did I say 'ridiculous'? There is a section about 'A Forger's Signature': this includes the two odd bits: i) the move from forgery to forge to smithy as a hidden confession; and ii) the argument that MWRANQHNAI contains the hidden: MWR-QHN (Morton) - 'a concealed reference to those who are fooled (Mortonized, we might say) by this forged (Smithed) letter.'
It is like an argument out of Doctor Who.
The point is that by anyone's standard most of Watson's original paper is exceedingly silly, and mostly a retread of what Carlson wrote a half a decade ago without even so much as an acknowledgment of recent discoveries questioning Carlson's methodology (he used the lowest grade images of the document to 'prove' it was a forgery).
Yet Watson isn't content until he has brought forward the stupidest argument possible to argue on behalf of the forgery proposition, and it is only in his rebuttal of Allan Pantuck's BAR article that he finally comes up with pure genius idiocy. He notes at one point:
Turning for a moment from confrontation to cooperation, I would like to add a further complex coincidence to Pantuck’s collection, one that he himself has missed. Smith, he tells us, became a “manuscript hunter” under the influence of Werner Jaeger. “Jaeger” is German for “hunter.” Hunter is also the name of the novelist whose tale of manuscript hunting Smith wittingly or unwittingly reenacted. “Jaeger” was also the name of a German friend and professional associate of Edward Elgar, immortalized in the Enigma Variations as “Nimrod”, the “mighty hunter before the Lord” (Genesis10:9). An intriguing pattern emerges: five hunters, an association with mysteries or enigmas, and a series of pairings between males of Anglo-American and Germanic ethnicity. I agree, then, that coincidences do happen in real life, defying the odds that might seem to be stacked against them in advance.
Was Watson high when he formulated this stuff? Seriously folks, there is a place for nonsense like this - it's called a blog. I engage in this kind of daydreaming in my spare time all the time here. BAR gave him an opportunity to take his best shot at Pantuck and Watson decides instead to outdo himself with a lengthy and very wacky non sequitur.
Watson apparently wants us to ignore Pantuck's very insightful demonstration that coincidences do happen in real life and accept instead that Morton Smith decided to model his life after a pulp fiction novel. Like Peter Head said - an argument straight out of Doctor Who or perhaps a Spiderman comic. Watson apparently thinks that the only explanation that accounts for the similarities between Hunter's novel and Morton Smith's real life discovery is that Morton Smith 'got his idea' from Hunter. Yet there have been a lot of conspiracy theories developed around the idea that the Vatican is hiding something in its library. If a historian discovered a document there one day it would surely resemble some of the narratives already written in some way. In other words, life isn't as original as people like to believe. At least I think that was Pantuck's original point.
I have noted that James Hunter's interest can be easily explained by a front page story in virtually every newspaper in the world at that time involving a kidnapping of an evangelic minister in Palestine that ended with said preacher's release after the payment of a ransom at the Mar Saba monastery. The point then is that the first part of the relationship is easily explained - James Hunter decided to develop the basic framework of his novel 'inspired' by contemporary newspaper stories. This kind of thing goes on in Hollywood even today. What is so surprising about a scholar like Smith ending up in the same monastery looking looking for and discovering a new manuscript? The monastery happened to be home to a lot of early and interesting texts.
For me at least the most surprising development in the whole Mar Saba story is that scholarship has revealed itself to be utterly vindictive and polemic in the twenty first century. Let's look at that closing statement from Watson's BAR article again just to absorb its evil:
my hope and expectation is that it [the Mar Saba document] will be increasingly ignored by scholars who fear, with good reason, that their work will be corrupted by association with it
In a single sentence we see the real purpose of Watson's efforts and those of his ilk. They aren't interested in the truth. They aren't interested in examining what might be possible with the Mar Saba document. Instead they are openly and quite candidly willing to come up with whatever might embarrass people into avoiding using the text. All of this is wished for without any convincing evidence to (a) identify the text as a forgery and (b) to make Morton Smith the forger. All they want to do is so poison the well that no one goes back to it. This is a sad day in scholarship indeed.
For there are many texts that have survived from antiquity that purport to be associated with a Church Father than are still used by scholars to allow us a glimpse into the early Christian environment. Many of these texts are identified by placing the word 'pseudo-' in front of the author. So it is that there are texts of Pseudo-Josephus, Pseudo-Ignatius, Pseudo-Hippolytus and countless other early Church Fathers. I want to state my firmest conviction that the Mar Saba document is certainly an authentic composition by Clement of Alexandria. Watson wants us to know that he is equally convinced that it is a forgery written by Morton Smith. Nevertheless, there is a middle position that the text wasn't written by Clement or Morton Smith but was instead the work of someone from the third or fourth centuries and still offers us a priceless glimpse into the early Alexandrian Church.
Are people really willing to take the plunge with Watson and his crazy arguments from Doctor Who and completely ignore this more interesting text? I sincerely hope they do not. It is almost never a good thing to close one's mind to possibilities. The only people who will tell you otherwise are partisans ...
dating back to conversations with his grandfather, Gaston Frank. "He said we represent one of the last descendants of the Frankist Jewish faith in the world," he muses. "I grew up thinking that our family was something like the Last of the Mohicans."