Secret Mark in Toronto

I attended the Secret Mark Symposium in Toronto last Friday.  It was great fun.  For the benefit of those readers who couldn't attend, I thought I'd provide a brief illustrated review of the conference.

Toronto's Union Station

I arrived by train.  (To be honest, this picture was actually taken the last day, not the first.)  Toronto is one of my favorite cities, and I had a chance to explore even more of it this time.  York U. is in the far northern reaches of the city, accessible only by subway and bus or commuter rail (plus a walk), but at night I stayed closer to the center, in western Toronto.

A Typical West Toronto Neighborhood

I like to think of west Toronto as the Brooklyn of Canada, but apparently Montreal's got a lock on that moniker, so perhaps it's more akin to the northern and western sides of Chicago.  In terms of US cities, Toronto is in general comparable to Chicago, I find (or, from the Canadian perspective, vice versa) though of course with its own unique and diverse character.  Most of Thursday after arrival was spent exploring the reaches of Bloor street, as far up and down as my legs could carry me.  I also took a new swing through the UT campus, which is always a pleasure.


The Morning Session

Friday began with the trek northwards on public transit to York U.  The Keele Campus is located in far northern Toronto, a part of the city which until 1998 was its own municipality, North York.  Founded in the 60s, its campus was built in the high-modern architectural style common among colleges built during that time, heavy on concrete and large, sturdy swinging doors.  The strengths of these buildings are their wide-open interior spaces, which I find always inspire a sense of freedom, despite their occasional lack of other virtues.

The campus had the feel of having been slowly filled in with somewhat friendlier and friendlier buildings, and I thought as a whole it worked rather well.

The conference itself was held in the lower floor and auditorium of Vanier college.  The conference room itself was well-lit by welcome exterior light coming in from a glass wall facing an open courtyard.

(Here you see Peter Jeffery speaking, with Phil Hartand to his left, and Pierluigi Piovanelli also at the front.  Beside him you can see the top of Marvin Meyer's head.  Sitting in the front row is Craig Evans.  Not visible at the table are Allan Pantuck and Scott Brown.)

Attendance was I thought impressive, with several dozen audience members in addition to the dozen or so participants.  Attendees included faculty, staff, and interested public.

Tony Burke opened with a few remarks, and we began with two exchanges: one between Charles Hedrick and Bruce Chilton, the other between Craig Evans and Allan Pantuck.  I thought these opening presentations were the most well-balanced hours of the conference.

Hedrick defended authenticity, though by making the I think rather wrong suggestions that the longer passages are ancient additions to GMk by either an imitator of Mark, or by Mark himself.  Chilton emphasized the several (real) problems with provenance, arguing that we need not make any decisions about the status of the text, and that the burden of proof lies on those who would argue for authenticity in the face of these problems.

Evans presented what amounted to an efficient and good-natured though derivative summary of Carlson and Watson's best arguments for inauthenticity (leaving aside the business--nonsense, in my opinion--about puns and plays on words).  It was unfortunate that neither Carlson nor Watson could apparently attend (nor Criddle, whose statistical analysis forms a part of Carlson's study).  Allan Pantuck responded with a quite impressive demolishing of some of the supposedly decisive arguments, including especially the purported connections with James T. Hunter's novel The Mystery of Mar Saba.  (Several of these points I had already made myself here on this blog, so I was quite gratified to hear them.)

There were some comments from the audience (including yours truly, as I tried to again separate the issues of forgery by Smith vs. forgery of the text in general) and a break, then Herschel Shanks spoke briefly in support of authenticity and of Smith's reputation as a scholar.  Shanks had a rather pleasant demeanor overall and I was intrigued by his support for authenticity.

Then came lunch, which I spent eating Taco Bell, being somewhat stuck on campus in a neighborhood mostly devoid of dining options.  Prior to lunch I made sure to introduce myself to several people, including Peter Jeffery, Scott Brown, Allan Pantuck, and both Tony Burke and Philip Harland.  Peter Jeffery seemed somewhat taken aback; possibly he simply didn't know what to say to a stranger.  (We have briefly exchanged comments on the Web, however, and I tried to explain this, but I think I garbled it and suggested it was on my own blog--it wasn't--so he still seemed a little uncertain about exactly what I was talking about, which is understandable.)  Scott Brown was very gracious and said he read my blog regularly.  Aw shucks.  Who knew?  Allan Pantuck was quite friendly and likewise recognized me once I explained who I was. Tony and Phil were both welcoming and had supportive advice to offer in response to some questions I had.


The Afternoon Session

The second half felt just a little more biased towards the case for authenticity, but this may simply be because some speakers chose to speak for longer than others.  Phil Harland introduced the session, and the first half featured three speakers: Marvin Meyer (basically pro-authenticity), Pierluigi Piovanelli (anti-authenticity), and Pantuck again.

Meyer drew some interesting parallels between the neaniskos of both Secret and canonical GMk with lightly-clothed or naked figures in Greek literature.  He also commented with some amusement on the "cottage industry" as he put it that had sprung up around debating and explaining Secret Mark.  (Ahem.)  He emphasized that the evidence that scholarship was capable of digging up regarding Secret Mark was impressive in its level of detail.

Piovanelli, like Evans, highlighted some problems that were originally raised by others (Carlson, Watson, etc.), particularly echoing Evans' concern (based specifically on Carlson) that Smith's work on GMk during the 1950s is too coincidental--that the "wrong person" discovered the manuscript, in the sense that Smith was an unusually appropriate candidate for making the discovery due to his already-existing concerns with the themes of the letter (mysticism in GMk and its relationship with GJn).  Piovanelli did not exactly accuse Smith of a hoax, but rather of forgery with the intent to further his own scholarly agenda.  He also mentioned a number of journal articles on the subject, including Annick Martin's 2007 article "À propos de la lettre attribuée à Clément d'Alexandrie sur l'évangile secret de Marc", in which she (as I think I understand it) proposes but rejects an Origienist millieu for the letter.

Pantuck then provided a very interesting presentation about Smith's skills as a student of ancient languages and writing, based on his correspondence.  He argued that Smith eventually developed good talent at reading Greek, but that by 1958 he still lacked the understanding needed to compose something as complex as SGM1.  Furthermore his Greek script has been characterized by Venetia Anastasopoulou as a "child's writing".  Pantuck's overall point is, again, one that I've argued myself--that to accuse Smith of forgery is to grant him essentially super-human powers that he specifically didn't possess, despite his impressive scholarly abilities, and that really no one could possess such skills.  Pantuck also emphasized (following Stroumsa, I think) that in Smith's correspondence during the late 1950s and early 1960s, he exhibits all the features we might expect from someone intitialy puzzled by the discovery, then slowly developing his own understanding of the text.

I felt that this portion of the symposium was a little stacked (though not deliberately, I think) towards the authenticity side of things, with two speakers sympathetic to authenticity and one against it, though Pantuck was in a sense just following up on his morning presentation.  There were some questions from the audience, and another break.

Then it was Peter Jeffery's turn.  He kept within his allotted 15 minutes, which I thought was a shame because I wanted to hear his liturgical arguments in depth.  Instead he sort of waved his hands towards them, saying they showed the SGM1 ritual and text had no place in the early Alexandrian church's liturgy at all, as we might expect from it.  He'd made similar arguments before of course, but again I was curious to know if he'd expanded them at all.  (His article was not provided either electronically or on paper, so we will have to wait for publication of the collection to read it, if that ever happens.)  He seemed a little blasé about the whole affair, possibly simply because he has a rather hard time taking the authenticity argument seriously.  He then turned his attention to some of Smith's more egregious claims from 1973 onwards, stating that they were "bullshit" and that this showed Smith was generally a deceptive scholar.  It was rather amusing and I have to agree that Smith was not only badly wrong about Secret Mark, but also made some rather ludicrous statements in his later works.  On the other hand, I don't think this proves Smith was a liar, just that he at times had some bizarre scholarly beliefs.  (And this is not to say Smith didn't have many interesting arguments, because he certainly did.)

Scott Brown spoke last, providing a rather long talk (much longer than the allotted 15 minutes, a restriction most speakers broke, though Jeffery did not, as noted above) about the church/temple-cosmology symbolism behind the idea of the "seven veils" and gnostic traditions.  He found it right at home within the Christianity of the second and third centuries, providing a few diagrams showing how sanctuary architecture tended to replicate the multi-layered cosmology of ancient times, and that this was consistent with the ways in which believers were organized in their assemblies.  He argued the point--as I have tried--that the initiates into the "great mysteries" were not the newly-baptized, but the already-baptized, who could later achieve a higher level of "perfection" as advanced students of Christian mysteries.  A questioner (it might have been Chilton) pointed out that the best translation of the letter might speak instead of a "seven-veiled truth" and wondered if this changed the implications of the text.  No conclusion was reached on this.  Brown also argued that the practices outlined in Secret Mark were related culturally to the Eleusinian Mysteries.

There was a general discussion regarding the afternoon talks, which was then opened up to include anything on the subject of the symposium.  I brought up the subject of Criddle's statistical analysis, which Carlson mentions, because one of the faculty in the audience asked about quantitative evidence.  Pantuck jumped in to add that this analysis was often misunderstood (true) and argued that it was a mis-characterization to say, as I did, that it suggested the letter was "too Clementine". (I admit he's technically right, though this is not easy to explain.)  After the discussion was over, I approached Allan and we had a brief discussion about Criddle's analysis.  I said a good way to summarize it was that it shows the rate at which the letter removes hapax legomena from the Celementine corpus versus adding new ones to that corpus, is too high for a work by Clement.  (It removes about twice as fast as it adds, which is unexpected--it should be the other way around.)  He agreed that was a good summary, but strongly disputed that it had any meaning.  He said we just don't know how fast individual passages should remove-and-add hapax legomena to the Clementine corpus--maybe some passages add-and-remove them faster (or slower) than others.  He also said not only has this kind of analysis failed with known works by various authors (Shakespeare and so on), but also that it fails with the Stromata for Clement himself.  He added that Criddle doesn't present his results like a proper statistical study: it fails to present any significance levels, so is not really a proper statistical test at all.  (I strongly agree with this, btw.  Criddle and Pantuck have had part of this disagreement out online previously, though it can now only be found in the Internet Archives.)  Overall, it was emphasized again that the very best thing that could happen would be to locate the manuscript and date the ink, and that without this the case for authenticity is much harder, and somewhat abnormal.  It occurred to me, however, as I sat there, that possibly since the mid-19th century, we simply live in an age where photographs have become their own manuscripts, no more or less trustworthy than a scribe.  We might not need to test the ink any more than we need to find pre-Byzantine copies of Homer or Thucydides.  The issue then becomes one of corroboration; in the case of Homer or Thucydides, we have numerous references to the texts in other ancient authors.  This is admittedly less clear in the case of Secret Mark, which To Theodore itself professes was supposed to be kept secret, lending an air of inherent suspicion to its veracity.

Then came a long break for dinner.  There was nowhere to go, so I headed to the library and spent a while online.  I briefly visited the stacks to locate Smith's short Archaeology article from 1960 (and was rather surprised and pleased to find it right there on the shelf), then visited a sort of diner in the food court where I ate a steak sandwich with poutine on the side.  (If you've never had poutine, it can be quite tasty, though it can sometimes be no more than an excuse to serve soggy fries.)  At 7pm I headed to the Vanier College auditorium, where about twenty audience members had stuck around for the public forum, joined by a handful of interested visitors.

The Public Forum--Harland, Jeffery, Meyer, Evans, and Brown

Allan came by and sat down and we chatted briefly--he asked me about my online identity, and I explained how it was just left over from the old IIDB forum (now FRDB), but that it also gave me some initial anonymity while I slowly built up my arguments and my confidence in making them.  I hope to begin making them more publicly in the future, so eventually I'll discard the_cave and just be myself.

Other audience members included Shanks, Chilton, Burke, and Piovanelli.  The panel itself  consisted of Jeffery, Meyer, Evans, and Brown, with Harland leading the discussion.  He gave a brief summary for the visitors unfamiliar with the controversy, then directed a series of prepared questions to the panel.  I forget exactly what they were--they seemed basically like an opportunity for the panel to restate their position on Secret Mark for the benefit of audience members who were generally unaware of the issues.  After about an hour-and-a-half of this, the more knowledgable members of the audience began interjecting themselves into the conversation, and after Burke handed Harland a scrap of paper the discussion was opened to the audience in general.  Around this time, Shanks chose to quietly leave the audience--probably he just had someplace to go, or else was tired.


A few brief notes in general:

Jeffery overall had the sardonic demeanor of someone almost embarrassed to be a part of the proceedings, and in general seemed detached, distracted, and perhaps even bored.  He mentioned somewhat wryly that not only is it impossible to explain to his fellow musicologists what Secret Mark is, but that most other people wouldn't know what it was, either.  Allan and I chuckled somewhat sympathetically at this, since like Jeffery, neither of us are employed in the religious studies field.

Meyer explained that he and Evans had in fact attended Claremont together, though since then they had gone in rather different directions in terms of their thought.

Evans again emphasized the many obstacles that he felt the letter needed to overcome before authenticity could be taken seriously.

Brown noted that when he first encountered the letter in graduate school, it didn't even occur to him that it could contain any erotic symbolism in any way.

I tried to make at least two points during the discussion.  One was to wonder aloud how organized the Jerusalem Patriarch's library was--I noted that Smith, in his Archaeology article (which I had just reread), had said that at Mar Saba, for example, in the 1940s and '50s, loans were made totally informally.  No one seemed to know about the Patriarchal library's practices, though afterwards Hedrick said to me personally that he thought they did in fact keep track of checkouts and returns.  During the discussion, Allan and I also privately discussed the fate of the pages (which several in the audience noted had been carelessly ripped from the Voss volume--Evans showed the photographs demonstrating this), and I also later asked Hedrick about the librarian he had spoken to.  He couldn't recall the name (note: his name was Kallistos) but agreed he had been sent to Greece by the Patriarchate and was still there.  We agreed--along with Chilton, who stood close by--that this librarian was the last person known to have seen the manuscript.  Hedrick said the librarian had told him in Jerusalem that he was holding the pages "for safekeeping", so it seemed plausible to all three of us (myself, Hedrick, and Chilton) that he may very well still have them.  Hedrick said that Nikolaus Olympiou (I think) would probably know of the librarian's whereabouts.  I suggested that someone could contact him, and they both agreed that would be very interesting.  (I'd also mentioned to Allan earlier that someone could maybe ask Fr. Columba Stewart if he'd be interested in exploring this.)  It seems to me that in forensic science, when someone or something is missing, the first thing you do is question the last person known to have contact with that someone or something.  It also seems a bit coincidental to me that Kallistos was librarian until 1999, and that it happened to be in 2000, when Olympiou visited the library, when the pages first went officially missing (rather than being unavailable but still elsewhere in the library).

My second point was to ask the panel whether Smith's later work--including The Secret Gospel but also including Jesus the Magician, both of which I myself find at times bizarre--was a distraction from the real debate over the authenticity text itself.  Strangely, no one had an answer to that, though Meyer defended Smith's work on magic (conceding that Jesus the Magician was "an odd book") by explaining that it did provide scholars with real insight into the spiritual practices found among society in Jesus' time.

Towards the end, a member of the public asked the rather interesting question that wasn't it "disingenuous" (her term) for some of us to try and ignore Smith's theories about the meaning of the letter, when it was, she claimed, well-known among the LGBT community as possible evidence of Jesus' homosexuality?  Her point, she explained, was that surely much of the controversy can be explained by deliberate efforts to use the letter as "proof" of Jesus' homosexuality.  (She said she spoke as a member of the LGBT community and knew what she was talking about.)  The topic of Smith's interpretation of the letter had already been broached earlier in the discussion, so the panel didn't have much to add to that, though Jeffery did name at least one scholar who in fact uses the letter to advocate for a homosexual understanding of Jesus (the scholar's name escapes me).  Brown had something to say, too, but I forget what it was.  Anyway the subject hadn't really occurred to me before, so it was food for thought.

When it was over, a number of us headed off to a drinking hole to converse and get to know each other.  Piovanelli and his companions noted to me that most people weren't familiar with Martin's article.  I agreed it was unfortunate that English-speaking scholarship often has a hard time keeping aware of the non-English literature.  (I read German poorly and French even worse so I am not really any exception to this, though they were grateful that someone at least had made the effort.)  When we arrived at our destination in the strip mall across the street, it was one of those sports bars that I find somewhat dreadful and I was rather amused at the incongruity of our presence there.  "So we're all getting Jello shots, right?" I asked enthusiastically as we sat down with the jock-rock music blaring around us.  I then explained to the incredulous faces silently staring at me that I was, in fact, joking.

The conversation was fun--sadly Tony Burke had to leave early and I didn't get a chance to talk to him in-depth, though I did have a very long conversation with one of his graduate students, who very kindly drove me back to campus, where I caught the bus back to the subway, and eventually made my way to West St. Clair street where I met up with friends to enjoy the rest of the evening.  (To meet them, I had to leave the York group a little early myself, which was a shame--I would have enjoyed the opportunity to speak with them further.  I never got the chance to ask Allan how he had the chance to study under Smith, for example.)

The next day my hostess and I enjoyed a brunch at a hip little place we walked to on West College, and later I tooled around Queen St. a bit before collecting my things at her friendly home and departing for Union Station.  The trip home was uneventful and punctual, and I arrived in time to meet a couple of friends for a drink and some wonderful conversation at Vermouth in Windsor.  The universities in Michigan have already ended their college semesters so crossing back under the river wasn't too difficult, though the border guard at the Windsor-Detroit tunnel was quite a character, with many questions (he was just doing his job I might add).  And then I drove home.

The Lights of Detroit

So that's was the conference.  Meyer mentioned at some point during the public forum that he doubted anyone had changed their mind on Secret Mark as a result of the conference, and he's probably right.  Still, it's the sort of thing that will probably just take time, one way or another.

My understanding is that Tony and Phil want to publish a small collection from the conference (attendees received electronic copies of several of the articles, but obviously we will be keeping these copies to ourselves).  Although Carlson was absent, it was said that he had sent an article in his stead, but it was not read at the conference, so I don't know its contents.  My hope is that it will be included in any published collection.


I have several reactions to the conference, but those will have to wait for another time.  Nevertheless, the additional thoughts of anyone else attending are welcome here, regardless of whether you support or reject the authenticity of either To Theodore or Secret Mark.  And for those whom I had the chance to introduce myself: it was a very great pleasure to meet, and I hope we will all cross paths again someday.