A Challenge to Carlson

I was hoping to continue developing my explanatory source-critical diagram, but I realized there was an important detail I hadn't yet dealt with.  Untangling it is taking some time, and I need a few more days to think it through.  I'm very encouraged, however, by the way things are progressing--at first I worried it was an insurmountable difficulty with my hypothesis, but it turns out that my earlier suspicions are confirmed even more so than ever before.  There are still a couple of dilemmas that need careful untangling, but just a few more days and I feel I will probably arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.  Indeed, I've made some very surprising discoveries--discoveries that are entirely congruent with the principles that have guided me so far.  So that's encouraging.

In the meantime, therefore, I'd like to finish up some work on the Secret Gospel of Mark (henceforward SGM, in line with the usage of most critics).  Here I'd like to finally take on Stephen Carlson's The Gospel Hoax.



First, I'd like to state that I have a great deal of respect for Carlson.  Despite the fact that he is not yet a credentialed biblical scholar, he is in a graduate program in a well-respected program, and will no doubt receive his doctorate soon.  I myself have no such credentials, nor do I ever expect to.  Furthermore, I don't think that a case for SGM's authenticity is in any way intuitive, so I can't really blame Carlson for his skepticism.  I can attest that proclaiming the antiquity of SGM is not an easy task.  So I think Carlson has done the best anyone could with the limited resources at his disposal.

Nevertheless, I think that Carlson is almost entirely wrong in The Gospel Hoax, and so these next few posts will be an attempt at meeting his arguments point-by-point, and hopefully demolishing them to a substantial degree.  This is just the way criticism works; I would expect no less of an attempt from my own critics, should they ever arise.

Larry Hurtado, in the Foreword to The Gospel Hoax, states "My judgment is that Carlson's case against the authenticity of the text is persuasive, decisive, practically unanswerable." (Carlson, p. xii)  I find this claim unfortunate, in that I think it is completely wrong.  I will be answering Carlson's case in what I hope is an equally decisive way, though I admit I will be relying on the arguments of others to a very significant degree.  I think that the sum total of these challenges, however, is just as persuasive as Carlson's case.  If it takes more than one of us to make this challenge, so be it.