Quick Thoughts on a New Fragment of GMK

Just wanted to say one or two things about P.Oxy. 5072:

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2011/110726.html

Tony Burke has a bit more here:

http://www.tonyburke.ca/apocryphicity/2011/09/19/new-unknown-gospel-from-oxyrhynchus/

Roger Viklund has a couple of pieces here (if you use Chrome, you can tell it to translate with a single click):

http://rogerviklund.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/ett-nytt-evangelium-patraffat/

http://rogerviklund.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/overlaps-between-secret-mark-the-raising-of-lazarus-in-john-and-the-gerasene-swine-episode-in-mark/

My own thoughts:

Suggestion Box (a publishing question)

What are the best journals in which to publish on patristics?

From what I can tell they include:

Catholic Biblical Quarterly
possibly Novum Testamentum
probably Journal for the Study of the New Testament
Journal of Early Christian Studies
Vigiliae Christianae
maybe also Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism (Are they still publishing?  They have only one paper listed for 2011 on their website.)
In some cases Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus could be appropriate.

Have I covered everything?  Which would you try to publish in first?  Keep in mind that I am a first-time author, unaffiliated with a graduate proram, a religious or classical studies department, or any religious institution at all.

A Poll on Blogging vs. Publishing

This is a little exercise I thought I'd try--don't know whether it will help or not.

Sorry, folks, the poll doesn't work without a Blogger account--rats!  I guess this is why everyone uses WordPress nowadays...

I appreciate the effort anyone made, however.  You'll be seeing more info soon.  In the meantime, please feel free to continue the conversation if you like.


Let's say (hypothetically) that I think I've solved a longstanding and fairly well-known problem in the field of early Christian literature.  (No, it has nothing to do with Secret Mark--please remain calm).  I feel I have a fairly good case to make for it.


Should I just blog about it here, or should I first take the time to get a publishable paper ready and start submitting it to journals?

The Seventh Sign, Pt. 6: The Storm-Stilling

In my last post on the subject, I showed how the Catch of Fish truly belonged on the list of the seven signs originally found in the Signs Gospel (and now found in GJn, as well as heavily redacted and edited in GMk).  We were still left with only six signs, however, since I eliminated the Raising of Lazarus as directly taken from the Signs Gospel (or SG).  Instead, that was composed by John out of elements from the Markan raising of Jairus' daughter, along with the raising of the man in what is now known as "SGM1", or the first fragment of the Secret Gospel of Mark in the Mar Saba manuscript.  Mark, for his part, based those two raisings on the original sign of the Healing of the Official's Child/Son.  In other words, the Raising of Lazarus is just a heavily-redacted, third-generation copy of the Healing of the Official's Child.   

I also promised I would eventually deal with the true identity of the remaining sign.  So, what was it?   

So far we have six signs on our list:

Blocker and Viklund on Hebrew Matthew and Secret Mark

Roger Viklund has posted a new essay by himself and David Blocker on some additional material found in a Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew that is clearly related to the Mar Saba manuscript and the Secret Gospel of Mark.  Please read the essay.


My first reactions:


We now know that one or the other of these two scenarios must be true, and the other false:

Adding Egerton and Syriac GTh

(This post gets a little technically dense; sorry about the brevity. ETA: typos corrected!)

I was mulling over the Egerton Gospel, as I do from time to time, trying to think of where it might fit into the HSH.  I had become particularly  interested in its mixture of Johannine and Synoptic elements (which were always triple-tradition elements).  I'd never been able to fit it into the diagram before, but what if it were a kind of proto-John?  The "Johannine-only" elements would then have been taken from the Signs Gospel; the synoptic triple-tradition elements from the original Gospel of Mark, i.e. Secret Mark.

This would have been a slightly complex idea, however, because I would then need a reason why the canonical Johannine redactor either edited out or heavily rewrote the synoptic elements.  This wasn't an impossible idea, but I didn't see anything in those elements (the questioning of Jesus by his opponents, and the healing of a leper) that seemed to require special treatment by a Johannine author.  So this remains an intriguing idea, but I don't think it's the best one.

I then turned to the Q side of the diagram to reconsider placing it there.

The Lost Ending of GMk: Conclusion

In my last post, I presented a completed ending to original GMk.

So what happened to it?

The Lost Ending of GMk, pt. 4

In the last post, we completed a chiasm for the original ending of GMk--two chiasms, actually, including the pericope begun by Mk 16:1-8.  Although we completed each bracket using material shared among the sea-miracles in GMt (the Water-Walking and the Fish and the Coin), GLk (the Calling of the Disciples/the Catch of Fish), and GJn (the Appearance in Galilee/the Catch of Fish), the end result seemed a bit brief, as though there were still more material to add.  In this post, we'll find that remaining material in the same manner, by searching for shared material among GMt, GLk, and GJn.  We'll find that it fits nicely into chiastic brackets, thus completing the original ending of GMk.

Again, here is what we have so far:

The Lost Ending of GMk, pt. 3

Before I proceed, I wanted to mention this article that James McGrath published in February of this year, essentially on the same subject: the probable existence of a missing ending to GMk based on the internal, textual evidence of GMk up to Mk 16:8, and the witness of GPet to the content of that missing ending. 

At any rate, in the last post, we got a kind of rough outline of what a missing ending of GMk might have originally looked like, based on the principle that the first verses of Mk 1 would form a kind of super-chiasm bracket with it--that is, that we should expect to find the specific themes of Mk 1 replicated at the end of the Markan gospel.

And I argue we can go even further with this, and figure out the specific details found in this final pericope.  In a previous post on the signs in GMk, I provided two lists from Raymond Brown’s Anchor Bible commentary on GJn: one of parallels between Lk 5:1-11 and Jn 21, and another of parallels between Mt 14:28-32 and Jn 21. 

The list of Lukan parallels is as follows (with triple parallels in the Matthean Water-Walking underlined)

The Lost Ending of GMk, pt. 2

Now consider the idea that the entire Markan gospel was originally one big super-chiasm.  This idea has been best put forward by M. Philip Scott, in Biblical Theology Bulletin ("Chiastic Structure: A Key to the Interpretation of Mark's Gospel", BTB 15.1, pp. 17-26), laid out in rather intriguing detail.  Pairs of opposed ideas do seem to be spread throughout the gospel, in nested conceptual brackets, just like they are within individual pericopes.  For example, Scott characterizes the beginning and end of the gospel (ibid, p. 18) as "An angel witnesses to his coming" with "An angel witnesses to his going", though I would amend the second half slightly to “An angel witnesses to his returning”.

So once we recognize the overall chiastic structure of Mark's gospel in general, the remaining pieces of the missing ending fall into place, along with the original super-structure.  Notice that what we have at the beginning of Mark’s gospel is not just John’s announcement of the coming of a messiah, but also some substantial baptism imagery.  Not only do we have the baptisms of John's followers, but we also notably have the baptism of Jesus.  Furthermore, we have John's promise that Jesus will baptize in the Holy Spirit--and, following Mark's adoptionist theology, we also have Jesus' own baptism in the spirit.

The Lost Ending of GMk, pt. 1

I did promise a post on the lost ending of GMk, didn't I?  Well, alright, here it is.  This will be a series of two or three posts, I think.  Then we'll get back to describing the final sign in the Signs Gospel.

The key to understanding the lost ending of GMk lies in understanding the chiasmic nature of the original GMk.  As I have often mentioned, Michael Turton (following principally John Dart, but others as well of course) has helped show how each authentically Markan pericope has achiastic structure with a twinned or paired center.  I don’t think Turton gets every one quite right (and in fact I’m probably going to do my own version of GMk, chiasm by chiasm), but he at least makes a good go at it, and some are very insightful.   

Turton tries his hand at constructing a chiasm for Mk 16:1-8, showing that it seems to be missing an A' bracket, ending enigmatically--and infamously--with "they were afraid, for" (EFOBOUNTO GAR).  There is a strenuous debate in the scholarly literature about whether this is a sentence fragment or not, focusing in particular on the question of whether GAR can serve as the end of a sentence, as well as at the end of an entire work.  To summarize, yes, sentences can occasionally end with GAR in ancient Greek (including the Septuagint), but only one other work, the Third Treatise of Plotinus, ends in GAR.

There is also the problem of why the Markan author would predict an appearance of the risen Jesus in Galilee, but fail to describe it, or why he would leave the reader hanging on the questions of whether the women would tell the disciples about what they saw, whether the young man's prediction would come true, whether Jesus were truly risen at all, etc.

Here is Turton's attempt at a chiasm:

The Seventh Sign, Pt 5: The Catch of Fish

Like the Water into Wine, the Catch of Fish also leaves traces behind in GMk.  It will turn out that they're harder to find, because the sign has actually gone missing, but nevertheless they're still there.

The first location is found in Mk 1, towards the beginning of Mark's gospel.

A Catch of Believers

When the first disciples are called in GMk, we find Simon and Andrew casting a net in the sea.  We also meet James and John in a boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets. Jesus tells them that they will become "fishers for men" and makes them an offer: "follow me".  They abandon their nets and follow him. 

These elements all have parallels in the Catch of Fish as we have it in GJn.  There, Simon, James, and John--the last two identified as the "sons of Zebedee"--are all fishing.  Jesus tells them to cast their net into the sea.  After he reconciles with Peter, he tells him "follow me". 

The Seventh Sign, Pt. 4: Water into Wine (Revised)

(ETA: Sorry, I originally published an incomplete version of this post--I've now posted the complete version, which includes a section on Th 47.)

Before we investigate the real identity of the seventh sign in the Signs Gospel, we'll have a look at the other two apparently missing from GMk: the Water into Wine and the Catch of Fish.  We'll find that neither is missing from GMk at all--the Markan author has simply reused them, in just the way that I describe in my research criteria: he has split them in two, and relocated them.  The Markan author frequently used splitting, duplicating, and re-using to create the Markan effect of "doubling" that is so famously present in his gospel.  These pericopes are no exception.

The Water into Wine technically does not appear in GMk.  But notice something interesting: there's a Markan parallel to the Water into Wine right where we might expect it, towards the beginning of Mark's gospel, in Mk 2:19-22:

The Seventh Sign, Pt. 3: Recap

In this post, I showed how the author of Mark used a characteristic feature throughout his gospel, particularly in his healings, namely: Jesus heals with his touch.  I argued that this was a feature deliberately introduced into the narrative by the original Markan author, in order to combat the docetism of Simon Magus.

So in this post, I subtracted those touch-healings out from the miracles found in GMk to see what we might find in terms of pre-Markan source material.  We then discovered that there was another, smaller group of related miracles among those remaining, namely: the Markan exorcisms (and there was another exorcism on the touch-healing list).  These all seemed closely linked to the Markan theme of the Messianic Secret, so we then subtracted those out, too.

From the penultimate list, we also subtracted out the doubled miracles of the Water-Walking and the Feeding of the 4000, since they look like just a doubled copying of the Storm-Stilling and the Feeding of the 5000.  We also subtracted out one piece of material that was probably post-Markan: Michael Turton has shown that the healing of the Syro-Phonecian woman's daughter probably isn't Markan at all, because it lacks a chiastic structure (I argue it was likely added by the canonical redactor). 

We were then left with the following miracles:

Just in Case You're Missing It...

Stephan Huller has been writing a wonderful series of posts over the last week or so, basically establishing a solid 18th century milieu in which the Mar Saba manuscript could have been inscribed into the Voss volume.  (Huller even goes so far to propose that Patriarch Callinicus/Kallinikos III (IV) inscribed it, but so far I am not entirely convinced.  Huller is basically arguing however that it's becoming increasingly likely it was at least inscribed by someone within Callinicus' circle.  As Huller points out, this is of course precisely what Morton Smith himself proposed: "we may suppose with some probability that the writer of the present letter had been trained in the Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople".)

The point is not that Huller is proving an airtight case for Smith's proposal; rather, the point is that Huller is demonstrating that a Enlightenment-era Levantine milieu is a perfectly plausible environment for the manuscript to be produced.  (Though I must say Huller is doing a terrific job of making a case that the manuscript is linked specifically to Callinicus and his circle.)  Indeed, Huller is showing that it is at least an equally plausible scenario as a forgery by a western scholar dating to the mid-20th century.  (Personally I would have to say that Huller's evidence has surpassed that of Smith's critics.)

Paananen's Interview with Quesnell on the Mar Saba Manuscript

Timo Paananen has posted his 2009 telephone interview with Quentin Quesnell on his website.

Some things we learn:

--It appears that on Quesnell's new testimony, Kallistos Dourvas was indeed the last person known to have seen the manuscript ("Kallistos took it to the firm and handled all arrangements with them.")

--The color photographs Quesnell procured do not seem to be the color photographs that Kallistos had and gave to Olympiou.  ("I have them.")  There is perhaps some slight ambiguity remaining here, but I see no reason to suspect Quesnell of being coy with words.

--The École Biblique appears to have become involved somehow.  ("There were some discussions with people at the Ecole, I believe."  This in all likelihood refers to the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem.)  This is perhaps the most interesting piece of information.  What if the manuscript now lies in the hands of someone affiliated with the École?

Let's not forget that it is with this trip that confirmed sightings of the manuscript cease, and all known attempts to view it (or even to view other manuscripts at the same library) become blocked and interfered with.

Quesnell has unfortunately left off responding to Paananen since this interview.  We know that his wife, Jean Higgins (herself a religious scholar) sadly passed away last September, so I suspect he has simply been preoccupied.  (He has also himself been retired since 2004.)

What's very interesting is that even if Quesnell decides to remain silent on the subject, we know there is more material out there regarding this visit and the manuscript in general.  Quesnell cites 1) a written correspondence between himself and Morton Smith, 2) written correspondence between himself and his late wife (still listed as emerita at Smith College for some reason) describing his trip, and 3) unknown "supplemental material".  All of these are sure to be interesting.

Grateful thanks to Timo for posting this very informative interview.

An Emerging Consensus on Secret Mark?

It's been stated by several participants in the "Secret Mark Conference" (really the first event in the York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium Series) that there was seemingly no consensus emerging from the discussion.  Having reflected on it for the past few weeks, I would actually disagree with that: I think we do see a partial consensus emerging.

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.

Quentin Quesnell Was the Last Person Known to Have Seen the Mar Saba Manuscript

Sorry, duplicate post--please see the original post below.  But the title of this post is the more accurate one: Quesnell is only the last person known to have seen the manuscript based on published evidence.

Quentin Quesnell Was the Last to See the Mar Saba Manuscript

This fact has only become known publicly since 2007.  (ETA: see Stephan Huller's interesting comment below.  It hints that we may have information about a sighting of the manuscript since Quesnell saw it.)


In my report on the first York Christian Apocrypha Symposium, I suggested that not only was Archimandrite Kallistos Dourvas the last person to see the endpaper manuscript of To Theodore, but that it only went missing in 2000, and that he left his appointment at the library of the Jerusalem Patriarch in 1999.

I may well have been wrong on all three counts.

Quick Post on Tselikas

Agamemnon Tselikas' report on the Mar Saba manuscript was posted to the BAR website last week.  I'm a little surprised it hasn't garnered more attention, but I thought I'd make a few comments about it.  Really I only want to focus here on his "Textological Observations", which is where he presents the real substance of his claims.  I'll comment on only a few of those observations, numbered below.

Peter Kirby resurfaces

http://peterkirby.com/

opening with a long missive directed towards James McGrath.  I have no dog in this particular fight and I've largely stayed out of it, but I hope to read more blogging from Peter as he gets the chance--I'd long wondered what he was up to these days.

Quick Post on Mar Saba

From Joseph Patrich's The Sabaite heritage in the Orthodox Church from the fifth century to the present, 2001, p. 10:

Up to 1887 there were 706 codices in the possession of the monastery, when they were removed for their safety to the patriarchate in Jerusalem.  Before 1887, fifty-five manuscripts had been taken from Mar Saba, finding their way to libraries and museums around the world.  The extant Sabaite collection thus amounted to 761 codices, 129 of which were written in the laura by thirty-six calligraphers or scribes over a period of eleven centuries, from the ninth to the nineteenth.  The major part of the collection thus consists of manuscripts that were written elsewhere.

So the presence of a written text in Mar Saba in a hand that was not by a resident of the monastery, is in no way unusual, and indeed is to be expected.  In terms of the physical evidence, it's only the Voss volume in general that's unusual (leaving aside the question of the character of the script, the text, and the context).


Coming soon, I hope (but not too soon...) will be commentary on Tselikas' report to BAR on his search for the manuscript.  In short, there will be much to criticize though I'll keep my comments to a minimum.  I also hope to put up a post I've been slowly building that tries to document the history of the text and efforts to study it in person.

Quick Links to Viklund-Hurtado Exchange

Roger Viklund and Larry Hurtado had a brief exchange online and I thought I'd link to it:

Hurtado 1
Viklund 1
Hurtado 2
Viklund 2

I don't have much to add, except to say that while my opinions about To Theodore are largely in sympathy with Viklund's, I have to say that Hurtado re-states some important issues about provenance/provenience with respect to the letter.  It's just that I think these issues are in no way insurmountable.

I do part with Viklund, however, regarding whether the letter is authentically Clementine.  It may be, but it may not be, and as I've stated before I currently lean towards attributing it to a student of either Clement or Origen writing most likely sometime in the early third century.


I haven't been blogging as often as I'd like; been busy with other projects and activities.  I've also been busy investigating some more potential parallels between GTh, GMk, and Q/GPet, especially Logion 55 and 101.   It's been truly fascinating, and I think I now have a more definite position on the compositional history of GTh, and on what its original layer contained (and what it didn't contain; specifically, it didn't contain the language of "hate").  Someday I'll blog on that, but I need to get back to linking original GMk with the Signs Gospel first.  That will require some significant time to finish putting together and I honestly haven't had it recently, nor am likely to until next month.  So what blogging I do will be fairly light for now.

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.

Interludes: The Adulteress's Chiasm

I admit I'm a little bit excited about this one.

The Pericopae Adulterae is the famous passage in GJn (and some manuscripts of GLk) describing a woman caught in adultery who is brought to Jesus.  Jesus says the famous words "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", and her accusers leave.  Jesus then forgives her and sends her away.

Its presence in GJn, however, (or in GLk) is notoriously unstable in the manuscript traditions (with many textual variants), though not conclusively so.  Wikipedia provides a good summary.  The language is generally considered non-Johannine, though this is disputed.

Leaving all of this aside, I've discovered something else about the pericope, independent of any theory as to its origins:

It has a chiasm.

Here it is:

Interludes: The Crucifixion Chiasm

I'd hoped to be making a series of posts about various chiasms in GMk, based on the work of Michael Turton.  Turton does truly admirable work in teasing out these chaisms and gets a lot right.  He has my deep respect.  Sometimes however I think he makes a mistake here and there, throwing off the structure of the chiasm in general.  However, I'm discovering that these chiasms really can be subtle, and there are numerous questions about how the canonical redactor might have changed this or that pericope, what verses (or even words) are truly original to GMk, and so on.  So this project is on hold right now.

But there is one chiasm that I feel confident I have discovered the correct structure for.  It's the crucifixion scene itself, and this weekend seemed like an appropriate time to post it.  (Yesterday would have been better, of course, but I ran out of time.)

And here it is.  Turton's brackets from his own chiasm for the crucifixion are in black capital letters; my revisions are in capital red letters.  Where my revisions supplant Turton's work, I have used a strike-through.

The Seventh Sign, Pt. 2

(REVISED)

With this post, I'm starting to add headers to the sections of my posts, which are growing rather long and unwieldy.  It's my hope that these headers will help guide the reader through the argument in a more step-by-step manner.

Healing a Child: The Fourth Sign

GMk actually has four of the signs; the missing sign from this list is the raising of Jairus' daughter.  That was in the first list of healings, in this post, for Jesus heals her by taking her by the hand.

I have shown previously how the raising of Jairus' daughter is related to the healing of the Centurion's servant in Q, and the healing of the official's son in GJn.  And in fact, I argue all three of these derive (one way or another) from the original story in the Signs Gospel, a healing of an official's child.

The Seventh Sign, Pt. 1

Let's look now at the healings in GMk that don't involve touch (leaving aside the ambiguous healing of the man with the withered hand, which I include in the touch-healings).  They are as follows, with their precise locations in GMk:

The Unclean Spirit (1:23-26)
Healing Many in Capernaum (1:34)
Healing Many in Galilee (1:39)
The Paralytic (2:3-12)
The Storm-Stilling (4:37-39)
The Gerasene Demoniac (5:2-13)
Feeding the 5000 (6:41-43)
The Water-Walking (6:48-51)
The Syro-Phonecian Woman (7:29-30)
Feeding the 4000 (8:6-8)
The Blind Man of Jericho (10:52)

Four of these are healings of demoniacs:

The Unclean Spirit
Healing Many in Capernaum
Healing Many in Galilee
The Gerasene Demoniac.

The Touch of Healing, Secret Mark, and Simon Magus

There's something interesting about the Gospel of Mark: many of the miracle healings are accomplished by touch.

Here's the list:

Bethsaida, Secret Mark, and the Not-So-Great Omission, pt. 4

In the last post, I made a case for my claim that an original version of GMk was used by the Q-author to produce a Q gospel that lacked the Bethsaida section.  This Q gospel was then combined with a canonical version of GMk to produce GMt, which used the Bethsaida material in canonical GMk; and GLk/Mc, which left out the Bethsaida material in canonical GMk (since it was absent in the Q gospel).

To further demonstrate the plausibility of this scenario, we'll have to show that the Q-author would have had reason to omit each of the original pericopes in the Bethsaida section in his Q gospel.  Once again, these original pericopes were determined, by Michael Turton, to have been:

a) The Water-Walking
b) The Feeding of the 4000
c) The Blind Man of Bethsaida

We deal with each pericope in turn:

Bethsaida, Secret Mark, and the Not-So-Great Omission, pt. 3

In Part 2, we showed how Michael Turton, in his Index to Historical Commentary on the Gospel of Mark, reduced the so-called "Bethsaida section" of GMk (roughly Mk 6:45-8:26) to only three original pericopes:

• the Water-Walking
• the Feeding of the 4000
• the Blind Man of Bethsaida

These three pericopes were the only ones written by the original Markan author, i.e. the author responsible for most of the Gospel of Mark as we know it--its overall narrative, its structures, and its characteristic features.  Turton simply calls this author "Mark" (though this author was not the editor of the canonical GMk.)

So there was an original version of GMk that featured these pericopes alone, in this order, in this section of the gospel. 

We know that Matthew nevertheless used canonical GMk in composing his gospel, because he has all the material in the Bethsaida section that the canonical author has.  But did Luke/Marcion also use canonical GMk? 

Bethsaida, Secret Mark, and the Not-So-Great Omission, pt. 2

We now turn to Turton's analysis of the Bethsaida section of GMk.  

Turton individually examines the pericopes in this section of GMk using chiastic analysis.  He eliminates any pericopes that do not exhibit what he feels to be typically "Markan" characteristics; chiastic brackets that "talk to each other" (i.e. exhibit thematic or vocabular parallels), central bracket pairs that feature chreia, sayings by Jesus that neatly summarize teachings or deftly refute opponents, etc.  As summarized in his "Excursus on Mark without Bethsaida", this leaves him with four pericopes that are arguably Markan in this section:

Bethsaida, Secret Mark, and the Not-So-Great Omission, pt. 1

We now begin an examination of the "Bethsaida section" in GMk, so-called because at its beginning in Mk 6:45, Jesus and his disciples set out in a boat for Bethsaida, and at its end in Mk 8:27, there is a healing in Bethsaida of a blind man.

Michael Turton has done excellent work in showing that this section is riddled with non-Markan editing and interpolations, and that there was an earlier, original, "Markan" version, containing much less material than we now find in GMk.  In other words, Turton thinks there was an earlier version of GMk, that lacked much of the Bethsaida section.

What I'll show is that Cerinthus would have had every reason to eliminate the few pericopes in this authentic, earlier version of GMk.  In other words, Cerinthus performed a "Not-So-Great Omission" on original GMk. 

A Chiasm for Secret Mark

I wanted to take a brief break from discussing the Didache to touch on the Gospel of Mark.  I have been hypothesizing that there was a pre-canonical version of GMk that the Q author used, and since this hypothesis forms a part of my structure for the composition of the Unforgivable Sin logon, this would be a good time to discuss that pre-canonical version of GMk.  I regard this version as identical with Secret Mark, and I'll show one reason why I think so: because Secret Mark exhibits the distinctly Markan features that Michael Turton has uncovered in his online Commentary to the Gospel of Mark.  That is, it shows the same attention to chiastic structures as Turton's Mark does.

The Unforgiable Sin Logion, pt. 5

Matthew also replaces Mark's unusual AMARTHMATA with AMARTIA, the same word as in Didache.  (AMARTHMATA is actually Pauline, showing the influence of Paul, especially Rom. and 1 Cor., on Mark.)  But in Mark's other uses of "sin" (AMART-) Matthew pretty much follows him verbatim.  So why would he have changed Mark's word here?  Matthew likely had another influence in this case, and Didache provides the best candiate for this influence, whether directly or indirectly.

Remember also that Matthew follows the same order as the Didache, PASA AMARTIA...AFEQHSETAI, whereas Mark uses PANTA...AFEQHSETAI...AMARTHMATA  How could Matthew have coincidentally followed the same order as Didache in these three words, if it had not influenced him one way or another (again, directly or indirectly)?


To finish our analysis, let's turn briefly to Luke's version.  Notice that he keeps the Unforgivable Sin logion away from the Beelzebub incident altogether--the Beelzebub incident is Lk 11:14-23, but the Unforgivable Sin logion is Lk 12:10.  Why would he do this?

The Unforgiable Sin Logion, pt. 4

Let's get back to the Matthean version.  Tuckett also thinks (in agreement with most scholars) that there was a Q version of this saying.  Most scholars think that it began "He who speaks against the son will be forgiven..." in parallel with GTh.  But notice...

...that both Matthew and Luke begin their versions (Mt 12:31//Lk 12:10) with either PASA (GMt) or PAS (GLk).  The parallel is even more direct in GMt, for he writes PASA AMARTIA AFEQHSETAI where the Didache writes PASA GAR AMARTIA AFEQHSETAI.  Tuckett suggests that Didache derives from GMt here.

But what if...the Didache preceded GMt?  Indeed, why would Matthew use PASA, and Luke PAS, instead of Markan PANTA?  It would seem on the face of it...that both Luke and Matthew are drawing from a single source, one that was somehow related to the Didache, and that contained the Didachean statement PASA (GAR) AMARTIA AFEQHSETAI.

The Unforgivable Sin Logion, pt. 3

GTh logion 44 ("He who speaks against the father will be forgiven...") seems to have parallels in both GMk (Mk 3:28-29) and in the Q-gospel (Q 12:10).  From these sources, it seems to have found its way into GMt and GLk--Matthew combines the two, keeping the saying in its Markan position in the Beelzebul incident, whereas Luke blends them together and relocates it somewhat.  In the synoptics, it is called, in general, the "Unforgivable Sin logion".  We'll be investigating it to see how it could have ended up in both the Markan and the Q traditions.  Our conclusions will be, I think, somewhat surprising.