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I’m working on some remarks on a more work-related topic, a modest reflection on thirty thousand years of European art, but since I’m trying to fill in a difficult gap in my own thinking I might as well put up another post on the strange ways of coincidence. (and then try to stop riding this particular hobbyhorse, since I have other posts I want to get on to)
I’ve begun reading Bart Ehrman’s 2003 book “Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew,” a useful survey for the popular reader of some of the early gnostic gospels and present-day scholarship on some of the books in question. (The 2003 date indicates it was written before Ehrman gained modest fame as yet another debunker of Dan Brown’s fabled novel, but the University of North Carolina professor was already apparently a History Channel regular.)
The book’s title contains an unacknowledged reference (I think) to a book from about 1980 that offers its own report on gnosticized visions. What Ehrman does address is Morton Smith’s 1973 publication of two books on Clement of Alexandria’s letter regarding a secret gospel of Mark, a manuscript fragment that Smith had photographed in the 1950s at Mar Saba monastery. Apparently current opinion is that Smith created an elaborate, decades-long hoax, beginning with a forgery that only he could have pulled off successfully.
I was delighted to discover this hypothesis, for reasons I’ll state in a moment. But the part that brought me up short was Ehrman’s reference to why we can’t confirm that Smith forged the eighteenth-century copy of the second-century letter in which the quotations from the secret gospel appear.
Ehrman explains that we can’t tell from Smith’s blurry 1950s photographs the key things that would allow us to determine if Smith faked the document…chemical analysis of the ink, or other subtle indications of provenance. But he says that we are unlikely ever to be able to examine the actual document. He knows this because “In one of those quirky coincidences of history, the very evening I completed my first draft of this chapter, I met the last western scholar on earth to see the book.”
Ehrman explains that he went to a social event at colleague Elizabeth Clark’s house and there was introduced to Hebrew University professor Guy Stroumsa, in town visiting his daughter, who had just begun a doctorate in classics at Duke. Stroumsa told him that in 1976 (in other words, three years after Smith’s massively researched analysis of his discovery appeared) he had suggested to a professor skeptical of the discovery that they drive over to Mar Saba and look at the book. They tried to find someone to analyze the ink and discovered that the only available equipment belonged to the Jerusalem police department. The Greek monks refused to let the document pass into Israeli hands, and it was left in the library of the Greek Patriarchate, whose librarian cut the relevant pages out of the book “for safekeeping” and then claimed to have mislaid them.
What interests me is that Ehrman has no earthly reason to perpetrate a hoax of his own. Stroumsa could have been contacted (I don’t know that anyone did contact him) to confirm or deny this version of this story, an account of the loss of the manuscript which had never been presented anywhere else. It would have been sufficient for Ehrman’s purposes to parrot the general belief that no other scholar has ever seen the manuscript pages Smith photographed. Introducing such a bizarre coincidence, the right man at just the right time, simply casts doubt on his own veracity. It could be a just-so story concocted by Stroumsa or Ehrman to reinforce the oddity that no one (including Smith) attempted to re-examine the original document, but placing it in this strange framework would seem an odd way to present such a tale.
Stroumsa, a quick web search will reveal, is veritably the spiritual inheritor of the work left by Ioan Couliano. What a remarkable bibliography! But I digress.
The scholarly just-so story about why Smith probably faked the document is already well-nigh the plot of a novella. Since Smith grotesquely overinterpreted the document he presented to the world, the only part of his argument to have survived critique is Clement’s text, his anxieties about the gnostics’ distortion of the secret gospel. That much is in the actual words of the letter, which is written in a style characteristic of Clement, just as the passages Clement quotes use the characteristic vocabulary of Mark.
An eighteenth century monastic forger wouldn’t have known so many (so very many…) of Clement’s habitual word usages, which became evident only after the appearance of a 1936 scholarly analysis. The only forger able to create such a document would have had to be someone left alone in the Mar Saba library for long periods of time, someone completely versed in the styles of the literature involved, and someone capable of forging eighteenth century Greek handwriting. It would also have to have been someone already bitter towards his scholarly elders, and inclined to mischievous wit: Morton Smith himself.
If Smith concocted the document in the 1950s, the fact that he spent a quarter-century creating a scholarly apparatus and an outrageous hypothesis to surround the original forgery bespeaks a sense of humor almost beyond imagining. But it isn’t unimaginable, really; Smith was brutally contemptuous of most scholars of Christian origins, and would have been delighted to create a two-volume joke at their expense. As Ehrman cites, Smith published a photograph in the popular book that possibly gives the game away, but omitted it from the scholarly volume where his critics would have seen it. (Scholars wouldn’t bother to look at a vulgarization…cf. the various commentaries on the Gospel of Judas, recently).
The letter of Clement is copied on the blank sheets following the page of the original book that quotes and refutes faked letters purporting to be by another early Father of the Church. (But of course, I would add, a humorless scribe might have found this a useful association to help him remember where he put this late-copied bit of fragmentary knowledge.)
Smith could be childishly querulous as well as wittily vindictive, apparently. My mentor Thomas O’Dea once told of hearing a debate between Morton Smith and Wilfrid Cantwell Smith (graduate students of the day called the two historians of religion “the Smith Brothers,” as in the then-popular cough drop). WCS insisted that the historian of religion had to be a believer, because only one who believed in religion could understand the dynamics of what it meant to hold a religious belief. MS insisted that the historian had to be an atheist, because to believe in any religion at all meant that the historian would be credulous regarding impossible legends.
O’Dea said that if the two had been freshmen in one of his classes, he would have taken them aside and explained some basic methodologies, but since they were two of the most distinguished scholars in their respective specialties, he couldn’t do much about it.
I’ve begun reading Bart Ehrman’s 2003 book “Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew,” a useful survey for the popular reader of some of the early gnostic gospels and present-day scholarship on some of the books in question. (The 2003 date indicates it was written before Ehrman gained modest fame as yet another debunker of Dan Brown’s fabled novel, but the University of North Carolina professor was already apparently a History Channel regular.)
The book’s title contains an unacknowledged reference (I think) to a book from about 1980 that offers its own report on gnosticized visions. What Ehrman does address is Morton Smith’s 1973 publication of two books on Clement of Alexandria’s letter regarding a secret gospel of Mark, a manuscript fragment that Smith had photographed in the 1950s at Mar Saba monastery. Apparently current opinion is that Smith created an elaborate, decades-long hoax, beginning with a forgery that only he could have pulled off successfully.
I was delighted to discover this hypothesis, for reasons I’ll state in a moment. But the part that brought me up short was Ehrman’s reference to why we can’t confirm that Smith forged the eighteenth-century copy of the second-century letter in which the quotations from the secret gospel appear.
Ehrman explains that we can’t tell from Smith’s blurry 1950s photographs the key things that would allow us to determine if Smith faked the document…chemical analysis of the ink, or other subtle indications of provenance. But he says that we are unlikely ever to be able to examine the actual document. He knows this because “In one of those quirky coincidences of history, the very evening I completed my first draft of this chapter, I met the last western scholar on earth to see the book.”
Ehrman explains that he went to a social event at colleague Elizabeth Clark’s house and there was introduced to Hebrew University professor Guy Stroumsa, in town visiting his daughter, who had just begun a doctorate in classics at Duke. Stroumsa told him that in 1976 (in other words, three years after Smith’s massively researched analysis of his discovery appeared) he had suggested to a professor skeptical of the discovery that they drive over to Mar Saba and look at the book. They tried to find someone to analyze the ink and discovered that the only available equipment belonged to the Jerusalem police department. The Greek monks refused to let the document pass into Israeli hands, and it was left in the library of the Greek Patriarchate, whose librarian cut the relevant pages out of the book “for safekeeping” and then claimed to have mislaid them.
What interests me is that Ehrman has no earthly reason to perpetrate a hoax of his own. Stroumsa could have been contacted (I don’t know that anyone did contact him) to confirm or deny this version of this story, an account of the loss of the manuscript which had never been presented anywhere else. It would have been sufficient for Ehrman’s purposes to parrot the general belief that no other scholar has ever seen the manuscript pages Smith photographed. Introducing such a bizarre coincidence, the right man at just the right time, simply casts doubt on his own veracity. It could be a just-so story concocted by Stroumsa or Ehrman to reinforce the oddity that no one (including Smith) attempted to re-examine the original document, but placing it in this strange framework would seem an odd way to present such a tale.
Stroumsa, a quick web search will reveal, is veritably the spiritual inheritor of the work left by Ioan Couliano. What a remarkable bibliography! But I digress.
The scholarly just-so story about why Smith probably faked the document is already well-nigh the plot of a novella. Since Smith grotesquely overinterpreted the document he presented to the world, the only part of his argument to have survived critique is Clement’s text, his anxieties about the gnostics’ distortion of the secret gospel. That much is in the actual words of the letter, which is written in a style characteristic of Clement, just as the passages Clement quotes use the characteristic vocabulary of Mark.
An eighteenth century monastic forger wouldn’t have known so many (so very many…) of Clement’s habitual word usages, which became evident only after the appearance of a 1936 scholarly analysis. The only forger able to create such a document would have had to be someone left alone in the Mar Saba library for long periods of time, someone completely versed in the styles of the literature involved, and someone capable of forging eighteenth century Greek handwriting. It would also have to have been someone already bitter towards his scholarly elders, and inclined to mischievous wit: Morton Smith himself.
If Smith concocted the document in the 1950s, the fact that he spent a quarter-century creating a scholarly apparatus and an outrageous hypothesis to surround the original forgery bespeaks a sense of humor almost beyond imagining. But it isn’t unimaginable, really; Smith was brutally contemptuous of most scholars of Christian origins, and would have been delighted to create a two-volume joke at their expense. As Ehrman cites, Smith published a photograph in the popular book that possibly gives the game away, but omitted it from the scholarly volume where his critics would have seen it. (Scholars wouldn’t bother to look at a vulgarization…cf. the various commentaries on the Gospel of Judas, recently).
The letter of Clement is copied on the blank sheets following the page of the original book that quotes and refutes faked letters purporting to be by another early Father of the Church. (But of course, I would add, a humorless scribe might have found this a useful association to help him remember where he put this late-copied bit of fragmentary knowledge.)
Smith could be childishly querulous as well as wittily vindictive, apparently. My mentor Thomas O’Dea once told of hearing a debate between Morton Smith and Wilfrid Cantwell Smith (graduate students of the day called the two historians of religion “the Smith Brothers,” as in the then-popular cough drop). WCS insisted that the historian of religion had to be a believer, because only one who believed in religion could understand the dynamics of what it meant to hold a religious belief. MS insisted that the historian had to be an atheist, because to believe in any religion at all meant that the historian would be credulous regarding impossible legends.
O’Dea said that if the two had been freshmen in one of his classes, he would have taken them aside and explained some basic methodologies, but since they were two of the most distinguished scholars in their respective specialties, he couldn’t do much about it.
