a secret preserved in a book

I seem to alternate between speculations about the intentions of the semi-educated and the almost excessively educated, counting myself as part of both camps, of course, depending on the topic under discussion.

I was going to post a speculation regarding the composition and mental universe of the most likely readership for novels that compliment the aforementioned likely readers by stretching just a bit beyond the range of their likely daily reading; but I find that I must instead report on the re-emergence of our old friend Guy Stroumsa, from whom we have not heard in many, many posts. (Another reason I should have started using keywords for this journal long ago.)

The Nation publishes the latest opinion (by Anthony Grafton) on the ongoing debate over whether Morton Smith forged the copied extract from a letter of Clement containing a passage from the Secret Gospel of Mark that Smith made famous in scholarly texts (such as Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark) and in his inflammatory Jesus the Magician (the followup to his informal account of the discovery, The Secret Gospel).

I had thought that, as I believe Bart Ehrman remarks, scholars had pretty well decided that the enormously learned Smith had invented the letter, faultlessly imitating eighteenth-century handwriting to copy the supposed extract into a blank page of an antique volume in which the facing page warns against the work of forgers.

But Stroumsa has now published the correspondence of Smith with Gershom Scholem (which, at a staggering $133 price tag, few of us will acquire for personal use) that Stroumsa suggests proves that Smith was not a forger. Grafton's essay gratifyingly reproduces Saul Lieberman's remark regarding Scholem's authority as "a historian of nonsense," and reports on Smith's own exacting standards of scholarship, shared by his friend Scholem, who knew the difference between scholarly nonsense and historically contextualized nonsense: "Smith's sense that most scholarship was second-rate made him reluctant to become a professor, since he felt 'more and more opposed to the reading of the nonsense that needs to be read to become an expert in any given research method.' Even after he decided to cast his lot with Wissenschaft, and even after his success was assured, he wondered--as he confided to Scholem--'why is it that the study of religion attracts so many nitwits?'"

The essay is to be found at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090126/grafton/single

and not only one book

The immense advantage of editing copy and having a diverse array of LiveJournal Friends is that one can begin by discovering the writings and estimable website recommendations of ex-Artforum staff member Brian Sholis, whose current weblog is:

http://thesearchwasthething.wordpress.com/

and whose writings and links to his previous blogs (In Search of the Miraculous, for example) can be found at http://www.briansholis.com

and who wrote the best review of George Steiner's My Unwritten Books (he actually detected the real agendas instead of focusing on the sensationalistic bits); amazingly the review appeared in Detroit Metro Times, a publication of which I have never previously heard:

http://www.briansholis.com/WRITING/CONTENT/STEINER/index.html

One can begin with that and end up before one knows it at a site that offers Goth-inspired infusions, perfumes, and incenses, with products that pay homage to H. P. Lovecraft and to Neil Gaiman (but not, so far as I can tell, to the Mutual Friend of so many of my small handful of readers):

http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/welcome.html