Saturday, April 3, 2010

Critiquing Carlson, part 7: Inventing the Data?

Carlson tries to show that Smith tied the gospel of Mark with secret sexual practices for years prior to his discovery of SGM, so the discovery by Smith of a text proving this link is highly suspicious. However, at this point Carlson finally ignores the distinction between the text of SGM and Smith's interpretation of it. Carlson writes "The climax of the nocturnal initiation of Secret Mark contains a juxtaposition of Mark 4:11 and a sexual practice forbidden in Jewish law" (Carlson, p. 71). But this is totally false. Only in Smith's reading is this true--but Smith's reading is, I think, obviously far-fetched and badly mistaken. It's Smith who eventually tries links to link Mk 4:11 with sexual practices, not SGM.


And I think SGM helped influence this strange association of Smith's; prior to his discovery, Smith did link Mk 4:11 with texts that mentioned sexual practices, but not in the blatant, direct manner that he did after publishing his 1973 works. Carlson points to his 1951 article Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels for an example of this (Carlson, p. 71f.) True, there Smith links Mk 4:11 with T. Hagigah 2.1. But Carlson misrepresents Smith here by cutting off the quotation from Tannaitic too soon. The full text of T. Hag. 2.1 does first mention the sexual restrictions of Leviticus, restricting their discussion to two people, but it goes on to restrict discussion of the Ma'aseh Bereshit and the Merkavah as well. It concludes by warning against metaphysical speculation among the faithful. Carlson leaves all of this out, cutting off Smith's full quotation of all this Carlson, p. 72): "'The (passages of the old testament dealing with) forbidden sexual relationships are not to be expounded to three (at a time)...'". This makes it appear as though Smith were focused solely on the restrictions placed on the discussion of the sexual restrictions of Leviticus 18. But instead, Smith simply quotes T. Hag. 2.1, which discusses forbidden subjects of mystical speculation in general. Its primary subject matter is the tradition of mystical speculation about the Creation (Bereshit) in Genesis and the Chariot Throne (Merkavah) in Ezekiel. It is certainly interesting that Leviticus 18 is included with these as a forbidden topic, but that isn't a connection Smith makes; instead, it's in T. Hag. 2.1 itself! (Indeed, we might well wonder if this already-present connection in Talmudic Judaism is itself a source of gnostic erotic practices among groups like the Carpocratians--but even if true, this does nothing to show Smith was linking Mk 4:11 to forbidden erotic practices, either.) Smith is hypothesizing quasi-gnostic practices among early Christians, and so makes a natural connection with T. Hag. 2.1. Any other scholar would have done the same. We must also notice that T. Hag. 2.1 doesn't actually link forbidden sex with mystical speculation at all--it just mentions Lev 18 and the Bereshit/Merkavah as forbidden subjects of discussion. Any connection, again, is in Smith's mind after 1958 (and maybe among the Carpocratians) but not in the text itself.

Carlson admits it could be coincidence, but is impressed that Smith revisited T. Hag. 2.1 "right before he returned to Mar Saba" (Carlson, p. 72), in a March 1958 article. But this is something of an exaggeration: the article, of course, would have been completed and submitted some months before, perhaps in 1957. And who knows how long Smith took to write it? Or when he first conceived it? All we can really say is that Smith wrote it sometime in the mid-to-late 1950s. Furthermore, in that 1958 article Smith only refers to the mention of the Merkavah in T. Hag. 2.1, and not to its other contents at all.

Smith's scholarship prior to 1958 suggests nothing of his later theories, strongly suggesting that it was only later that he returned to his earler work to find new textual associations among the ancient texts he studies. There is nothing striking about Smith's link between Mk 4:11 and T. Hag. 2.1 until after SGM is discovered. It is only then that Smith decides that texts like Mk 4:11 have anything to do with sexual practices resembling those described in Lev 18 (and even then, only one of them! Lev 18 of course details nearly two dozen forbidden sexual practices.) There is nothing inherent in Smith's scholarship to suggest that link; he has simply made rather bad use of the texts available to him. He could have, for example, decided that the Carpocratians were the ones who linked GMk with the kind of erotic behavior and gnosticism forbidden from discussion by T. Hag. 2.1, but that SGM makes no such connection. This interpretation would have been far more accurate. (I would say it would be correct!) Possibly T. Hag. 2.1 did influence Smith's thinking about SGM. But that influence only operated after his discovery of SGM, not before. The fact that Smith studied T. Hag. 2.1 prior to 1958, even just prior, is no evidence he was preoccupied with erotic Christian mysticism before discovering SGM, because there is no erotic mysticism of any kind suggested in T. Hag. 2.1.

Lastly, Carlson mentions that Smith hypothesized a source linking both GMk and GJn as early as 1955 (p. 82), showing he had the motive to forge just such a document. But couldn't this just mean Smith was perceptive? And should we really assume this idea arrived fully-formed in Smith's mind three years before he departed for Mar Saba? Imagine he was simply correct: should we therefore be surprised if he found evidence supporting his theory? Carlson is impressed that this idea was in Smith's head before he left for Mar Saba. But was he the only scholar with that idea? If there were many scholars who had that idea, Smith was merely the one who happened to stumble across the evidence for it. I admit it would be more impressive if Smith had not thought GMk and GJn shared a source, and then discovered SGM. But, sometimes the right person makes the right discovery.

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