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Review of Smith by Paul J. Achtemeier
Originally appeared as book review in Journal of Biblical Literature 93 (1974): 625-628.
This is copyrighted material that cannot be included elsewhere without permission.
Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, by Morton Smith.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1973. Pp. xi + 454. $30.
The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel
According to Mark, by Morton Smith. New York/London: Harper & Row, 1973.
Pp. xi+148. $5.95.
These two books, the former scholarly, the latter popular, deal with a manuscript, found by Professor Morton Smith (Columbia University in New York City) in 1958 in the Monastery of Mar Saba, which identifies itself as a letter from Clement of Alexandria to an otherwise unknown Theodore. Written in an 18th-century hand in the back of a 17th-century printed book, the fragmentary letter discusses a hitherto unknown "secret" version of the Gospel of Mark which has fallen into the hands of Carpocrates and quoted two short passages from it. It is to the development of the consequences of this letter that the two books are dedicated. The latter, a chatty account of the discovery, the process of collecting material, and the development of the argument, is based on the research reported in the former volume and shares the strengths and weaknesses of that research. This review will be limited to the more scholarly volume.
In the first chapter, Professor Smith describes the fragment and the process
by which he established its date of copying. In the second chapter, he submits
the fragment itself to extensive analyses of style and content and concludes
that it did indeed originate with Clement of Alexandria. In the third chapter,
he examines the fragments from the secret version of Mark, and, after considering
questions of style, content, and structural relations to the four canonical
gospels, Smith concludes that they derive from an Aramaic source common to Mark
and John and that they belonged to an earlier version of Mark than the one now
contained in the canon. In a fourth chapter, Smith investigates the extent to
which the content of the fragments fits the time from which it purports to come,
and in a final chapter he speculates on the history of the Clementine letter
and its contents from its origin until its inclusion in the 17th-century book.
The final third of the volume is taken up with a variety of appendixes and indexes.
Smith's erudition is evident throughout the volume, and he scrupulously acknowledges
the comments of the large number of scholars from all over the world to whom
he submitted, for their comments and reactions, various materials included within
the book. The fact that many comments disagree with his own views and present
alternative explanations has not dissuaded Smith from including them.
The content of this "letter of Clement" is not startling, and to
those familiar with non-canonical materials about Jesus neither are the fragments
from an unknown version of Mark. The conclusions reached by Smith on the basis
of this letter, however, are indeed, as he claims, revolutionary for the way
Christian origins are understood. This "longer text" of Mark, as he
calls it (hereafter cited as LT), reveals to Smith that Jesus practiced an initiatory
rite of magical dimensions, a conclusion that then allows him to unlock the
relationship of Jesus and Paul (both had ecstatic baptism-initiation rites which
they practiced on their followers), the relation of Gnostics to later primitive
Christianity (the former preserved more primitive practices), the composition
of the gospels (an Aramaic Vorlage for Mark and John), the strange Johannine
rhetoric (the mystical ascent of Jesus into the "kingdom of heaven"
is reflected in some Johannine accounts), the widespread problem with libertine
Christianity (it followed Jesus' baptismal and other practices), the persecution
of early Christians (for their magical practices), and the exegetical solution
to a number of NT passages that have long been a source of disagreement among
scholars. So sweeping a proposal needs prolonged and derailed investigation,
something the scope of the present review will not permit. Let us focus our
attention on a key area where some important problems arise.
That key area concerns not so much what Smith's conclusions are as it does
how he has reached them. Characteristically, his arguments are awash in speculation.
As an example, we may consider his account of Jesus' act of baptizing, itself
nowhere mentioned in the Synoptics and denied in John (4:2). On the assumption,
itself based on speculative emendation of the LT (edidasken to edoken,
III, 9), that the secret gospel refers to Jesus' "baptismal ritual"
(again not mentioned in LT), Smith is able to arrive "at a definition of
'the mystery of the kingdom of God': It was a baptism administered by Jesus
to chosen disciples, singly, and by night. In this baptism the disciple was
united with Jesus. The union may have been physical . . ." (p. 251). This
result is reached despite the fact that the LT does not mention any baptism,
let alone any ritual connected with it, let alone any theological justification
for such an imagined ritual. Having reached this "conclusion," Smith
then uses it to supplement and correct the (in his view) distorted NT presentation
of early Christianity, in order to arrive at an historically more accurate picture.
Example: his treatment of the scene in Gethsemane. Here, we learn that "it
was while performing such a baptism that Jesus was arrested" (p. 237, built
on Mark 14:51-52 and the necessary "correctives"). To replace this
unmentionable and secret fact, Jesus' agony in the garden was invented and substituted
(p. 243). That there is no place in the present text of Mark for such a secret
ceremony gives Smith no pause at all. His creative imagination is equal to the
task. Of course, such solutions can be created, but with such creativity all
things are for the scholar, as for God, possible.
Along with such speculations, there is an arbitrariness in dealing with texts.
Smith disbelieves John 10:41 (p. 205) and believes Mark 1:5; Matt. 3:5 // Luke
3:3 (p. 206), and displays a credulity bordering on gullibility with reference
to "characteristics of (John) the Baptist's rite" (p. 207)—in no case
are reasons given. The suspicion will not down that there is an a priori principle
of selective credulity at work in relation to biblican texts. Smith knows, for
example, that Acts is a "partizan [sic] document often shown to be incomplete"
(p. 251), yet accepts Acts 6, 21 as clearly historical when he wants to show
why Jesus' followers were persecuted: because of their libertinism (pp. 255-58;
Smith identifies, on the basis of references in Clement, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus,
Nicolaus of Acts 6:5 with the Nicolaitans of Rev 2:6, 15, and both with libertinism,
p. 262).
Rather apparently, such selectivity is achieved at the expense of any careful
use of modern methods of research in dealing with gospel texts. Redaction-critical
work is absent from Smith's deliberations. Example: his discussion of Jesus'
attitude to the law (pp. 248-51). With no distinction between traditional and
redactional material, he heaps together passages indiscriminately from all three
synoptic gospels and then refers to "this large and clear body of evidence"
(p. 249). The absence of such distinctions gives to many of his conclusions
a curiously facile, almost unreal, quality, and he regularly draws historical
conclusions from traditional and redactional material. Nor is there any careful
form-critical work done on the evidence Smith draws into his discussion (he
prefers Dodd's thesis on the originality of the Marcan outline to form-critical
conclusions about its lack of historical basis—cf. p. 94). He also omits any
mention of H.-W. Kuhn's important form-critical insights into Mark 10:13-45
(Ältere Sammlungen im Markus-evangelium [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1971], ad loc.; cf. JBL 93 [1974] 306-8), thus
seriously compromising the results he achieves in his own analysis of this key
passage for his argument.
Rather, Smith's basic methodological assumption seems to be that the NT writings
are composed of historical fact with a theological overlay. Strip off the latter
and you have as residue the former. Example: his treatment of Jesus' baptism.
That baptism was characterized, he says, by the fact that it gave to the recipient
"a spirit" (p. 220). This the Christian theological overlay made into
the "holy" Spirit. Stripping such apologetic theologizing away, Smith
reaches his historical conclusion: the recipient received an ecstatic "spirit"
that led to the illusion of entering (the kingdom of) heaven. Such a methodological
assumption allows Smith, as it allowed those who used the method in the 19th
century, to reconstruct Jesus' emotional state and psychological processes;
the orgistheis in LT II, 25 "is easily explicable: Jesus could have
been angered either by the use of his secret title or by the disciples' rebuke
of the suppliant (cf. Mk 10:13f)" (p. 104). It also allows the recovery
of remarkable historical detail. On LT III, 6-7, Smith notes: "The story
suggests a large house, perhaps a villa. The young man was rich. Jesus and his
followers may have been given a wing for themselves" (p. 115). All that
despite his disclaimer that "it would be naïve to ask whether or not
the events reported in the longer text 'really happened'" (p. 196). That
disclaimer is, throughout the book, honored in the breach.
The trouble with such speculation as method is the fact that it does not always
yield consistent results. Early Christianity, we are told, particularly the
libertine parties, derived from Jesus himself (p. 254; for that reason, the
Carpocratians are more reliable witnesses, even when their views must be speculatively
reconstructed, to "true" early Christianity than is the NT, p. 276).
Paul also got his views directly from Jesus, a position Smith accepts from J.
G. Machen's The Origin of Paul's Religion, "perhaps the most brilliant
presentation of the problem" (p. 248). Well and good. What then are we
to make of it when we are assured later on that "what early Christianity
was like in areas from which no material has been preserved can be inferred
from the things Paul opposed in his letters" (italics mine, p. 264)?
How such a statement is to be reconciled with the venerable Machen's views is
hard to fathom.
There are yet other problems with the book. For example, Smith compares the
order of Mark 6:32-16:8, including the LT, with John 6-20 and finds "continued
parallelisms of the geographic framework" and a "coincidence of order
of so many events" that they can "hardly be accidental" (p. 161,
cf. pp. 158-60). Then, Smith compares the transfiguration and passion stories
he finds in Mark 8:29-9:2ff.; 10:20-LT; and 14:27-16:5, and finds a recurring
pattern. After all this, he then quietly disclaims the whole endeavor: "On
rereading this section . . . I suspect the parallelism may be due to my invention"
(p. 167)—an eminently sensible judgment. What then is our surprise when later
on (p. 192) we find those very parallels cited as elements in an evidentiary
chain!
In sum, we have in this monograph an admittedly vast amount of erudition, pressed
into the service of a highly speculative "field theory" of Christian
origins. Smith apparently belongs to the "one master stroke" school
of the solution of historical problems; the greater the number of problems a
theory seems to solve, the more likely it is to be correct. Else why would Smith
think his question in defense of his enterprise an important one: "Will
the reader please offer another explanation [sic!] for all these problems?"
(p. 266). Would that historical reality yielded itself so readily to one master
thesis! The manuscript Smith discovered adds a bit to our knowledge of second-century
Christianity, should it prove to be genuine; his speculations on its significance
are, in the end, interesting for their sweep, but unconvincing as historical
explanation.
PAUL J. ACHTEMEIER
Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, VA 23227
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