Pantuck and Brown vs. Carlson on Secret Mark

April 21, 2008 by Tony

Allan Pantuck passed along to me an article he wrote with Scott Brown challenging one of the claims made by Stephen Carlson in support of his position that Secret Mark is a hoax perpetrated by Morton Smith. Brown, long a supporter of the authenticity of the text, has chipped away at several of Carlson’s claims now, and this one is quite devestating to Carlson’s argument. Here is the abstract for the article:

Allan J. Pantuck and Scott G. Brown, “Morton Smith as M. Madiotes: Stephen Carlson’s Attribution of Secret Mark to a Bald Swindler,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 6 (2008): 106-125.

In 1960, Morton Smith announced that he had discovered in the Mar Saba monastery tower library a fragment of a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria containing excerpts from a longer version of the Gospel of Mark that Smith called the ‘Secret Gospel of Mark’. Controversial since its publication in 1973, this discovery has recently been criticized in print as both an academic hoax and a malicious forgery. This paper uses newly discovered manuscript photographs and archived documents to refute a claim found in Stephen C. Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax, namely that Smith invented a pseudomymous twentieth-centuty individual named ‘M. Madiotes’ as an elaborate and deliberate clue that he himself had forged the letter of Clement.

Another Judas Apocryphon?

April 20, 2008 by Tony

While researching Syriac manuscripts for the Infancy Gospel of Thomas I came across a reference in a manuscript catalogue (W. Wright and S. A. Cook, A Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, 2 vol. Cambridge: University Press, 1901) to a text called “History of the silver which Judas received from the Jews as the price of our Lord Jesus Christ.” I have never heard of this text before and thought I’d ask here if anyone knows anything about it.

The manuscript is Cambridge Add. 2881. It is dated 1484 and comes from Damascus. It is written in Garshuni (i.e., Arabic in Syriac letters) with some portions in Arabic, but not the Judas text. The Judas text runs from f. 136b-138b. Also included here are several other apocryphal texts: Acts of Thomas (f. 53b), The Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ to his Disciples on the Mount of Olives (f. 103b), the Abgar Correspondence (f. 158b), The Relation of Pontius Pilate regarding the dealings of the Jews with our Lord, written in the year 18 of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius (f. 160a), and History of the Decease of the Virgin Mary (f. 223a).

Bruce Chilton Reconsiders Pagels’ Gnostic Gospels

April 3, 2008 by Tony

Bruce Chilton, a prominent Historical Jesus scholar, has contributed a piece on Elaine Pagels' groundbreaking book The Gnostic Gospels for the New York Sun (HERE). Thanks to Jim Davila at Paleojudaica for pointing this out.

Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism V: Blade Runner

March 27, 2008 by Tony

For our penultimate class in Gnosticism we took a bit of a break and watched Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2008). For those in-the-know, Blade Runner is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick had an avid interest in Gnosticism and, though the film takes some liberties with his book, it is still suffused with Gnostic imagery and themes. Blade Runner was originally released in 1982 . Unfortunately, the film flopped but it became a cult classic and led to several further incarnations, including a Director’s Cut in 1992 and now the “Final Cut.” For more information on the film’s history, check out its WIKIPEDIA page.

After the film, we had a short discussion of the Gnostic themes and imagery we were able to observe. Several excellent ideas arose, including the identification of Replicant Roy Batty as a saviour figure (the nail in the palm and the ascending dove were tip-offs), Tyrell as Demiurge, the post-apocalyptic city as the dark earthly realm of matter, Rachael as the archetypal Gnostic seeking salvation, etc. Another observation made was that there are no children in the film. This led me to think further of my own take on it; so I thought I’d post that here to stimulate some discussion outside of the classroom. Note, however, that I have not consulted any commentaries on the film, so my comments risk being unintentionally similar to others and/or pitifully naïve.

As mentioned, the post-apocalyptic city represents …

The Apocryphal Jesus on Film

March 16, 2008 by Tony

I have been trying to catch up on some news items I’ve been sitting on for a while. I’ll begin with some information on three apocrypha-related films.

The first is “The Messiah,” an Iranian movie that looks at the life of Jesus from an Islamic perspective. One of the sources used in the film, besides the Qur’an and other Muslim traditions, is the Gospel of Barnabas, a fourteenth-century Muslim anti-gospel hailing from Italy. Of interest in this text is the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. Like several early Gnostic Christian texts (including the Apocalypse of Peter, Second Treatise of the Great Seth, and, according to Irenaeus, Basilides), Barnabas states that someone else was crucified in Jesus’ place. The full text can be read HERE, but here is an excerpt of the relevant section (ch. 216):

1. Judas entered impetuously before all into the chamber whence Jesus had been taken up. And the disciples were sleeping. Whereupon the wonderful God acted wonderfully, insomuch that Judas was so changed in speech and in face to be like Jesus that we believed him to be Jesus. And he, having awakened us, was seeking where the Master was. Whereupon we marvelled, and answered: 'You, Lord, are our master; have you now forgotten us?' And he, smiling, said: 'Now are you foolish, that know not me to be Judas Iscariot!'

2. And as he was saying this the soldiery entered, and laid their hands upon Judas, because he was in every way …

The Christ Files

March 10, 2008 by Tony

“The Christ Files,” a four-part documentary on the Historical Jesus to air in the Australia beginning March 21, begins with an episode titled “Gnostics and Romans.” A 2-disc DVD will be released on the same day. The documentary is based on the book by the same name by Dr. John Dickson, Director of the Centre for Public Christianity and Honorary Associate of the Department of Ancient History, Macquarie University, Australia. As he criss-crosses the globe, Dickson interviews such noted scholars as Tom Wright, Richard Bauckham, and James Charlesworth. Visit the official site HERE, and see a short clip on the Gospel of Philip.

The Contributions of the Christian Apocrypha to the Study of the Historical Jesus

March 6, 2008 by Tony

As mentioned in my previous post, the Wedgewood Baptist Church have sent me some questions to answer regarding the Christian Apocrypha. Here is another one (and I'd be interested to see what other scholars think of the question):

Could you name two or three contributions Christian Apocrypha (CA) have made to the historical study of Jesus?

I assume that should read the “study of the historical Jesus.” If so, only a few CA texts have been used in the effort to find authentic Jesus traditions outside the canonical gospels. These are Gospel of Thomas, the Egerton Gospel, and the Gospel of Peter. The agrapha (i.e., isolated sayings, which can include the citations from the lost Jewish-Christian gospels) are also a good source, though very few of them have been considered early (mind you, that is because the investigators have ruled out some of them as authentic only because they are so different from canonical sayings; and that is a spurious argument). Of the three gospels, GT has made the greatest contribution; even conservative scholars have been forced to admit that some of its unique sayings may be authentic, though they often state that these sayings do not change the image we have of Jesus from the canonical gospels. The CA have made a contribution also in widening the available pool of evidence for the historical Jesus; once one makes the ideological leap to consider that these might have authentic Jesus traditions, then our investigations are taken to …

Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism IV: The Gospel of Thomas

March 6, 2008 by Tony

This week's Gnosticism lecture focused on the so-called School of Thomas. Our discussion looked at evidence for dating the text (whether early or late) and the implications this has for its study. As a way to present some of this discussion, I thought I would include here a condensation of my own thoughts on the Gospel of Thomas that I prepared for another forum. The Wedgewood Baptish Church in Charlotte, North Carolina contacted me several months ago asking if I would respond to questions about the Christian Apocrypha put forward by members of their congregation. I just obtained these questions (thirteen in total), and one of them deals specifically with the Gospel of Thomas. Here is the question and my response:

Do you agree with Crossan that the Gospel of Thomas comes from the first century and is possibly contemporaneous with “Q”? If not, why?

I am open to the possibility that apocryphal gospels could be early texts, or at least could contain early traditions. I do not dismiss the possibility a priori as some scholars do. But we need to look at the evidence:

1. What do we mean by the “Gospel of Thomas”? The only complete version of the text we have is a fourth-century Coptic manuscript. Our other evidence comes in three Greek fragments of the late second and third century. The Greek evidence is quite different from the Coptic; obviously it has gone through some development in the intervening years (and even the Greek fragments may …

Panel on Secret Mark

March 3, 2008 by Tony

Chris Zeichmann over at Thoughts on Antiquity (HERE) has posted a summary of a panel discussion of Secret Mark that took place at Claremont Graduate School last week (February 28). Among the panelists were Marvin Meyer, John Dart, Birger Pearson, and Dennis MacDonald.

New Developments in the Syriac Tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas II

March 6, 2008 by Tony

Several months ago I posted an item here on the start of my investigation into the Syriac tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (available HERE). Since then I have made significant progress in obtaining manuscripts and have begun collating them against previously published editions. Inspired by Roger Pearse’s posts on Thoughts on Antiquity (the latest is available HERE) relating to his work on the ~~Onomasticon~~ by Eusebius (edit: the text he is studying is actually Quaestiones ad Stephanum et Marinum or “Gospel problems and solutions”), I thought I would offer this progress report on the project.

I began the project, as many do, with lists of unpublished manuscripts. These were provided long ago by Anton Baumstark (Geschichte der syrischen Literatur mit Ausschluss der christlich-palästinensischen Texte. Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Webers Verlag, 1922, p. 69 n. 12 and 99 n. 4) and more recently by S. C. Mimouni (“Les Vies de la Vierge; État de la question,” Apocrypha 5 [1994]: 239-243). The two lists were subsequently reproduced (and thus came to my attention) by Cornelia Horn in a paper she delivered at the Ottawa Apocrypha Conference in 2006 (“From Model Virgin to Maternal Intercessor: Mary, Children, and Family Problems in Late Antique Infancy Gospel Traditions”). Such lists are provisional; they are based on the bare information provided in catalogues, and some items come from word-of-mouth reports by colleagues. So, it is to be expected that the lists will contain some errors, which can …

Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism III: Valentinianism

February 28, 2008 by Tony

Despite my interest in Gnosticism and all things apocryphal, I must confess that I find reading one Gnostic cosmogogical myth after another rather tedious. I have speculated before that perhaps other young religious systems went through a similar process of crafting such myths before an official one (or two) became standard. For Christian and non-Christian Gnosticism we get to see mythmaking in process—in all its joys and pains.

So, I struggled a little this week to find something in our discussion of Valentinianism that would excite me, and therefore excite the class. We ambled through the lecture material—an overview of sources, a tour of Ptolemy’s myth, a catalogue of sacraments, and a peak here-and-there into some of the texts (including the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip, and the extant fragments of Valentinus’ works). Then we were left with an hour to do…something.

I decided to try our hand at Valentinian exegesis. I selected three pericopae from the gospels to examine: the Parable of the Sower, the Parable of the Unjust Judge, and the Woman with a Hemorrhage. The selection was somewhat random; I figured that we’d get more out of the endeavour if they were not obvious (the Johannine Prologue, for example, invites Gnostic exegesis and would be too easy). So the class was broken into groups and asked to do an allegorical reading of the pericopae—put more specifically, they were to read Valentinian cosmology and anthropology into (or is that out of?) the texts.

The …

Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism II: The Gospel of Judas

February 19, 2008 by Tony

The first assignment due in my current Gnosticism course is a translation comparison. The goal of the assignment is for students to see how much work is involved in putting together an edition of a text and how the editor’s decisions can greatly affect how one reads or understand the text. This is particularly so with fragmentary texts. In previous years I have used the translations of the Apocalypse of Adam in Layton’s Gnostic Scriptures and Robinson’s Nag Hammadi Library.

This year I opted for the Gospel of Judas by Marvin Meyer (The Nag Hammadi Scriptures) and April DeConick (The Thirteenth Apostle). I chose this text for three reasons: it is well-known to (though not well-read by) the wider public, the assignment would force the students to read the gospel very carefully and thus lead (hopefully) to a rewarding discussion of the text, and the interpretation of the text is highly contentious.

Meyer and DeConick have been in conflict over their particular interpretations of the text; their positions are available for all to read in an article on Meyer’s site (see HERE) and a series of responses on DeConick’s blog (see HERE). But I hoped the students would not see this exchange before writing the paper; it is preferred that they find the major contentious passages themselves and thereby avoid trying to understand why each scholar arrived at his/her position but focus purely on the general issue of the choices involved in the …

Manuscripts from the Deir al-Surian Monastery

February 18, 2008 by Tony

A story is making the rounds of the blogging world of a manuscript discovery from the Deir al-Surian monastery in Egypt. The story (found HERE) focuses on the recovery of a missing page of a codex housed at the British Library. The missing page, a list of Christian martyrs from Edessa in 411, was recently found beneath a floor in the monastery. But what is most interesting about the story (to me, at least) is the following:

The fragments were among hundreds discovered beneath a floor in the Deir al-Surian, which is itself a treasure trove of ancient books. Dr Brock and his colleague, Dr Lucas Van Rompay of Duke University in North Carolina, are now working on the first catalogue of the many manuscripts that are more than 1,000 years old.

Let’s hope some apocryphal texts will be found among the manuscripts.

Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism I: The Syllabus

February 12, 2008 by Tony

In 2007 I used the Apocryphicity blog as a host for some musings on the weekly classes of my course on the New Testament Apocrypha. I am now teaching the counterpart to that course: Gnosticism. Though a little late into the semester now, there’s no reason to let that prevent me from posting some thoughts on the course to date. We’ll begin with a discussion of the course syllabus (available HERE).

1. Course Texts. This is the third incarnation of the Gnosticism course. The first two versions were constructed around Kurt Rudolph’s Gnosis. I found Rudolph’s book useful but occasionally had to teach against it as some of his assertions about the origins of Gnosticism and of Mandaeism are now out-of-date. So I thought I’d try out Birger Pearson’s new book, Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature. So far I am not very happy with it. While I like how he divides his discussion into the various groups (Sethianism, Valentinianism, etc.), much of what Pearson does is summarize the material. He also makes numerous assertions about the origins of the texts without offering support (leaving the reader somewhat bewildered at how he arrives at the dates he provides). I will play out the year with the book but I do not think I will use it again. This is the first year also for Meyer et al’s new Nag Hammadi Library volume. In previous years I used Bentley Layton’s Gnostic Scriptures, which, alas is currently out-of-print. But …

Christian Apocrypha Session SBL 2008

November 13, 2017 by Tony

The deadline is fast approaching for proposals for the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. The meeting takes place in Boston, November 21-25. Anyone interested in submitting a proposal to the Christian Apocrypha Section (really, the only section that truly matters) can find details at THIS LINK. Proposals must be in by March 1. I will be there once again this year, this time presenting on my ongoing work on the Syriac Jacobite tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.