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?