Tonight it was - I wonder if Jerome's references to ritual nakedness and the command to "go sell what you have and give to the poor" can be traced to Clement of Alexandria? I know some of you might be distracted watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians right now so I will try and explain the significance of all of this in very simple terms.
We have this letter that was discovered by Morton Smith in the Mar Saba monastery that purports to be from Clement of Alexandria. There really is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the document other than the fact that Smith seemed to have made a lot of enemies in his lifetime. Smith was a very good scholar so his enemies had to make personal attacks on the man, most of them after his death.
In a way that I have never really figured out, the critics of the Mar Saba document develop their case from the idea that Morton Smith must have been gay because he never got married. Morton Smith's alleged homosexuality now explains his 'hostility to the Church' which in turn provides need information for why he not only claimed that Jesus was a magician but that he ended up forging a text developed around the idea that a longer version of the gospel of Mark once existed in Alexandria a long time ago which had a naked Jesus baptizing a naked disciple.
All of this - the discovered letter, the lost gospel, Jesus naked with a naked disciple in the water - is supposed to be part of some diabolical plot on Smith's part to destroy Christianity or something like that. Like I said, I can't make sense of it. I get the silly ideas of one author mixed with the silly ideas of another.
The bottom line with these all these people claiming they are sure that Smith forged this otherwise unremarkable letter is that there is something horribly wrong with the idea of a naked Jesus appearing with a naked disciple immediately after the Question of the Rich Youth (Mark 10:17 - 31) narrative in Mark. Yet all of these scholars know full well that Jerome and the western monastic tradition had just such a motto for most of the last two millenia - nudus nudum or nudum Christum nudus setjuere or some such related terminology.
The bottom line is that the letter to Theodore and the saying of Jerome are identical. Jerome repeatedly connects the idea with baptism. Baptism was performed in the nude in antiquity with naked men standing beside one another 'in the bath' as Celsus refers to it. There isn't a single aspect of the formulation that is bizarre or unseemly.
So why do all these experts like Craig Evans, Larry Hurtado, Bart Ehrman and the like all have a problem with the Letter to Theodore? Oh, if you ask these windbags this question they will go on and on with what amounts to being utter nonsense. Like children who refuse to admit the truth, the facts of the matter here is that it's Morton Smith and his attempt to tie the letter to his crazy theory about magic and sexual libertines that's the issue.
If someone like Jacques-Paul Migne or a host of other acceptable scholars had uncovered the text, we wouldn't be sitting here making reference to any controversy. The letter really is a letter by Clement of Alexandria and aside from making reference to the idea that St. Mark decided to add something to his gospel, there really isn't anything that is utterly earth shattering about the text - other than the fact that it now lays bare how utterly subjective and mendacious Biblical scholarship is these days.
The thing we can't lose sight of here is the fact that Jerome clearly connects his 'naked with naked' concept with Mark 10:17 - 31 and Mark 10:21 in particular. Where did he get this idea? It simply can't have come from his own imagination because we see Clement make the exact same reference about two hundred years before him:
Wherefore also the Lord says, “Sell what thou hast, and give to the poor; and come, follow me.” Follow God, naked of arrogance (γυμνὸς ἀλαζονείας), naked of fading display (γυμνὸς ἐπικήρου πομπῆς), possessed of that which is thine, which is good, what alone cannot be taken away—faith towards God, confession towards Him who suffered, beneficence towards men, which is the most precious of possessions.This is yet another home run, my friends. It confirms that not just Jerome but Clement understood that Mark 10:21 was connected with the ritual nudity of Christian ascetics. They were not only following the command to sell all they had but clearly also something more.
Διὰ τοῦτο καί «Πώλησόν σου τὰ ὑπάρχοντα», λέγει κύριος, «καὶ πτωχοῖς δός, καὶ δεῦρο ἀκολούθει μοι·» ἕπου τῷ θεῷ γυμνὸς ἀλαζονείας, γυμνὸς ἐπικήρου πομπῆς, τὸ σόν, τὸ ἀγαθὸν τὸ ἀναφαίρετον μόνον, τὴν εἰς τὸν θεὸν πίστιν, τὴν εἰς τὸν παθόντα ὁμολογίαν, τὴν εἰς ἀνθρώπους εὐεργεσίαν κεκτημένος, κτῆμα τιμαλφέστατον. [Paed. 2.3]
There is absolutely nothing in Mark 10:17 - 31 to infer that the rich youth or anyone else in the narrative for that matter was a 'naked follower' of Jesus. It makes absolutely no sense to assume that St. Mark was trying to say 'those reading my gospel are the first 'naked disciples'" for the Church had to have been founded on some apostolic foundation. Clement and Jerome are clearly part of an Alexandrian tradition which assumed that at least one follower of Jesus ended up naked with Jesus in the baptismal waters. Given that Alexandria is clearly the point of origin for this tradition, it is more likely than not that the 'rich youth' figure was St. Mark himself.
If I can return to issue of the obtuseness of modern scholarship for a minute, the situation we find ourselves in academia is very similar to contemporary politics. People like Evans, Hurtado and the like all pretend to be 'conservatives' who - in their own mind at least - are attempting to defend the inherited tradition of their ancestors. Yet Jerome's nudus nudum motto is the very beating heart of Catholic mysticism. These men by contrast are anglo-evangelicals, who really have no connection to the apostolic Church other than in their own imagination. They are conservatives in name only.
If we really want to preserve and strengthen the true roots of Christianity and the mystical flame which keeps faith alive we should embrace the Letter to Theodore. It represents nothing short of the original grounding of Jerome, Maximus of Turin, Gregory the Great, Thomas a Kempis, Francis of Assisi and all the popes, mystics and thinkers of Catholic tradition who marched under the nudum Christum nudus setjuere banner. It is the modern evangelical heresy with its advocates Craig Evans, Larry Hurtado and their ugly minions who represent the real break with tradition.
Let's condemn the heretics once and for all in Toronto, April 29!
