Some Comments on Francis Watson's Latest Reply

Back in April, Francis Watson published a brief reply to Allan Pantuck's "Beyond Suspicion" article in JTS.  I thought I'd just add my own two cents to the discussion.

Watson's reply relates to only two points:

1) the coincidence of Smith's scholarly interests prior to the manuscript's discovery, and
2) the coincidence of the plot points in James T. Hunter's novel The Mystery of Mar Saba to Smith's discovery.


I first have to note that Watson's reference to "partial or complete nudity of the two male participants" is completely egregious.  The text of SGM1 makes no reference whatsoever to complete nudity, nor even properly to "partial nudity" as we would understand the term in English.  It simply states that the NEANISKOS (basically "twentysomething male") had been "dressed in a fine cloth over his nakedness" (PERIBEBLHMENOS SINDONA EPI GUMNOU).  Indeed, a speaker of English could accurately describe him as fully clothed.  And the Greek words are precisely the words used by canonical Mark to describe the young man of Mk 14:51, who is certainly not described as nude at all until he leaves the sindon behind as he flees.  Furthermore--good grief--it says nothing about what Jesus was wearing, and I must say the natural assumption is that he was wearing his normal attire.  Watson gets the passage badly wrong.


Moving on to 1), Watson states that the importance of the "continuity between Smith's views [on GMk] pre- and post-discovery" is "only evident if one grasps how unusual Smith's esotericism is within the context of New Testament scholarship in the 1950s and indeed today".  Thus, his argument is that Smith's interest in "esotericism" in GMk in the 1950s is unusual in light of his discovery of an apparently "esoteric" text in 1958.

I'm afraid I fail to see how unusual Smith's interest is, or how his scholastic pursuits could be described as "esotericism" prior to 1958 (and even well beyond).  Smith published his dissertation in 1951, though it seems to have been largely researched and written in the 1940s.  While he does delve deeply into the Jewish literature of the first and second centuries (the Mishna and related texts), this in itself is surely not unusual or even really esoteric in any scholarly sense.  The only comment on esotericism in this dissertation that his critics have highlighted is a link Smith makes between the "mystery of the kingdom" in Mk 4:11 and the restrictions on the esoteric discussions of certain books in T. Hag. 2.1.  This is preceded by the note:

Further I think the passage in Sifre on Deut. to have been based on the fact that an important part of primitive Christianity was a secret doctrine which was revealed only to trusted members (Smith 1951, p. 155)

But this takes up only a handful of lines in a nearly 200pp. published manuscript (including appendices but not including indexes).

The next text Smith's critics draw attention to is his 1955 review of Vincent Taylor's 1952 commentary on GMk.  There, Smith devotes about two pages to criticism of Taylor's comments on Mk 4:11.  But this is only one item out of a list of 43 other comments which run about a page each on average (through 42-43 pages), and he devotes equal attention (about two pages) to each of the single verses of Mk 2:17b and 8:38, which have nothing to do with esotericism. 

Furthermore, it's not Smith who raises the issue of esotericism--it's Taylor, who writes:

In the NT, and especially in the Pauline Epp., it [MUSTHRION] means an 'open secret' made known by God, and is used of the Gospel, or the inclusion of the Gentiles.  There is no case in which it connotes secret rites or esoteric knowledge communicated to 'initiates.'  In the present passage and parallels, it is used of a knowledge concerning the Kingdom of God which has been imparted to the disciples, but not to the people in general (Taylor 1952, p. 255, quoted in Smith 1955, p. 29)

Smith merely points out two things in response to this.  First, Taylor seems to be making two contradictory claims:

a) "mystery" does not mean esoteric knowledge, yet
b) in Mk 4:11 it does refer to exclusive knowledge that the disciples have.

Smith resolves this rather plausibly by assuming that Taylor was making an exception for Mk 4:11, or else was distinguishing between "initiates" and the disciples.  What we must notice, however, is that the claim that Jesus gave the disciples exclusive knowledge does not originate here with Smith; rather, it originates with Taylor.  True that Smith apparently thought the same in the 1940s, but he seems to be joined here by good company, in the person of Vincent Taylor.  And Smith's comments would not have been prompted at all were it not for Taylor's efforts at fending off esoteric understandings of Mk 4:11.

Second, Smith points out that Taylor is still wrong, for in I Cor 2:6, Paul quite clearly refers to TELEIOIS ("initiates") who receive Christian wisdom.

Furthermore, Smith says at the end:

The points of Taylor's work discussed in this paper have been only those which seemed worth correcting and which admitted of brief and demonstrable correction. (Smith 1955, p. 62f.)

So Smith apparently did not feel he spent an unusual amount of effort in critiquing Taylor on esotericism in the NT.

Lastly, Smith's critics have pointed to his 1958 article "The Image of God" which, like his dissertation, mentions T. Hag. 2.1.  This time, however (as Scott Brown has ably pointed out in HTR) it's in the context of discussing Clement of Alexandria's discussion of secrect doctrines in Stromata, and not only was originally discussed by Smith in a series of lectures in 1955, but is also entirely appropriate to the discussion of Clement, and has nothing to do with GMk. 


So it looks like what we have are the following items in Smith's pre-1958 works:

• Smith studied Jewish writings of the early Roman imperial period in the 1940s, and briefly mentioned one similarity in a single passage in T. Hag to Mk 4:11 in the midst of a 200pp. manuscript, published in 1951, while taking the opportunity to claim that Jesus taught a "secret doctrine" similar to Jewish esotericism.

• Vincent Taylor (perhaps or perhaps not unaware of Smith's dissertation) in 1952 both denied that the NT term "mystery" refered to esoteric knowledge, but also stated that it did refer to exclusive knowledge the disciples had, an interesting claim to which Smith responded briefly sometime between 1952 and 1955, adding some further details though not remarkably many.  Indeed, Smith himself seems to have dropped any discussion or exploration of esoteric knowledge (certainly within the context of GMk) for the remainder of the decade.   

• Smith uses his 1940s-era knowledge of T. Hag. again in 1955, mentioning it briefly and appropriately in a discussion of Clement of Alexandria and Jewish mysticism--two topics that are quite common avenues of religious research.

But...that's it.  Those three items are, it would seem, the total extent of what Watson calls Smith's "esotericism".  So it seems to me that when Watson talks about "Smith's esotericism" in the 1950s, he is really refering to a very small sliver of Smith's scholarly production during the early 1950s.  To claim this sliver somehow represents Smith's work as a whole prior to 1958 is simply wrong.

Also wrong, I think, is to claim that Smith's minor interest in Christian esotericism before 1958 is in any way unusual for the 1950s.  Indeed, general interest in Christian esotericism picked up considerably during the 1950s, but not in any way related to Morton Smith.  Rather, it was inspired by the discovery of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas and its publication in 1956 (in English in 1959), with its emphasis on "secret sayings" and the apparently exclusive knowledge Thomas receives in Logion 13, for example.  Perhaps Smith's pre-1956 interest in esotericism (however minor) is interesting, but mostly it just seems prescient.  Indeed, a reference to "hidden" (APOKRUFOI) sayings of Jesus already existed in the Greek fragments of GTh known since the 1897; surely Grenfell and Hunt's efforts to publish these fragments, and subsequent scholarship on them, should not be described as unusually esoteric, either then or now.  Furthermore, the esotericism of GTh has been discussed extensively throughout the last two decades or so by April De Conick (and others), so Watson's claim that "esotericism" in NT scholarship is in any way unusual in our own time seems multiply baffling.
   

As for 2), Watson actually concedes to Pantuck the plausibility that coincidences actually do happen in real life.  This is generous and appreciated.  However, he tries to go back on it a bit by hypothesizing a fictional novel that preceded the Piltdown Hoax.  Scholars would be justified, he proposes, in claiming that such a novel formed the inspiration of the hoax.  But this strategy goes nowhere, because the justification for such a claim would presuppose the existence of the hoax--but the Piltdown Hoax was exposed via other means.  Surely if the Mar Saba manuscript were indeed exposed as a hoax based on empirical evidence, we might well be justified in wondering whether Smith were inspired by James T. Hunter's novel.  But without knowing whether the manuscript is a hoax or not, a link between Hunter and Smith can only be made by presupposing the hoax.  Otherwise, it is just as Watson admits: nothing but a series of coincidences, such as actually happen in real life.  (And, as I have argued, there are few real coincidences between Hunter's novel and Smith's discovery, and what few there are can be easily explained.)