A Critique of Watson: Introductory Arguments

These next few posts will be a critique of Francis Watson's article "Beyond Suspicion: on the Authorship of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark." Watson takes the view that Morton Smith forged the Mar Saba Letter; I take the view that he did not. I'll be examining Watson's arguments one by one, in sequential order.

In my first post I'll cover Watson's introductory section I of his article. HIs substantive arguments in section II will be covered by individual posts for each sub-section 1, 2, and 3, with 3 broken up into two parts. Section III, part 1 will then get a post, and I'll conclude with a post about Section III, part 2, plus the conclusion in Section IV. I will label each section of my examination with Watson’s numeration, taken from his article.


We begin with Watson’s first substantive points, none intended to make a positive argument for forgery, but simply to introduce questions and doubts on various issues. I show that if at all valid, these questions nevertheless do not point towards a modern forger.



I.2. Watson says "From the Carpocratians’ gospel, we learn that they have added the love of ‘naked man with naked man’ (III.13) to the heterosexual licence of which Clement otherwise speaks." Actually we do not know this: Watson can only speculating here. While Watson's statement is certainly consistent with the evidence that To Theodore describes a Carpocratian gospel that makes homosexual love licit, To Theodore itself actually makes no such claim.

3. Watson notes that when Eusebius summarizes Clement’s history of the composition of the gospels (from Clement’s now-lost work Hypotyposeis), it differs somewhat from the account in To Theodore. But if To Theodore describes the composition of Mark in slightly different terms than Clement does elsewhere, this is easily explained by my pseudo-Clementine author, a contemporary or near-contemporary of Clement, imitating Clement's style and vocabulary (though not necessary as forgery). This author would either be imitating Clement directly, or would be retelling a story commonly repeated in the early third century, but with slight variations.

Furthermore, I am quite intrigued by the thematic parallels Watson has discovered between Eusebius and To Theodore. We know that Eusebius is not always trustworthy when speaking of early church history; why should we not suspect him of misinterpreting Clement’s words to mean that John was the author of the more spiritual gospel, rather than Mark? Indeed, perhaps Clement or Eusebius (or both) interpreted “John” and “John Mark” to be the same person—was this a source of confusion? Or, if Eusebius actually summarizes Clement accurately, we can then assume that my pseudo-Clementine author was the one either confusing John with John Mark, or perhaps just subtly rewriting history. Watson’s good eye has caught something of interest here, but it does not at all point towards Morton Smith as the forger of the Mar Saba manuscript.

4. The secrecy urged in To Theodore, that Watson finds problematically un-Clementine, is likewise easily handled by the hypothesis of a pseudo-Clementine third-century author.

5. Watson thinks the linguistic parallels among SGM1 and the synoptic gospels is evidence that the author of SGM1 sampled them directly during the process of forgery. But if there are echoes of SGM1's language in all the synoptics, this should be no surprise either--for I argue that not only do all the canonicals derive from SGM via two different paths (canonical GMk, and the Q-gospel represented by GPet and in part by GHeb), but also that there was a proto-SGM which GLk used directly. The language in SGM not only draws from that found in proto-SGM, but was also redistributed by its intermediaries, and finally by the canonical authors. (More on all this can be found under my Hyper-Synoptic Hypothesis series).

6. If Clement’s Who Is the Rich Man provides a source for To Theodore, as Watson claims (rather than just representing a parallel set of passages by the same author, with the same concerns), this is also easily explained by a pseudo-Clementine third-century author.