Rosson re: The Secret Gospel

Loren Rosson has posted some thoughts about Secret Mark. Tony Burke has already replied; I thought I would add some observations.

The Jewish-Christian Gospels, pt. 1: Ebionites and Nazaraeans

I've been promising this for a long time, so I better finally deliver :)

To explain the identification of Q with GEbi, and of both GEbi and GNaz (and perhaps GPet) with "GHeb", we'll need to sort out the evidence regarding these gospels and their relationships with not only GMt but also GLk-Ac. This will take several posts. I largely draw on Ben Smith's extremely helpful pages on the Jewish-Christian Gospels (helpfully indexed here), but augment this occasionally with material from elsewhere. I do not really rely on any one study of these gospels (such as Klijn or Luomanen) because I think that so far, no one has sorted out these gospels quite right. I believe that the HSH will help us see the true relationships.

I generally use Ben Smith's translations, but rely on Frank Williams' translation of Epiphanius. I copy the Greek from Ben Smith as well, who does not use diacritical marks. When translating the phrase "according to the Hebrews", I place it in quotation marks: otherwise when referring to it I use acc. Heb.

(ETA: fixed the translations from Jerome--I had accidentally deleted an intermediary block.)

So, let's begin with our first observation:

1. The gospel of the Ebionites, and that of the Nazareans, were different texts, as nearly all scholars now recognize.

A Home for GEbi, and a Solution for Q

ETA: In 2010, I began identifying Q with the Gospel of Peter, and both with the Gospel of the Hebrews. Later that year, I distinguished between GPet and GHeb, but continued to identify the former with Q. 

Over the years, my thinking on this evolved considerably, until late in 2013, I realized I had it wrong: Q is to be identified with GEbi and (one version of) GHeb. GPet was posterior to Q/GEbi.

This post, and several earlier posts, have been edited to reflect this realization. I have tried to note where I had made edits.

This is the post in which I first identified Q with GEbi. Some material has been removed; one bullet point has been added, as noted below.

A Brief Plug for the Next York University Symposium

Sadly, I probably won't be able to attend, due to constraints of time and finances, but the second York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium will take place next month, and I encourage anyone reading this to attend. The first one was terrifically engaging and of very high quality, and produced a stellar proceedings, and this year's efforts look sure to be the equal of the first.

Were I to attend, I'd probably single out the following events:

Viklund and Paananen in Vigiliae Christianae

I've been very busy for the past week or so, and I managed to miss this, but I was surprised and rather pleased to see Roger Viklund, with Timo Paananen, publish his findings in VC on the mistaken analysis of the Mar Saba handwriting that Carlson undertakes in The Gospel Hoax. Congrats to Roger and Timo.

Viklund's analysis now enters the published, peer-reviewed literature. This is great news for defenders of Smith's honesty.

And I absolutely must add (and IMHO this is a little ground-breaking) that this seems to establish a precedent for scholarly publication of findings originally published on the web. Viklund originally posted these findings on his blog back in late 2009. We now see those findings, or at least a succinct summary of them, published in a scholarly setting.

It would seem, then, that blog material can in fact be re-presented. What it takes to pass peer-review, I guess, is a meaningful revision of that material. The fact that we now have an effective standard for this seems like kind of a big deal to me. I think everyone in the discipline should be paying attention to this--I can't think of another example of this type of blog-to-journal publication (or a better one, at any rate) in the field of biblical studies. However, I would be happy to be proven wrong and pointed to other examples.