Discussions About 'Secret Mark' Should Have Little Bearing on the Question of the Mar Saba Document's Authenticity

The more I keep working on my tables (see previous post) the more I am amazed that no one before me thought of approaching matters the way I am presently. Let's be serious. If someone claimed to have found a lost letter of Ernest Hemmingway, literary critics would seek to prove authenticity by comparing the letter to other letters of the same author. What do the moronic scholars engaged in the 'Mar Saba debate' do instead? Tackle the issue of 'secret Mark'?

Is there any other field that would proceed in such an obtuse manner? Why then hasn't my approach been taken to settle the issue?

I will let you know what I think. I think there are no real experts on Clement. You know what I mean. For certain there are a few scholars who you will inevitably get referred to when you ask around. The guy in Pittsburgh, the Frenchmen, the Scandanavian one. I won't even mention their names because they refuse to weigh in on the issue of authenticity.

My question is what good is an 'expert' unless he is willing to put his balls on the line and say something like - 'in light of my familiarity with X I deem Y to be a forgery' or coversely 'that it is authentic.' Yes, I know my side of the debate will say that the Letter is included in collections of Clement of Alexandria's work. But I can't help wondering - why would authorities on the Alexandrian writer want to 'sit this one out'? Wouldn't this be something that 'experts' on the writings of Clement of Alexandria would want to be placed front and center?

Indeed, to continue with the original analogy - wouldn't every Shakespeare necessarily have to have an opinion on which of his plays were actually written by him? I can't fathom why Biblical scholars have taken the lead on the forgery question? Seriously. Why on earth spend all this time figuring out whether 'secret Mark' fits with 'canonical Mark'? What can that hope to prove about whether or not the letter is authentic?

Once again you'd think that the Clementine authorities would have the last word. Alexandria could have possessed a gospel claiming to be written by Mark but edited by Basilides or even Clement himself. The possibilities are endless.

I can see having a scholarly debate about anything. Did Clement have a penis, for instance (not as stupid as you might think given the interest in castration in Alexandria). But how can people waste all this time talking about secret Mark when the question of authenticity - a question which can only be properly framed in terms of 'did Clement write this letter - hasn't been settled yet.

The question of whether St. Mark wrote the 'secret Mark' or whether Clement is citing an actual gospel text has absolutely no bearing on the authenticty question. Indeed the stupidity gets augmented even further when we continue to take such an interest in the question of whether Morton Smith forged the document he claims to have discovered at Mar Saba.

Of course if the original document was available to us, it would be quite easy to settle that question. The reality is however that it is gone, probably gone forever. This means that the only way of tackling the authenticity question at the moment is to probe into the question of whether Clement actually wrote the Letter to Theodore.

This is something I am presently involved in at this otherwise insignificant blog. If the real authorities on the Clementine writings weren't sleeping on the job, this question would have been settled in the affirmative a long time ago.