Egyptian Lectionaries, Pt. 1: Establishing Plausibility

[rewritten substantially to discuss the healing of the boy with the unclean spirit in more detail]


We will now discuss the possibility, suggested in general by Thomas Talley in The Origins of the Liturgical Year, that readings from the canonical gospels were substituted for readings from Secret Mark that were originally in Egyptian lectionaries. If Talley is right, this is evidence for Secret Mark, since the early lectionaries at Constantinople interrupt a Markan cycle of readings with Jn 11, the raising of Lazarus.  Talley suggests this reading was originally Secret Mark 1, and was replaced by the orthodox Johannine version at some point. Jefferey argues against this (The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled, p. 72ff) 


1/23 ETA:
In comments, Andrew Criddle has asked, rightly, whether I am really proposing that there were early Egyptian lectionaries based on Secret Mark, whose readings were replaced by canonical ones.  I should add that this is not exactly Talley's thesis: he seems to be making a much more modest thesis about specific Egyptian lectionaries, and their relationship with the reading of Jn 11 in the lectionary of Constantinople.  That reading interrups what is otherwise a Markan sequence.  It actually seems to be Jeffery who makes the somewhat more ambitious suggestion that this process could have been extended throughout the lectionary cycle (Jeffery, p. 78, 80).  Mostly I think Jeffery is just trying to provide evidence that if Talley is right, then we should find traces of Secret Mark in other lectionaries as well.  I am trying to show that even this more ambitous proposal is plausible.  But note that Jeffery's argument is not really a direct argument against Talley; it is more about the implications of Talley's thesis.


Jeffery first notes that Jn 3, the wedding at Cana, is typically the reading associated with the Epiphany-centered baptism rites of early Egyptian liturgy.  He asks where the parallel with the wedding at Cana is in Gk, if that pericope is to be a kind of substitute for an original reading from Secret Mark--in a certain 5th c. Egyptian lectionary, for example (ibid, p. 78-79).

Well, we do have Mk 2:18-2:22, which involves sayings about weddings and bridegrooms, and about new wine.

And, note that the Thomas saying parallel to this pericope is Saying 47, which not only includes the new wine/old wine and the old patch/new garment contrasts, but also the statement "No man drinks old wine and immediately desires to drink new wine". So...how did the author of GJn know, if all he had to use was GMk, that a story about a wedding, a bridegroom, and wine, was the perfect place (following GTh) to put an elaboration on the contrast between old wine and new wine?

I can't explain what the pre-Johannine GMk pericope might have looked like (and the GMt and GLk pericopes are identical to the Markan one), but the Mk-Th-Jn links are surely suggestive at least, and cannot be dismissed as coincidence. IMO, Jeffery's question just bolsters the case for a gospel different from canonical Mark as a source for GJn. This gospel would have produced both Jn 2:1-11 and Mk 2:18-2:22. I can't prove this gospel was Secret Mark, but Jn 2 does not look out of place as a replacement for a Markan reading.


Jeffery makes a similar point about the presence of the passage from Luke 9:39-42 (ibid, p. 79) in the same lectionary. This lectionary features the following readings in the following order:

Lk 9:39-42 (boy with unclean spirit)
Mt 8:24-26 (calming the storm)

If these are likewise supposed to be substitutions for parallel Secret Mark readings, it's a little surprising, because the parallel pericopes in Mark are in the wrong order:

Mk 9:14-29
Mk 4:35-41

and we might expect the hypothetically original readings in a Secret Mark to have appeared in the same order, in a lectionary, as they appear in canonical Mark.

But I think there may be a solution to this. The pericope of the boy with the unclean spirit is much longer in GMk than in GMt and GLk, and rather different. Michael Turton, in his commentary to GMk, has pointed out that Koester suspects the passage to be heavily redacted. For one thing, the exorcism Jesus performs in GMk is for a mute and deaf spirit, not an epileptic spirit. (There is no such confusion in the Matthean and Lukan versions.)

Notice that in the "Bethsaida section" of GMk (usually numbered Mk 6:45-8:26), we read the story of the Syro-Phonecian woman, who has a child with an unclean spirit, followed by the healing of a deaf-mute man.  These two pericopes seem to thematically resemble the healing of the boy with the unclean spirit.  Some have suggested that this section of GMk originally circulated independently from the rest of the gospel (notably David Ross and Delbert Burkett), and Koester thinks it was missing entirely from the version that Luke used.

So here's a speculative idea: what if the Bethsaida section was originally found elsewhere in GMk? In the early chapters of GMk, Jesus is said to cast out demons and unclean spirits numerous times (1:26; 1:34; 3:11; 3:22) before the stilling of the storm in Mk 5, so there is ample room for a more primitive story in an earlier version of the gospel. Perhaps Secret Mark--or even a predecessor of Secret Mark--was that earlier version.

Maybe a redactor of GMk (for example, the author of the version used for GLk, in Koester's scenario) removed this section because of its "weak" apostles and its mean-spirited Jesus. But it later got written back in, later in the gospel, gving us canonical Mark.

So, perhaps the original reading in Secret Mark (or a proto-Secret Mark) was a healing of a child with an unclean spirit, who was close to death.  Some Egyptian liturgist, reorganizing the lectionary readings, found a parallel in Lk 9:39-42, and so chose that (maybe arbitrarily) to replace the original.


The Markan version also curiously adds: "the boy was like a corpse; so that most of them said, 'He is dead.'" But this might not be conflation: maybe this is closer to the original. Notice that there is another gospel pericope involving a man whose son was ill and dying: the healing of the official's servant in GJn.  What's more (this is quite intriguing) there is even a connection with the water-into-wine pericope we just discussed (which is found in the same Egyptian lectionary) because this Johannine healing is set "in Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water into wine" (Jn 4:46). It also falls before the walking on the water, which is actually just another storm-stilling story.

This healing is also a parallel to the healing of the centurion's servant in GMt and GLk. And...you guessed it, the pericope of the centurion's servant in GMt and GLk comes before the stilling of the storm. Furthermore, all this is a lot like the healing of Jairus' daughter in the synoptics--which also falls before the stilling of the storm.


Again, I'm not trying to sort out these pericopes definitively; I'm just demonstrating that among the four gospels, there are hints of a source that contained just the kinds of pericopes, in just the right narrative order, that we might have originally found in an earlier version of the 5th c. Egyptian lectionary that Jeffery mentions. These hints are strongest in GJn, which we suspect to be as closely related to Secret Mark as GMk was.  In particular, this makes plausible Thomas Talley's suggestion that Secret Mark 1 was originally used as a reading on a baptismal sunday, providing support for a baptismal connection in Secret Mark 1, contrary to Jeffery's claims.