Critiquing Carlson: A Summary

To summarize my criticism of The Gospel Hoax:



1a) The novel The Mystery of Mar Saba turns out not to have any tell-tale parallels with the work of Morton Smith.

1b) If there is any relationship between the subject of the Voss book and the contents of the Mar Saba manuscript, it is apt--that is, the scribe of the manuscript was plausibly motivated by Voss to transcribe the letter from the Clementine author.

2) There is no need to choose between Morton Smith and a Mar Saba monk as the scribe of the manuscript--it could easily have been an eighteenth-century scholar from continental Europe, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or protestant (I propose a Jesuit, but this is only one alternative among many)

3) Although Andrew Criddle's vocabulary statistics do seem to validly indicate something unusual about the letter, there is no need to again cast the choice between only two options: Clement as the original author, versus Morton Smith as the original author. A Clementine or Origenist scholar following in the decades after Clement is a quite plausible candidate for the author of the original letter. Indeed, we have no real evidence the letter is by Clement at all: clearly the title "The Most Holy Clement" was added by someone else, whether written by the Mar Saba scribe, or added to the original Clementine letter by some previous scribe. So the real author could have been a contemporary of Clement, who was familiar with his thought and work. Indeed, we can simply start calling him "pseudo-Clement", and assume he was an ancient author who wrote around the time of 200CE.

4) There are still some valid critiques to be made about the applicability of Carlson's statistical analysis, found in Solow & Smith's 2009 article.

5) The hypothesis of a Clementine/pseudo-Clementine or Origenist author, nearly contemporary with Clement himself, explains numerous other phenomena in the letter.

6) Not only has Carlson's analysis of the salt metaphor been shown to be bogus (by Scott Brown, for example), without adequate response by Carlson, but Carlson entirely misses the point of Smith's link between Mk 4:11 and Jer 10:14 in Greek, enabling him to wildly misinterpret the allusion Smith makes between those two verses. Identifying the genuinely plausible allusion that Smith cleverly saw eliminates any need to see a hidden statement of authorship by Smith in his commentary to the secret gospel.

7) Carlson reads into Smith's work during the 1950s a preoccupation with esoteric sexuality and Markan-Johannine shared sources. But Carlson is reading only in hindsight; when viewed objectively, Smith's work in the 1950s betrays no preoccupation with esoteric sexuality, nor is his interest in Markan-Johannine sources unique. There is thus no reason to suspect his 1958 discovery to be forged evidence for his pet theories. In the case of esoteric sexuality, Smith was simply wrong about Secret Mark--on that subject, he completely misread To Theodore. But on the subject of Markan-Johannine sources, Smith was simply insightful ahead of time. The fact that Smith was sometimes wrong and sometimes right just means he was human, with flawed powers of judgment, like the rest of us.


I hope that this eliminates the case against the authenticity of the Secret Gospel of Mark. Not only is it authentic, but it is not what Smith thought it was. Instead, it was what the author of To Theodore said it was: a semi-gnostic version of the Gospel of Mark, including readings not found in our canonical copies. It may not have post-dated the canonical gospel like To Theodore said it did (in fact I argue it instead pre-dated the canonical gospel), but it was nevertheless ancient, and lies at the very center of the Markan gospel tradition.

We will henceforward be using the Secret Gospel of Mark (SGM) as a part of the Hyper-Synoptic Hypothesis. There is no need to assume that SGM did not form a part of the gospel traditions. Indeed, we will be demonstrating that it was a critical element in the development of the gospels.

We do owe Carlson a debt: he made the best case possible against Morton Smith's discovery. This was necessary in order to prove the authenticity of Smith's discovery, and to exonerate Smith from charges of fraud. The fact that Carlson is almost completely wrong should not obscure this fact.