While Stephen Carlson is certainly developing into a wonderful scholar, his claims in the Gospel Hoax are exceedingly silly. I have learned to respect Peter Jeffrey's honesty and integrity, but his Secret Gospel Unveiled (I don't remember all the rest that appears in the title - something about sex, drugs and rock 'n roll) is utterly senseless. The most recent efforts to discredit the discovery (Watson, Tselikas) only get wackier. The bottom line seems to be that while there are certainly unusual circumstances related to the preservation of this ancient manuscript, it is certainly best understood as a remarkable document whose preservation had an equally remarkable story that is never likely to be fully known.
I happen to accept the document's authenticity because in spite of all the efforts of 'the experts' the text is ultimately still left standing. The Mar Saba document itself certainly exhibits Clementine characteristics just as its 'secret gospel of Mark' exhibits unmistakable Markan features. Having reread Morton Smith's The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel according to Mark over the last few days, despite its obvious brilliance, I don't feel that Smith truly 'gets' the real significance of the document. Smith makes the material fit his own interest in magic even when those arguments seem utterly forced.
I don't know how it is possible that people can imagine Smith to be so diabolical that he'd spend almost twenty years writing a thesis which misunderstands his great discovery. Surely the forger understands his forgery. Not so with the Mar Saba document.
The first thing Smith should have done in his book was to find evidence that Clement supported the idea that the gospel or 'the word of God' (ὁ τοῦ θεοῦ λόγος) spoke in a different 'key' to the divinely inspired or 'perfect' as opposed to mortal men. There is a great deal of evidence in Clement which supports this idea. Then it would have been useful to gather up all the contemporary Patristic evidence in Irenaeus and Tertullian which demonstrates that unnamed heretics supported a similar agenda.
Once this was established, namely that the core paradigm at the heart of the Mar Saba document regarding two different gospels of Mark for two different classes of people within the Church, I think the proper course of action would have been to follow the Pythagorean basis to this understanding of 'word of God' as musical όργανον ('instrument'). Why so? Because when you really come down to it, Pythagorean mathematics were certainly at the heart of Clement's thinking and - more importantly - the whole purpose of mathematics is to prove the existence of things. As Bertrand Russell notes "mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry."
Now I know it might sound strange for me to argue that Morton Smith should have proved the existence of 'Secret Mark' by mathematics but that's only because we have learned to think like the orthodox. Even Smith, as a typical Biblical scholar, saw the 'gospels' and the New Testament 'canon' as something which developed along the lines dictated by Irenaeus. As I have noted many times here, Clement certainly did not think this way. His writings betray clear evidence that his proofs for the truth of the word of God were ultimately developed through arguments rooted in Pythagorean mathematics. Smith couldn't have invented the idea of the 'secret gospel' because he didn't understand Clement nor his tradition.
When you look at the things that Irenaeus attributed to his gnostic opponents, even though these claims are largely incomprehensible we still get the unmistakable idea that they were obsessed with the Pythagorean understanding of 'generation' from a primal Monad. This is true with the Valentinians and even more so with regards to the so-called 'Marcosians' - the followers of Mark.
When you look at the opening lines of the gospel now associated with John, there is a clear interest in some sort of a coded 'unveiling' of the word of God. The word is with God, the word is God but at the same time this word is becoming something established among men. Yet we have learned to think of this 'word' as some kind of 'cryptic allusion' to the man Jesus. Clement certainly understood that the underlying concept was the gospel itself.
I know this kind of mystical thought has little place among 'serious scholarship' but it perfectly accounts for the seeming 'paradox' of the two gospels in the Letter to Theodore. The gospel prologue doesn't say anything about 'the word of God' tabernacling 'for a while' and then leaving to go back up to heaven. No, by contrast just as the fact that there are two gospels, there is the situation of a 'tabernacling' Son and a hidden Father in heaven:
We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Yet the 'Son' here is clearly the same 'word of God' mentioned throughout the first thirteen lines of the prologue. Origen clearly understands the text in this way, no less than Clement.
Indeed the prologue certainly did not appear in the publicly circulating gospels but was revealed only after the proper instruction and initiation. So that the words "and of its fulness have all we received, and grace for grace" clearly was meant to imply the existence of two things - viz. grace on top of grace, the grace of the public gospel and then something more for the text which lay in 'secret.' Hence the distinction "for the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." Notice again that there is mere 'grace' and then something more associated with Jesus - viz. 'truth' a mystical concept very closely associated with 'secret Mark' in the letter to Theodore.
When the prologue ends there is the reference to the situation where "no man hath seen God (the Father) at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." Yet isn't this identical to the situation with respect to the 'public gospel' refracting the light of the mystic text for public 'declaration'? I would even argue that Clement makes specific reference to this situation at the beginning of Book Five of the Stromateis when he declares that:
there are some that draw the distinction, that faith has reference to the Son, and knowledge to the Father. But it has escaped their notice that ... neither is knowledge without faith, nor faith without knowledge. Nor is the Father without the Son; for the Son is with the Father. And the Son is the true teacher respecting the Father; and that we may believe in the Son, we must know the Father, with whom also is the Son. Again, in order that we may know the Father, we must believe in the Son, that it is the Son of God who teaches; for from faith to knowledge by the Son is the Father. And the knowledge of the Son and Father, which is according to the gnostic rule -- that which in reality is gnostic -- is the attainment and comprehension of the truth by the truth.
There is clearly some reflection here not only of the prologue of the 'mystic' gospel but more importantly the two gospels 'in harmony with one another' at the heart of the Letter to Theodore.
We are told there that even if heretics who are familiar with the secret text "should say something true, one who loves the truth should not, even so, agree with them. For not all true things are the truth, nor should that truth which merely seems true according to human opinions be preferred to the true truth, that according to the faith." This has always puzzled modern scholarship. Yet it only does so because they do not recognize the essential Pythagorean harmony understood to be at the heart of the Alexandrian conception.
What Clement is saying in fact is that the 'secret gospel' of Mark cannot be taken on its own. It has to be 'harmonized' with what is laid out in the public gospel of Mark. The two act in concord as C does with F in the diatessaronic interval of the 'perfect fourth.' To this end I would argue, that Smith could not have written the Letter to Theodore because he doesn't understand and thus could never find the thread which ultimately proves its authenticity.
I will reveal that 'thread' in subsequent posts. It has everything to do with (a) understanding the references to Pythagorean though among the heretics and especially the 'Marcosians' and (b) connecting these heretical followers of Mark with Clement's Alexandrian tradition by means of the Pythagorean interest in the 'diatessaron.' It will be easier than most people realize. The only reason Smith didn't see it again was because he didn't forge the letter ...
And by the way, the underlying 'diatessaronic' harmonics are demonstrated by 'the Son' being identified by Clement as 'the fourth' (see previous post) and the Father 'the eighth' or ogdoad. As we have also noted, the resurrection narrative deliberately emphasizes these days (counting from the Passion) because of their underlying Pythagorean 'harmonies.'
