Scott G. Brown,
Mark’s Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith’s Controversial Discovery.
Studies in Christianity and Judaism 15 (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier
University Press, 2005).
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
Scott
G. Brown writes a comprehensive, imaginative, and engaging book. He
endeavors to rescue the Secret Gospel of Mark (which he wants to
rechristen the Longer Gospel of Mark) from the ignominy of being the
fraudulent creation of the late Morton Smith. Then, on the hypothesis
that the Longer Mark text represents a genuine ancient document, he
argues for genuine Markan authorship, proposing that the evangelist in
later years undertook to expand his original text for the benefit of
more advanced students of the faith. I find myself unconvinced on either
count. First, I judge that Stephen C. Carlson (The Gospel Hoax:
Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark) has ably refuted Brown’s
attempt to get Smith off the hook and has pressed the case further,
putting Smith’s creation of the apocryphon beyond reasonable doubt.
Second, I find Brown’s attempt to knit the Secret, er, Longer Markan
text into Plain Old Mark thematically and stylistically a chain of weak
links, in spite (or maybe even because) of its ingenuity.
Again, I refer the reader
to Carlson to nail Smith to the cross of forgery. As to that issue, I
must make but a few comments. It is intriguing to try to trace out
Brown’s apologetical strategy. He does not like Charles E. Murgia’s
observation that the Clementine fragment accompanying the Markan text
seems to abound with defensive buffers hinting broadly at the novelty of
the new gospel: Clement says it is a secret text, reserved only for the
elite, guarded carefully in the church at Alexandria, and available to
the heretic Carpocrates only because he deceived or bribed one of the
document’s guardians. Murgia saw in these assertions a set of
anticipatory excuses for the fact that no one till Morton Smith had seen
or heard of such a text. How could they, since it was Top Secret even in
the ancient world? But Murgia saw, rightly, I believe, that these
convenient features of Longer Mark are equivalent to the notice at the
end of Mark that the holy women told no one about the empty tomb and
angelophany, a transparent bit of imposture intended to answer the
carping, “Why didn’t we ever hear about this before now?” Well, Brown
chips away at the secrecy claims every way he can think of, arguing that
the word mystikon really denotes, in this case, the mystical or
symbolic gospel, and that Morton Smith was wrong in translating it
“secret.” Of course, it now should be clear that Smith thought of his
invention as “the Secret Gospel” and simply sought the closest Greek
word he could find. The case is exactly parallel to that of the
fictional Necronomicon, the creation of H.P. Lovecraft. He liked
the sound of the title, which came to him in a dream, and he doped out
its translation as “image of the laws of the dead.” But he didn’t know
his Greek well enough. Necronomicon is valid Greek, all right,
like Manilius’ star book, the Astronomicon, but it really should
mean, simply, “Concerning the Dead.” An even better parallel would be
that of Robert E. Howard’s analogous creation, Nameless Cults,
ostensibly a blackletter tome in German script. He sought a viable
German “original,” and fellow writer E. Hoffmann Price suggested
Unenbarren Kulten, while another colleague, August Derleth,
suggested Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Even though the latter
implies something more like “unpronounceable cults,” Howard liked it
better. With Smith, too, the “translated” title probably came first, the
“original” second.
Brown points out that there
were no church buildings in second-century Alexandria, so for the Longer
Gospel to be carefully guarded could not have meant it was under lock
and key someplace. He denies that Smith’s Clement means that the
document conveyed genuine esotericism, but only that it was amenable to
allegorical interpretation. For all that, Brown admits it was (one might
suggest) like the Jewish Merkabah mysticism, open only to the learned
and devout who were over 40. But this hardly makes it a public text open
to the scrutiny of the psuchikoi as he seems to want.
Brown says that Smith was
mistaken again in inferring the classified character of Longer Mark from
his charging his correspondent Theodore to deny even under oath that
Mark had written a secret gospel. Brown takes Clement’s words to denote
only a denial of Markan authorship of Carpocratian interpolations, but
that cannot be, since Clement justifies his recommended course of action
as a white lie: “Not all true things are to be said to all men.”
Brown cannot forgive A.H.
Criddle for his argument that the Clementine text sounds too Clementine,
in the manner of a pastiche or parody. Brown tries to argue that
Criddle’s sampling was not representative, but the argument sounds
sophistical to me. Likewise Brown’s attempt to defend the Markan text
from the charge of sounding too Markan, implying it is a mere textual
cento of Markan phrases (which is how it struck me as an untutored
teenager in 1973—talk about “reader response”). He points to Mark 4:1-2
as an example of an undisputedly Markan text which has an even higher
concentration of Markan signature features and in a much shorter
compass. But statistics don’t tell the tale here: who can look at the
Secret/Longer Mark text and find it comparable in any way to Mark 4:1-2?
As Brown quips in a different context, “As an apologetic tale, it can
prove little else” (p. 139).
As one might expect in a
case like this, Brown mounts a frontal assault on what Samuel Sandmel
called “parallelomania,” the hasty inference that two texts with some
mutual parallels must also be parallel at points no longer discernable,
and thus one text depends upon the other. It is a kind of false analogy
fallacy, as well as a hasty generalization, that Sandmel warned of. But
parallelomania makes no sense as a charge here. “People who educe vague
parallels as evidence that the apocryphal gospels are dependant upon the
canonical gospels would do well to remember that the same procedure has
been used to argue that the Gospel of Mark is a refashioning of myths
derived from the Odyssey and the Iliad and that the Gospel
of John is the product of a Near Eastern form of Buddhism. The listing
of trivial, inexact parallels is the sine qua non of improbable theories
of literary dependence” (p. 94). Who said anything about trivial or
inexact parallels? Virtually every phrase of the Secret Gospel pericope
about quasi-Lazarus (may we call him Quazarus?) can be pinned down like
a specimen insect onto some page of a gospel harmony.
One is especially surprised
to hear Brown, who rightly suspects canon apologetics to lie beneath
scholarly indifference toward “heretical” texts, to snickeringly dismiss
theories of Homeric or Buddhist influence on the gospels. Both sources
were readily available in the gospel-composing milieu. I cannot guess
what is supposed to make such theories automatically absurd, unless it
is their uncomfortable orthodoxy.
Brown rightly takes this
reviewer to the woodshed for my careless imprecision in confusing
characters in the evangelical spy-novel The Mystery of Mar Saba,
which I (lamentably ignorant that Philip Jenkins had already pointed out
the connection) once suggested inspired Smith’s hoax. But this
sloppiness on my part in no way affects my (i.e., Jenkins’s) main
contention. And it is gratuitous necromancy that assures Brown that
Smith would certainly never have wasted his time reading a trashy novel
like The Mystery of Mar Saba. On the contrary, I suggest that
such a novel is exactly the sort of leisure fiction to appeal to
scholars like Smith.
Essentially, Brown’s
argument much resembles Latter-day Saint apologetics on behalf of the
Book of Mormon. The text is obviously a modern pastiche of readily
identifiable scriptural snippets, like a ransom note in a movie,
composed of disparate sentence fragments cut from magazine pages and
pasted together. Brown’s arguments are misdirection strategies.
Specifically, his attempts to drive a wedge between Smith’s own
scholarly “surmises” on the Secret Gospel and what the Greek text
actually says (or can be made to say) recalls the disparity between the
Book of Mormon, with its crude Patripassianism, and the baroque,
polytheistic theology that Joseph Smith and others later hung on it like
ornaments on the branches of a Christmas tree. Morton Smith never made
much of the gospel he had “discovered.” He avoided basing his serious
scholarly hypotheses upon it, leaving other scholars to do with it as
they pleased. But this doesn’t mean he didn’t write the text. No, his
point was to toss an apple of discord onto the scholarly seminar table.
The more seriously scholars took it, the more fun Smith had. He could
hardly overrule them on the meaning of the text without betraying his
authorship of it. It was a Candid Camera stunt, and it would have ruined
it for him to intervene. He knew better than to base any serious work
upon it, so he didn’t. That would have vitiated his serious work (like
Jesus the Magician). What he wanted was to dupe other scholars
into taking his hoax seriously and basing their work on it. I
should say that Brown has fallen for it, and the very sophistication of
his analysis is precisely the sort of sophistry Smith wanted to tempt
forth and laugh at.
And here is a further piece
of irony occasioned by Brown’s sneering dismissal of “unclean” theories
of Buddhist and Homeric influence on the gospels: such theories do
certainly demonstrate how one may prove anything with enough
ingenuity. In saying this, I do not mean to agree with Brown that these
theories are absurd. They are not. Nor is his (or it wouldn’t have been,
before Carlson wrote). But that’s just the trouble: an embarrassment of
riches. The clever exegetical dancing on display in all such theories
should mitigate the seriousness with which any of their proponents urge
us to take them.
Putting, as he supposes,
behind him the question of the genuine antiquity of the text, Brown goes
on to demonstrate the integrity of the text of Longer Mark with that of
Plain Old Mark. He argues that the Quazarus resurrection pericope plus
the later note that Jesus subsequently snubbed the lad’s mother and her
friends, including Salome, forms one of Mark’s famous “sandwiches” or
intercalations with the comical episode of the Sons of Dunder, James and
John, putting dibs on the seats of honor at Jesus’ coronation feast.
Smith/Clement placed the two Secret Gospel passages on the left and
right hands of Mark 10:35-45, but do they and the James-John pericope
mutually interpret one another as the other famous half-dozen sandwich
constructions do? Brown contends that they do, and that they thus
qualify as the seventh set. But against this conclusion, four serious
objections occur to me.
First, the second section
of Secret Mark merely refers to the first, identifying one of the Ya-ya
Sisterhood with Quazarus’ mother. There is no other apparent connection
I can see. It does not form a sequel much less a conclusion to the
Quazarus scene. It is not a second piece of bread in a sandwich, like
the second half of the story of Jairus’ daughter.
Second, despite Brown’s
contention that ancient critics/scribes would likely never have
recognized the sandwiching technique (and thus would never have thought
to imitate it), one must point out that Matthew certainly recognized it,
since he took the trouble to undo it! For him the fig tree tantrum and
the temple cleansing are two separate events. The visit of Jesus’
relatives has no longer anything to do with the Beelzebul controversy.
Third, Brown admits that
the original text makes plenty of sense as Mark first wrote it: with the
James and John episode standing on its own. So how integrally can it
belong to its present context in Longer Mark? If it makes sense as a
secondary interpolation, it can’t be invoked as if some kind of missing
piece of the puzzle. What puzzle?
Fourth, the intercalated
lesson Brown finds in Longer Mark depends upon a contrast between
grandiose chest-thumpers James and John, who utterly fail to grasp the
true nature of discipleship, and the resurrected Quazarus, who reappears
in the same skimpy garb, apparently a symbolic baptism costume, in the
Garden of Gethsemane. But since he flees ignominiously from that scene
as swiftly as the most lily-lived of the twelve, there is not much
contrast that I can see. So what if he also appears in the empty
tomb at the end? That’s not supposed to be part of the sandwich. Unless
it’s one of those long party sandwiches. Plus, how can we be sure that
young Quazarus is even supposed to be the same as the Gethsemane
streaker (as Brown calls him—bravo!), or that either of them is supposed
to be the angel incognito at the tomb? Brown admits that with the Plain
Old version of Mark, there is not sufficient reason to identify the
streaker with the man in the tomb, and that it is only the Longer text
that clinches it. How? That’s what I’d like to know.
But the plane crashes with
a climactic anticlimax: what Brown offers us as the supposedly advanced,
deeper truth of the elite gospel turns out to be the same as the theme
constantly reiterated throughout Plain Old Mark: the way of the Kingdom
of God and sharing its glory is the way of self-abnegation, martyrdom if
need be, here and now. This is deeper teaching? This was kept from Joe
Q. Catechumen? How can any reader of Plain Old Mark have avoided it?
“What LGM 1 and 2 do is deepen a reader’s appreciation of this gospel’s
Christology and discipleship theology” (p. 216). What vapid euphemism!
This hardly amounts to a “heightened esotericism” (ibid.). The mountain
labored to bring forth a mouse. Why all this trouble for so meager a
result? I suspect that it is part of Brown’s larger apologetical agenda:
if the “Longer” gospel were really a secret gospel, if it had real
secrets, a genuine Gnostic, esoteric dimension, then it would lend
itself more readily to the theory that Smith concocted it as an
embarrassment to orthodox Christianity. And that Brown will not have.
But one fears that, in the wake of Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax,
Brown’s efforts have been rendered as Quixotic as those of
“Sindonologists” after the Carbon 14 dating of the Turin Shroud.