a reply to:
toms54
Hello there, Toms—-
Sorry about that—I was hurriedly writing the other day from memory in my last post about Morton Smith’s shorthand discovery of a lost-snatched
from Secret Mark; here are a few minor corrections to my overly hasty-post.
The original letter (from which the shorthand transcript had been hastily scribbled-out and pasted to the back an old book of sermons by Ignatius of
Antioch and was re-discovered by accident by Morton Smith in 1958 at the Mar Saba monastery near Qumran in the area of the Dead Sea) was purportedly
penned by Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215 CE) and addressed to some unknown ‘Theodore’, and not by Origen, although Origen did write about the
homosexually-oriented Gnostic Carpocratians himself in some of his own letters.
In 1990, the original pasted shorthand-transcript was (apparently) lost, but we do have some good color photocopies made in 1983, as well was some
black-and-white photocopies made by Morton Smith himself.
The style of the koine Greek of these two fragments matches very very closely the halting baby-Greek of the canonical 2nd Greek (‘According to
Mark’, whoever he was) and show every hallmark of being an authentic part of a longer version of the Gospel which was pared down into its present
form early on in its history.
QUOTE
‘And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming close to them, she prostrated herself before ho
Iesous and says to him, “Son of David, have mercy on me.”
But the disciples staved her off from him. But ho Iesous, now angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great
scream was heard from inside the tomb. And going near ho Iesous rolls away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the
youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him-up on his feet, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him; and he began
begging him that he might be with him.
And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days ho Iesous gave him instructions on how to prepare
himself and during that evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked [body]. And he remained with him the whole night, during
which [time] Jesus taught him the Mystery of the Kingdom of Theos. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.’
UNQUOTE
Unfortunately, the transcript is only a small fragment of a larger pericope (now lost) from Secret Mark; it would be fascinating if the rest of Secret
Mark were discovered (and—Shock & Awe !—actually published for common people to read…)
Admittedly, ‘the young man, looking upon [ho Iesous], began loving him, and begged that he might be with him’ can refer to the 12 men that Moses
surrounded himself ‘in order that they might be with him, one from each tribe’ (see Joshua 3:12) i.e. as royal advisors (i.e. as part of the
King’s privy-council) and not to any overt homosexual liaison, but the fact that the baptismal ceremony refers to men being plunged into ‘living
water’ naked must have raised some eyebrows in the early Markan community and may have been part of the reason why the passage was eventually
excised ‘from the Bible’ (along witchy the phrase, ‘and looking upon [ho Iesous] began loving him’) although, as you correctly mention,
another floating fragment of the (same ?) pericope managed (somehow) to remain part of our canonical Greek gospel of Mark 14:51-52, along with several
other snatchets of weird stories involving ho Iesous in a series of bizarre actions (e.g. literally spitting into a man’s eyes and placing his hands
on him to heal him of blindness, see Mark 8:23).
Either way, the tiny fragment re-quoted in the Morton Smith transcript seems an authentic part of a longer document (it’s very hard to imitate the
bad-baby-Greek of Mark’s Gospel as successfully as this snatchet seems to be able to do so effortlessly), and goes to shew just how much early
Judeo-Christian source material was supressed by later copyist-generations for their own theological agendas…so perhaps we shall never really know
for sure if the all-male priesthood of ‘ho-Iesous’ ever had any homosexual/homoerotic elements. Perhaps we can thank Saul of Tarsus for that, a
man who never met ‘Jesus’ in the flesh (only in dreams and visions, like my cook) and who was responsible for silencing the original Nazorean
teachings of both ‘Jesus’ and his brother, Yakkov bar Yosef ha-Tzaddiq, aka ‘James the Just’ who is (unfairly) given such short shrift in the
NT with a single book that bears his name that barely got voted-into the canon of the NT.
Clear as mud?
edit on 26-5-2018 by Sigismundus because: (no reason given)