I Think I Have Changed Some Minds About the Authenticity of the Mar Saba Document

My wife wonders why I spend so much time blogging about something that the average person really doesn't care about - i.e. Morton Smith's discovery of the Letter to Theodore in the Mar Saba monastery. The answer is really simple. I am not the smartest person to attempt to make sense of early Christianity. Nevertheless, I haven't spent my life in academia. I've spent most of my time in the 'real world' and I think I can recognize a smear campaign when I see one. The 'controversy' over the Mar Saba document is about as likely as the 'missing birth certificate' of President Obama, the 'swift boat' of John Kerry, the 'Monica Lewinsky scandal' etc. In each case you essentially develop misrepresentations of evidence inside of a conservative echo chamber and voila you have 'proof' of something that most evangelical Christians want to 'wish away' anyway.

In this case, what started as essentially one mendacious professors grudge against Morton Smith developed into something much bigger with the right 'right way' political connections. Like the birth certificate question we start with a basic problem - why has an important document gone missing? There are of course a number of possible explanations to this difficulty, however the partisans always focus on questions of 'likability' and 'likeness.' Was Morton Smith a little bit strange? Well, from the research I have been doing most professors have strange personalities. Maybe it has something to do with being locked up with books in a dimly lit library for so many hours. Yet can we extrapolate from this that he would risk his future in academia by falsifying a text that in every way seems to be an authentic letter of the late second century Church Father Clement of Alexandria?

We have discussed this here in many different ways but the proper answer to this question always comes back to Morton Smith's use and interpretation of the Letter to Theodore. At every turn in his 1973 Smith wants to use the Mar Saba document to help advance his theories regarding 'Jesus the Magician.' The reality is that the Letter to Theodore has nothing whatsoever to do with this nonsense. Indeed Smith ignores obvious connections with the account of the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John, the Platonic notion of judgment in the hereafter, patterns in the way Clement makes references to heretics and moreover the way the evangelist Mark introduces stories that make his analysis of the document he discovered - well, quite frankly quite laughable.

The bottom line is that his friend Helmut Koester does a much better job explaining the significance of the Letter to Theodore and Secret Mark than Smith does. How is this possible if Smith is the author of the manuscript? This is an absolutely implausible conspiracy theory that suits political partisans more than serious scholarship. The point however as a result of all of this is that the Letter to Theodore has been ignored by a generation of scholars. I see an opportunity for a second rate scholar such as myself to make his mark.

In any event, my arguments must be having an effect on regular readers of my blog like my Facebook friend Jordan Stratford whom I noticed recently changed his mind about the text being a forgery (a month and a half ago he told me so on Facebook). In any event, here is admitting that he was wrong.

We should admire Stratford's intellectual integrity. Very few scholars and thinkers have that kind of honesty. I hold out no hope for a similar revelation in the hearts and souls of most prominent 'hoaxers' other than Birger Pearson whom I feel might yet still come around. Everyone basically mistook the Baylor publication the Gospel Hoax at its word that there was a 'forger's tremor.' Little did they know that the publisher - supposedly an academic publisher - checked the work of the young scholar. They were too busy plotting the downfall of liberal academia to notice the error it seems ...