Salainen evankelista

Symphony No. 8 of Jean Sibelius

2011-12-13T10:59:00.001+02:00

As documented here, I received on Saturday a telepathic performance of Jean Sibelius' Symphony No. 8, long thought to have been lost forever after the composer was seen burning a mass of papers in his fireplace around 1945. In the video below Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra plays three fragmentary parts of previously unknown music of Sibelius.

In an alternate timeline / mirror universe, the above video is due to known Sibelius scholar Timo Virtanen. He has identified these fragments from Sibelius' archival remains as the most probable candidates for belonging to the lost symphony. The original video in its entirety (including Virtanen's interview in Finnish), courtesy of Helsingin Sanomat, is available for viewing here.

Seek, And Ye Shall Break It: A Personal Rant

2011-12-05T10:03:00.001+02:00

Last July, standing in the middle of the room, I let my gaze fall upon a bookshelf, stuffed quite full of books. I came up with a thought:

I wonder how much do I actually pay for the delight of having an overflowing bookshelf in my home.

Some background information is necessary to describe to proceedings from here. It is no secret that in the past decade I have become more and more interested in finding weaknesses in various systems, in order to break them apart. Loosely described, a system can be found anywhere where there are rules dictating how events are to be connected to each other. I suspect such understanding of 'systems' is simply a computer-literate redressing of the concept of 'language games', as described by late Wittgenstein. Incidentally, the workings of these systems is easiest to demonstrate in computer programs, which -- at their very lowest level of binary code -- are nothing but rules to control electric impulses inside the computer. Infamous as the fact is, computer software as a set of rules or a system is always breakable due to the impossibility for the programmer to keep track of infinity of variables and to anticipate the creative effort of others who may, for various reasons, want to try and work around the set rules. Consider, for instance, one of the iconic 8-bit platformers, Capcom's Mega Man (1987), which rules i.a. that one is not allowed to walk through solid walls. As Joel Yliluoma's animated GIF demonstrates, that one rule can be broken:

How does this happen? Interestingly, the effect is produced by exploiting other rules the programmer has put down regarding the usage of ladders in the context of the game. While normally used rather conventionally to climb up or down, the possibility to do both of these simultaneously (that is, direct the character to move both up and down at the same time with precise timing) results in something different, producing a glitch in the system and bypassing one set rule with the help of another(s). A simple example in itself, such approach can be adapted outside of clearly-defined rules systems, even as far as describing one's religion or society as a 'game', 'played' by a set of 'rules' (social conventions, legal statutes, etc.), which -- as is the nature of all rules -- can be bended or even broken, consequences of such actions withstanding. Arguably, the most intriguing systems are ones in which one is itself a participant. If one cannot really step outside of the system while maintaining a participatory connection to it, trying to decipher the rules and bend them to the breaking point becomes an exercise in risk assessment. In other words, when you are in, you (generally) stay in whether your rule-bending resulted in the desired or the unpredictable.

But back to July. I had made the connection betweens books, space and expenses before, but not really understood it. Quite simply, if I did not have so many books, I would not need the bookshelf (besides, there was another one in the living room), in which case I would not need the space for the bookshelf, in which case I could live with about two square metres less, in which case I would not need to pay money for the non-needed space. What if I converted all those books into e-books? Have we not invented libraries for the specific purpose of storing those ink plots placed on wood pulp glued together? And seriously, when was the last time I printed out a pdf? Somewhere around 2006?

Going through the e-book project with my wife, we began to see other potential developments. What if I virtualized all those retro computing pieces lying in the cupboard -- a task I had actually done half a decade ago when computer emulation began to come together? Which of these movies were we going to watch in the future, given that in our societies of abundance every movie that exists in convenient format (DVD/Blu-ray) could be obtained within 24 hours if desired? How about those dishes we had not needed for some three years; how much did we pay for the space for hoarding those rarely-if-ever-needed cooking accessories? Why did we actually have half-a-dancing-hall in front of the sofa? What did we even do at home, come to think of it?

Not much, spacewise. As we figured out to our mutual surprise, after a hard day's work, unless we were attending an event or had a training session, we'd generally settle down with our own laptops, occasionally watching or playing something together, but nothing that really required any more than a few square metres of space. Most of the superfluous space would be used by our two cats as a racing track, but even they would have preferred a more vertically challenging setup. Some truly fascinating possibilities began to emerge in our minds.

How much is much? How much is enough? In Finland the average amount of living space is somewhere between 35 and 40 square metres per person, but how do we choose to read these statistics? If we happen to be fairly average in this regard, is that good or bad, and where would we like to go from there? And if we tried to work around our socialized understanding of required living space (for happy, worthy-of-a-human-being-existence by First World standards), to what figure would we all things considered arrive?

On paper, we got down to 20 square metres, in total.

Which prompted a search for a more modest apartment, bearing in mind that all the money thus spared could still be invested in living standards by other venues, such as making sure those 20-something square metres were utilized to their full extent. As luck/fate/insert-universal-randomness-here would have it, by the end of July we had found a very good candidate, and by the end of August purchased it. A single room in a 110-year-old mansion with a garden, pictured below. By the end of September we had moved in. Thus ends the story of how I broke yet another system, and lived happily ever after.

History, however, has taught us that no original ideas exist, nor do ideas ever stay fixed over a period of time. Ideas can always be traced to their precedents. It is obvious to me that the necessary precursors prompting my recent move are ideas prominent in degrowth, downshifting and simple/slow living movements. In other words, what really did happen was a jump on a trendy bandwagon, a mere play on the hip factor for the sake of shaking a convention a bit. Or am I being too harsh? On one hand no one can deny that e.g. my ecological footprint would not have gone down drastically which -- in our current rules of language usage -- makes me a near-saint. On the other, no one should suggest that this drop was anything but a by-product of moving to a smaller apartment, and certainly not a big factor behind the original decision. And it still very much fits into First World living standards, probably even better (as in 'more technical gadgets to play with') than before.

Seemingly, this one system remains as solid as ever.

World, Here I Come!

2011-12-01T20:00:00.001+02:00

Put all the necessary paperwork in motion, received the all-important computer access to the university resources.Contemplated on making a four-year plan, but decided to adopt Jorge Cham's instead:

PhD Comics, originally published on May 5, 2008.

I'd post more, but right now I have this pint to take care of.

A Prayer for Grad Students in PhD Comics

2011-07-09T14:01:00.001+03:00

This was too good to pass by:

PhD Comics, originally published on July 8, 2011.

By Kingdom Come /
I should be done... | snork!

A Short Interview with Quentin Quesnell

2011-06-15T13:21:00.002+03:00

In November 2009 I compiled a list of questions I would like to ask from Quentin Quesnell, who had handled the manuscript of Clement's Letter to Theodore in 1983. During the year 2010 I did write to Quesnell, and even received a brief reply from him. Here are the questions (bold) and Quesnell's answers to them (cursive) with some [editorial] remarks:

1) Did you go to Jerusalem just for the manuscript, and can you recall the exact date (or month)?
Just for the manuscript... Date? June, 1983.

2) I assume you went to the Patriarchate library to see the manuscript. Did you have any trouble convincing the staff to let you take a look at it? Can you think of any reason why you succeeded to see the manuscript, while Thomas Talley failed in 1980? [Talley was told that the manuscript was being "repaired".]
Trouble? None. Reason for success? I don't know. Perhaps that I had written ahead. I don't recall encountering any staff except Kallistos. He was always with me.

3) Was it easy for the library staff to locate the manuscript?
Easy for them to locate? I don't know. It took only minutes to return.

4) Was the manuscript kept in a special case or in a restricted area of the library?
Special case? No. No restricted area. It stood on a simple wooden table on a reading stand. I was asked not to touch it. I had about two hours to examine the pages each visit. Everything seemed to be as one would have expected. Kallistos was extremely helpful. The manuscript was covered in plastic, removable.

5) You told me on the phone that the manuscript was already removed from Voss' book. Did you notice anything peculiar about the manuscript?
Peculiar? Apart from the general peculiarity of the whole situation? No.

6) Was there any discussion about testing the manuscript scientifically, e.g. doing an ink test?
Scientific, physical experiments? Yes, repeatedly. But he (they?) was immovable.

7) Can you recall the name of the firm that photographed the manuscript? Did you take the manuscript out of the library yourself? If you took the manuscript yourself to this firm, do you remember who gave you the permission to do that? Did you yourself return the manuscript to the library?
The firm? Garo. Kallistos took it to the firm and handled all arrangements with them. There were some discussions with people at the Ecole, I believe.

8) What happened to the colour photographs? Could they be the same photographs that Charles W. Hedrick and Nikolaos Olympiou published in 2000?
I have them.

P.S. Beyond the answers to your eight questions supplemental material will follow as soon as possible - also the Smith-Quesnell correspondence of 1983 etc., a contemporary (1983) narrative of my six weeks in Jerusalem in the form of letters to Professor Jean Higgins (Smith College Dept of Relig).

--

Sadly, as exciting as some of the answers above may sound, this was the last line of our correspondence. Over the following year, I kept sending Quesnell letters (three of them, one every four months), but never received another in reply. And no, I do not know what to make of this turn of events.

The studio, Photo Garo, exists still (http://photogaro.com/default.asp), but they have not answered to my emails, either.

The above is published in hoping that someone with better geographical positioning would be inclined to go on from here.

On Winning Arguments

2011-05-31T18:33:00.000+03:00

I could have written down some thoughts on Agamemnon Tselikas' Handwriting Analysis Report published last week by Biblical Archaeology Review; the report contains a host of observations ranging from palaeographical ("the hand of the scribe was not moving spontaneously") to tracking down Morton Smith's trips of manuscript hunting, leading Tselikas to conclude that Clement's letter to Theodore "is product of a forgery and all the evidences suggest that the forger can not be other person than Morton Smith or some other person under his orders".

It will take some time to begin and evaluate the contents of Tselikas' report. In the meantime -- apart from perusing what others have thought of it (in chronological order: Roger Viklund, Stephan Huller (three good observations), the_cave) -- here's my today's fix of Wiley Miller (original here)

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller 31/5/2011

Comment Policy on Salainen evankelista

2011-05-23T16:21:00.000+03:00

Blogger (the platform on which this blog rests) may be acting up again, discarding comments, labeling them spam and counting them wrong, and there is not much I can do about it at the moment. For more information, consult e.g. this thread and myriad others on Blogger's support forums.

The general comment policy on this blog is, however, clear: no comment, EXCEPT those made by advertising bots, is ever deleted, censored or otherwise modified, despite its contents. I even encourage anonymous commentators to share their insights and information leaks, and apart from the Google staff (the current owner of Blogger) no one can compromise the privacy of commentators, as spy-apps (which collect user information) are not present on this blog's layout.

That is to say, if anyone thinks their comment has gone missing, contact me via email (found in my User Profile) and we'll let the world know of your thoughts.

Toronto Conference In Review - A Summary

2011-05-20T21:55:00.001+03:00

Here are the various reports on the Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium, part of the York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium Series, held on April 29th in Toronto, followed by some further reflections from my part (as far as the conference reports allow me to join in).

Burke, Tony:
Reflections on the Secret Mark Symposium, part 1
Reflections on the Secret Mark Symposium, part 2
Reflections on the Secret Mark Symposium, part 3

Miceli, Calogero A.:
Secret Mark Symposium: A Student’s View

the_cave:
Secret Mark in Toronto

Veale, Sarah:
Thoughts on the Secret Gospel of Mark Conference

Wettlaufer, Ryan D.:
Report on Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium Pt 1
Report on Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium Pt 2
Report on Secret Gospel of Mark Symposium Pt 3

--

One of the stated objectives for the symposium was that "some progress can be made by bringing these scholars together to present their latest work on the gospel". Previously, there was no consensus amongst the scholars, and -- as I have noted elsewhere -- no engagement nor venue for such a consensus to emerge. Clearly then, a symposium on the subject was most useful to have, even though few people (reportedly) came and changed their minds.

Indeed, it is almost six years since Stephen Carlson's The Gospel Hoax came out. Some of the reports above state that many of his claims have been dropped for good, but this does not seem to be exactly the case. Roger Viklund raised the issue a few days ago, and I tend to agree, that many of Carlson's claims have simply been redecorated and occasionally slightly elaborated, hanging along despite the criticism scholars have presented in recent years. There is a desire to move onwards already (Hedrick's paper comes to mind), but at the same time a tendency to travel in circles: since Jenkins raised the issue of Hunter's novel in 2001 how many iterations of that particular argument have we gone through (Carlson, Watson, Evans etc.)? Furthermore, I cannot but perceive a widening gulf between scholars working directly with the Mar Saba manuscript and scholars writing secondary reports on the debate; in recent secondary literature Carlson's arguments still remain the last word on the subject.

Of the individual papers I cannot comment much since I have not seen most of them, but "The Peter Jeffery Challenge" -- go and check how Morton Smith utilized ancient sources in his works and whether one finds him deceptive -- is an interesting proposal. Particularly since I have already done at least the minimum of one hour of checking them. More details regarding the challenge are found here (in the comments), along with Ryan Wettlaufer's question whether the Jeffery challenge is actually begging the question -- further developments may be taking place. [EDIT: Don't forget to check out Jeffery's comment below!] In itself, however, the question of the usage of ancient sources is a legitimate one. But I propose there are limits to the possible conclusions we can arrive at with such questioning.

On a general level, two things seem to be off. First, scholars are trained to disagree with each other; at least this is a big part of the education I have received from Helsinki University. As coming up with original ideas is much more difficult than pointing out weaknesses in other's arguments, the journey into academia begins with referencing and criticizing. It is also self-evident that without disagreement there is no discussion to be had. For a trained scholar, spotting things to disagree with becomes almost trivial and in the end one usually comes to the conclusion that no death nor living scholar is to be found with whom one does not -- cannot -- but disagree with. Not with every single point, mind you, but with many of them, nonetheless.

The other difficulty with Jeffery challenge is the manner with which scholars normally handle their enormous differences in opinion. They soften their responses. They avoid harsh statements. They try to moderate the differences and reach some sort of a compromise. They do NOT call other interpretations Bullshit! They do NOT claim to have solved the question once and for all. Instead, they use a lot of words such as 'probably', 'plausibly', and 'almost certainly' (the more adventurous ones). They do NOT voice their initial, knee-jerk reaction to a point they disagree with, but open their mouths only when they have applied the necessary manners & decorum on top of it. These features of discussion have a simple psychological foundation: they enable scholars to have a dialogue instead of merely shouting at each other. In effect, they are signs with which we can distinguish between academic and non-academic discourses.

What does all of this mean regarding Morton Smith and his use of ancient sources? For one thing, as a scholar goes through Smith's interpretations she is bound to find lots and lots of details she disagrees with. Some of these are minor and some display a gross misunderstanding (if not a gross and deliberate misrepresentation) of the sources in question; finding such things is the bread-and-butter of studying ancient texts, after all. Yes, Morton Smith had highly idiosyncratic ideas! But so does every other scholar, quick or death, and in itself this fact is no grounds for holding him more deceptive than any of the others. In my personal opinion (i.e. from my particular perspective) there are far more 'deceptive' scholars out there, big names in the field of biblical studies even. I have strong knee-jerk reactions for anyone who does not buy the 'diversity in early Christianity' argument, speaks about 'mainstream early Christianity' when he merely refers to one of its variants ('proto-orthodoxy') and fails to put the words 'heresy' and 'heretics' into scare quotes, to cite the first three examples that came instantly to mind. These reactions, however, are not good starting points for further dialogue with e.g. scholars whose knee-jerk reactions are the absolute opposite of mine.

I strongly feel that not calling Morton Smith, or any other scholar, 'deceptive' -- whatever our innermost thoughts on the question might be -- is almost a requisite for having an academic debate in the first place. I wonder if that means I have failed at the Jeffery Challenge.

Toronto Conference In Review - Part IV

2011-05-10T21:11:00.001+03:00

More and more reviews just keep coming! Calogero A. Miceli, a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University, wrote a guest post for Apocryphicity, followed shortly by Tony Burke's own reflections, in two parts (for the time being; waiting for the third).

UPDATE: Part 3 of Burke's reflections has recently been published.

Toronto Conference In Review - Part III

2011-05-07T22:15:00.000+03:00

Sarah Veale, a journalist and religious studies student at York University, attended the Secret Mark conference on April, 29th. Her thoughts on the proceedings are available at X, Y and Zen.

Toronto Conference In Review - Part II

2011-05-06T17:38:00.003+03:00

Evangelical Textual Criticism has a post with the title Full Report on Secret Gospel Conference (though it is currently empty).

UPDATE: Parts one and two of Ryan D. Wettlaufer's review are now available.

2ND UPDATE: The third and last part of Ryan's report is now available.

Incidentally, Blogger has not yet recovered comments left on this blog since Tuesday, they may or may not become available some time or other.

Toronto Conference In Review - Part I

2011-05-06T12:33:00.000+03:00

Of people who witnessed The York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium Series last Friday, the anonymous author of Synoptic Solutions, simply known as the_cave, has written a detailed, illustrated review of the proceedings for the benefit of those who could not attend. Many thanks to the_cave!

Hunter's Experience in the Monastery of Mar Saba

2011-05-01T19:34:00.000+03:00

The York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium Series seems to have gotten off to a good start with its commencement last Friday, as evidenced by the pictures posted on Facebook (so that's what some of the people look like!), and at least something new has come out of the discussions of the day. Roger Viklund considers a previously unknown fact, revealed by Allan J. Pantuck in his response to Craig A. Evans at the conference, that James H. Hunter, famous for penning the novel The Mystery of Mar Saba featuring a modern attempt at forging taking place in the monastery, had traveled to the place on a donkey in 1931 and met the monks, much the same way Morton Smith would make it in later years. The similarities between the experiences of the two men could be taken as an explanation for the general similarities their writings happen to share.

But were the experiences of Smith and Hunter at Mar Saba that similar? Smith describes his first visit as a 'strange and beautiful experience', explicitly mentioning 'the silence of the desert' and the hours-long liturgy which was 'dazzling the mind and destroying its sense of reality' -- though he confessed that he required a certain amount of 'suspension of disbelief' to achieve the latter state of mind (Secret Gospel, 4-6). How did Hunter perceive the life of the monastery? A clue to his perspective can be gleaned from the pages of his novel, from one of its longest paragraphs.

Hunter begins by narrating the history of the monastery, but goes on to offer an opinion on its current state of affairs (on pages 229-230):

Such was the weird home of Christian men in past ages, now degenerated into a ghastly institution of superstitious formalism lacking soul and heart, of rites performed by monks whose honesty and mode of life left much to be desired.

That's some vicious thing to say. But once started on this track, Hunter gathers steam.

The life of the monastery was as empty as the burnt-out crater of a volcano. What religious life there was had deteriorated into a burden of prescribed, and ungraciously observed, devotions; of dreary ceremonies begun at midnight with weird chants and rites that make the blood of the casual visitor who stays overnight run cold. With nothing to occupy their time, it was easy to see that the monks had degenerated.

When on the roll, let it roll, I guess.

The older monks were crafty and seemed sub-normal; the younger ones for the most part had fled there to escape the penalty of some misdeed committed among the world of men. The effect of the life there was to reduce the anchorites to a state of deplorable baseness and wretchedness. There was nothing in the life of the monastery conducive to the development of either the body, the mind or the spirit.

Think it could not get any worse, would you?

The rankest of moral weeds could only grow in a corrupting atmosphere like this. In such a miasma, man became obsessed with his fellow-man. In their souls was hate instead of love, tumult where peace should have reigned, as they performed mechanical religious duties, and remained ignorant of the blessed Gospel of the Son of God and the transforming power of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The paragraph quoted above stands out even in a novel rife with xenophobia, uncontrollable orientalism and racism. The ending sentence reveals the purpose of this slander: a struggle between Hunter's evangelical Christianity and the Orthodox Christianity of the monks in Mar Saba. Still, one cannot but wonder why Hunter would choose to portray the monks in this manner? If he really journeyed to the monastery, if he really spent a night in there and attended the nocturnal liturgy, as could be concluded from the 'dreary ceremonies.. at midnight' above, and if he really conversed with the monks and heard their stories of transferred libraries and burned manuscripts that could emerge from secret places of hiding after a time, how could he describe them as such? The vitriol is all the more striking considering that Germans, communists, atheists, freethinkers and other bad people receive much, much less vile in the novel.

And if Hunter did journey to the monastery as his travel plans indicate, one has to wonder what events in fact took place amongst those 'sub-normal' monks who 'became obsessed with... fellow-man'.

The Secret Gospel of Mark in 2011 - A Story So Far

2011-04-26T18:56:00.002+03:00

April 29 is closing in fast, the day when The York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium Series presents a day-long conference regarding the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark, with a program featuring the most prominent North American scholars, lots of interesting topics and ample space for ~~pot-shots from the trenches~~ extended discussions between the various parties. If one has not yet behold the glorious programme, one finds it here. There are even rumours of recordings to be made available from the conference, and at the very least a publication of the papers will surely come out sometime in the far future.

In the meantime, Biblical Archaeology Review has almost become the foremost place to catch newsitems regarding the questioned text of Clement's letter, in its page dedicated to the question of authenticity of Clement's Letter to Theodore and Secret Mark. Since Christmas, some new items have been added to the page. The single sentence at the end -- Stephen Carlson declined our invitation to respond -- is one of these. People who have followed the debate since Carlson's treatise turned the tables in 2005 are not surprised. Carlson has withdrawn himself from the debate (presumably) in order to concentrate on other things he finds more interesting, and comments from his part have been extremely scarce for the past few years. It is, naturally, every scholar's prerogative to choose the debates he or she will attend to. York Symposium, likewise, will have to do without him.

Scott Brown's newest published piece, My Thoughts on the Reports by Venetia Anastasopoulou, goes to some length in explaining and elaborating the technical terms Anastasopoulou used in her analysis last year, which caused some confusion amongst the scholars due to the general unfamiliarity with the techniques of QDE (questioned document examination). As Brown notes, Anastasopoulou's verdict is possible only if the manuscript of Clement's letter contains someone’s natural handwriting (p. 10). For Brown, this entails that Morton Smith not only did not write the lines himself, but did not even author them (and put someone else to do the writing): if there are no signs of forgery to be found, the manuscript must be no-one's forgery!

Small wonder that Peter Jeffery, in his new response to Venetia Anastasopoulou's handwriting analysis, effectively discards the whole question of handwriting in favour of the question of what is the text actually saying. For Jeffery, Clement's letter is best understood as a 20th-century composition. The most important bit in Jeffery's response is the ending. For the first time in years, the scholars supporting the forgery hypothesis have to be on the defensive. As Jeffery writes,

If those who think the text was composed in the twentieth century have not explained how the manuscript was created, those who think the text was composed in the second century have not explained what it says.

Yes, the supporters of the forgery hypothesis have difficulties in coming up with a plausible scenario in which a manuscript like Secret Mark could be produced by Morton Smith (now at least one other person must be involved), but those who support its authenticity have likewise difficulties in making sense of the meaning of the text. Both of these statements are probably true. But things have clearly changed. Where once we had crowds cheering for the victory of the forgery hypothesis, we now have people acknowledging openly that both perspectives on the Secret Gospel have their own problems, and that we still are locked in a stalemate (to borrow Hedrick); where to go from here?

The newest exchange in BAR happens between Allan Pantuck and Francis Watson. Pantuck, in his Solving the Mysterion of Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark, chooses two points of interest from Watson's earlier article in JTS (61, 128-170). Did Morton Smith change his mind with his discovery or is the Secret Gospel of Mark saying exactly what Smith was preaching years before its 'discovery'? What to make of the similarities (and differences!) between Smith's story of discovery and Hunter's The Mystery of Mar Saba, a novel depicting a discovery of an unknown Gospel from Mar Saba 18 years before Smith made his?

Pantuck stresses that coincidental similarities do happen, as illustrated by various telling anecdotes including the story of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe, in which a cabin boy named Richard Parker is killed and eaten following a shipwreck by the three other survivors, when years later a cabin boy named Richard Parker was killed and eaten following a shipwreck by the three other survivors of Mignonette; the latter took place in 1884, 46 years after the publication of the novel. Bearing such possibilities in mind, other facts such as

in 1955, the pre-discovery Smith appears to be reading Mark 4:11 as secret teachings for the disciples that placed them under the rulership of God, not as secret rites that freed them from the demands of God’s law (p. 6)

become all the more important. As with handwriting analysis, it is hardly enough to point the occasional similarity. The real magic is to adequately explain the dissimilarities.

Lastly, just a few days ago, Watson's reply to Pantuck appeared on the site. Watson argues that his argument 'does not assert or require a total continuity between Smith’s views pre- and post-discovery, only a high degree of continuity' (p. 3), thus making Pantuck's observations moot. Yet Watson acknowledges, on the other hand, that 'we should not accept all alleged coincidences uncritically' (p. 5). The question then becomes, how high a degree of continuity is enough to make a case? How to find out which of the alleged coincidences are 'true coincidences' and which ones are evidence of one author following another?

One problem with the discussion so far has been the lack of criteria for judging such notions. Whereas biblical scholars have tried to answer the question of literary dependence e.g. holding that it takes 16 (!) words in precise order to establish that one author has used another (McIver & Carroll, JBL 121, 667-687), no one, apart from Andrew Criddle in 1995 (and Brown occasionally), has offered numbers to back their claims up. We recognize instinctively that an argument like the aforementioned survivors of Mignonette were following a model laid down by Poe (they remembered Parker's name from the novel and used it as a basis for deciding whom to kill and eat) is an absurd one. Why do we argue, then, that the common word 'reconcile', and few other similarities, is enough for establishing a definite link between Smith and The Mystery of Mar Saba?

In light of the recent developments it is exciting to see what comes out of the York Seminar.

--
--

In other bits of news, Finnish Cultural Foundation has confirmed that I will receive a one-year grant for writing a PhD dissertation from December 2011 onwards. Why not right away? Reasons of bureaucracy no one would believe were possible even if I tried to explain.

And for something completely different, psychologists call 'Change Blindness' the fact that we are many times unable to notice changes around us, illustrated nicely by Daniel Simons' experiment where a clerk behind a desk is suddenly switched to another -- an incident 75 % of the people fail to notice. Video explaining the experiment and the phenomenon is available here (spotted at Montclair SocioBlog, via Sociological Images).

An Interview of Agamemnon Tselikas Now Online

2010-12-24T15:51:00.000+02:00

Stephan Huller has published an interview of Agamemnon Tselikas, the other Greek handwriting expert hired by Biblical Archaeology Review last year. The interview was conducted by Charles W. Hedrick a few months ago, and deals with the travels of Morton Smith and the lost manuscript of Clement's letter to Theodore.

Could Smith have been a secret agent of the Western powers as well as an historian and manuscript hunter during the 40s and 50s? What does Tselikas' report on the handwriting, due to be published in BAR soon, reveal? These questions and many more will undoubtedly be discussed in various blogs soon after the Holiday season.

Just Like His Father!

2010-12-23T18:05:00.002+02:00

Fingerpori Dec 22, 2010

"Just like his Father!"

Source: http://www.hs.fi/fingerpori/1135262543593

Since it's not Christmas yet, I'll pass the blasphemy charges. The artist is Pertti Jarla.

Academy of Finland: Finnish Science Policy Begins to Lack

2010-12-22T12:45:00.000+02:00

According to a comparative study of science policies in five European countries (Tutkimuspolitiikan käytännöt ja välineet – viiden maan vertailu (Research Policy: Tools and Practices: A Five-Country Comparison) by Kimmo Viljamaa, Janne Lehenkari, Tarmo Lemola and Terhi Tuominen; available online) an update is required in Finland. Finnish researchers have less options for choosing researcher-driven funding (as opposed to thematically targeted funding where the topic of one's research cannot be decided by the researcher herself), and the available sources of funding are scarcer. Helsingin Sanomat, in fact, titles its news story 'Finnish researchers have their hands tied and a continuous stress over funding'. The official press release of the Academy of Finland follows:

Academy of Finland’s five-country comparison reveals:
Finnish science policy needs updating

21 Dec 2010

The Academy of Finland has reviewed the research- and science-policy measures carried out in the 2000s by five countries (Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland) comparable with Finland. The study shows that these countries have been successful in their research efforts because they have throughout the 2000s actively and consistently developed the preconditions and instruments for their research. Finland is one of these countries but does not play a leading role and is not a model country in this respect.

The report “Research Policy: Tools and Practices: A Five-Country Comparison” was published in Helsinki today. The basic question explored was: What have these five countries done better than Finland, or what key measures with positive impacts on scientific performance has Finland neglected or failed to implement?

The national and international evaluations conducted in the past few years indicate that the relative quality of Finnish scientific research has not improved in the 2000s as expected. Several small European countries – such as Denmark, Ireland and Norway – have outstripped Finland and certain leading-edge countries in science – e.g. the Netherlands and Switzerland – have further increased their lead over Finland. A major reason for this is that Finland has not updated its science policy since the early 2000s, when Finnish science made rapid progress and approached the international forefront.

The report also shows that the countries seem to carry out – or at least try out – measures adopted by a forerunner country, even if there is no strong evidence of their impacts.

According to Paavo Löppönen, Director of Evaluation and Development at the Academy of Finland, Switzerland differs from the other reviewed countries in an interesting way. Switzerland continues to further approach the US top in research and will most likely outstrip it in the near future. In its research efforts, Switzerland has relied on traditional methods, primarily such as strong, internationally competitive universities, substantial funding for basic research, extensive and versatile international cooperation, and researcher mobility.

Löppönen points out that it is not possible to identify one single factor that would explain the success of the reference countries compared to Finland. The following five major differences can, however, be listed:

• Degree of internationalisation of science: This is a particular strength for Switzerland and Finland’s most apparent weakness. When we compare the percentage of foreign researchers and students involved in the research system of these countries, Finland clearly lags behind that of the reference countries.

• Research funding structure within the higher education sector: In Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland, the public sector accounts for more than 60 per cent of the core funding for research at universities and higher education institutions: in the Netherlands the percentage is 75 per cent, whereas in Finland 45 per cent and in Ireland 35 per cent.

• Thematically targeted versus researcher-driven funding: The relative significance of thematically targeted funding schemes seems to be greater in Finland than in most of the reference countries.

• Research infrastructures: A common feature shared by all the countries reviewed for this study is that they are actively engaged in the development and use of international research infrastructures. The reference countries have, however, invested more in developing national research infrastructures than Finland, for example with concrete investment programmes for several years.

• Researcher salaries: The fierce competition for the highly skilled has also affected science policy. As a result, a number of different incentives, such as research career paths, have been created to attract new talent. The present study reveals that a particular challenge for Finland in its efforts to attract foreign talent relates to researcher salaries, which significantly lag behind those of the reference countries. This refers both to the public sector, universities and the private sector.

The report “Tutkimuspolitiikan käytännöt ja välineet – viiden maan vertailu” (Research Policy: Tools and Practices: A Five-Country Comparison, 128 pp.) by Kimmo Viljamaa, Janne Lehenkari, Tarmo Lemola and Terhi Tuominen, Advansis, has come out in the Academy of Finland publication series.

PhD - On Hold (For Now)

2010-12-10T20:48:00.000+02:00

Earlier today I attended my last seminar as a PhD student -- at least for the time being. As of writing this post I am already out of the university, or as the formal certificate puts it, I have 'declared that he/she is discontinuing his/her studies at the University of Helsinki' until 30.11.2011, before which date the 'University does not accept any studies completed by the student', nor can the 'discontinuation of the studies... be cancelled'.

The reason for the fixed-duration discontinuation is money; mainly that I have decided to cease to work under the stress of deadlines for next to nothing. This decision will probably slow down the production of articles for my PhD (as the lack of deadlines tends to do), but enable me to pursue various topics that would not have fallen under the scope of my original plan. Blogging should continue as sporadic as usual, and should my editor become worried, I will still deliver that paper on time; fear not!

And who knows which country I end up to once my spouse graduates with her master's degree next year.

A Curious Proposition by Email

2010-11-19T17:50:00.003+02:00

So, I got the following message through email:

Hi Timo,

I am the owner of [site withheld], and was wondering if your site accepted guest post submissions? In case you're unfamiliar with guest posts, basically what I'm interested in doing is getting the word out about my website by approaching other websites, offering to write them a free article on any topic they wish (ideally related to Postgraduate students or Education however) for publication on their site. In exchange for me writing the article, I'd get to put a by-line at the bottom of the post with a link to my site. The idea, is that hopefully some of the regular readers of your site will find my article interesting, then follow the link through to my site and then perhaps become a regular reader there as well.

As for what you'd be getting out of the deal, in addition to doing me a favor, you'd get to have an article created for your site on whatever topic, so if you didn't feel like writing an article for a particular day this would be a good fill-in.

Thanks for your time and let me know if you're interested.

Thanks,
[name withheld]

If giving free advertising space for morally dubious sites would not be a problem, I wonder what topic I would choose. 'Is the Secret Gospel of Mark a forgery or not?', 'What is the relevance of the Secret Gospel of Mark for the study of early Christianity during the following decade?', 'Ten promising perspectives for the study of Clement's more spiritual Gospel'?

I would not have mentioned the email if I wasn't a wee bit curious to see what kind of a guest post I would get in return.

On a related note, Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the services custom-essay companies provide for students who are too lazy or busy to write their own. (Spotted at The Biblical World)

One-Sided Reception of the Hoax Hypothesis

2010-11-15T17:28:00.001+02:00

Craig S. Keener discusses the Secret Gospel of Mark in The Historical Jesus of the Gospels: Jesus in Historical Context (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009). In four paragraphs on page 60 he summarizes the situation thus:

The “Secret Gospel of Mark,” not to be confused with the canonical Gospel of Mark, is an important source for John Dominic Crossan's reconstruction of the historical Jesus. But while some scholars have wished to use the “Secret Gospel of Mark,” more scholars have cautiously warned against its use in reconstructing the life of Jesus.¹¹² In fact, Secret Mark, once hailed by some New Testament scholars (especially by its putative discover Morton Smith) as an early (even pre-Mark) source,¹¹³ has come to be regarded by most as a forgery dating from anywhere between the late second and the twentieth century.¹¹⁴ The most recent discussion suggests that a twentieth-century date is most likely for the forgery, offering New Testament scholarship's own version of science's famous “Piltdown Man.”¹¹⁵

The only manuscript (actually, a photograph of a manuscript) seems to derive from a different provenance than the monastery where it was supposedly found, and evidence appears to suggest that it appeared at the monastery only in recent times.¹¹⁶ Its attribution to Clement is stylistically open to question;¹¹⁷ it also clearly presupposes modern idiom and perhaps modern custom.¹¹⁸ In fact, recent analysis reveals the typical “forger's tremor” throughout the document,¹¹⁹ as well as characteristics of Morton Smith's Greek handwriting style, convincing many that Smith himself was the forger.¹²⁰

Smith's publications on Secret Mark reflect the same “cut-and-paste” excerpting techniques that characterize the composition of both Secret Mark and the allegedly Clementine document in which it is embedded.¹²¹ Its understanding of homosexuality reflects that of Smith and his twentieth-century context rather than that held in the first century,¹²² and some thus suggest that it may have been composed precisely to advance that twentieth-century perspective.¹²³

The work may even reflect some twentieth-century literary models.¹²⁴ These include a novel about a fraudulent document discrediting Christianity, discovered at the very same monastery and exposed by one “Lord Moreton” -- published one year before Morton Smith's first visit to this monastery!¹²⁵ We are all capable of being taken in occasionally, and it is understandable that many scholars (including myself) would have been reticent to charge such a noted scholar as Morton Smith with forgery. Given the breadth of information today, we must depend on other scholars at many points. The evidence, however, now seems to be in on this case: the Secret Gospel of Mark is a forgery, hence any reconstructions based on it must be re-reconstructed.

112 Charlesworth and Evans, “Agrapha,” 526-32; cf. Marcus, Mark, 47-51.
113 Cf. Jeffery, Secret Gospel, 247: “we were supposed to accept that these two fragments of the Secret Gospel, preserved only in an (allegedly) eighteenth-century copy, represented a text as early as, or even earlier than, any canonical New Testament writing.”
114 Stanton, Gospel Truth, 93; Neusner, “Foreword,” xxvii; cf. Losie, “Gospel.” Brown, Death, 297, dates it earlier, to c. 125.
115 As late as the 1700s some writers followed the ancient convention of pretending to translate ancient writings seen by no one else (Lefkowitz, Africa, 111); for a Gospel forgery from 1860, see Millard, Reading and Writing, 53. For one popular retelling of the “Piltdown Man” forgery or hoax that misled many earlier paleontologists for four decades, see Millar, Piltdown Man (though Millar favored Grafton Elliot Smith as the culprit, there has been no consensus).
116 Carlson, Hoax, 35-40.
117 Carlson, Hoax, 49-64; also Jeffery, Secret Gospel, 41, 99 (citing others' observations that it provides much more distinctively Clementine vocabulary than Clement's normal passages do).
118 Carlson, Hoax, 65-71. Jeffery, Secret Gospel, 55-70 (cf. also 71-90), finds there elements of Smith's Anglican liturgical background; it does not fit second-century Alexandrian liturgy, and Smith misunderstood eastern liturgy (cf. 123-48).
119 For this and other features suggesting forgery, see Carlson, Hoax, 26-35.
120 Carlson, Hoax, 42-47, esp. 46-47; Evans, Fabricating Jesus, 96-97. It also contains some obscure information on which Smith had previously published (Carlson, Hoax, 71-72). Jeffery, Secret Gospel, suggests other cases of Smith's deception (e.g., 127, 134, 147, although these cases might reflect simply a shift in perspective), sexual humor (e.g., 128-29), misreading another culture in light of his own (132-33, 136-44), and agendas powerful enough to seriously distort data (144-45).
121 Jeffery, Secret Gospel, 119, 121.
122 See Jeffery, Secret Gospel, 49-50, 185-212, 248. Jeffery also notes that the Mar Saba text's portrayal of homosexuality better fits “the 'Uranian' homosexual subculture of nineteenth-century English universities” than its putative context (Secret Gospel, 225; the entire argument is 213-25). For the reversal of Smith's own position (and his movement from an Anglo-Catholic to his belief that early Christianity was a conspiratorial construct), see Jeffery, Secret Gospel, 149-84.
123 Jeffery, Secret Gospel, argues that Smith composed the work to defend homosexual love against traditional Christian views (119-21, 239, 242-43, 247).
124 Jeffery, Secret Gospel, 226-39, 241-42, citing Oscar Wilde's Salomé (note esp. the seven veils suggested in Smith's document, 229, reflecting an image developed by Wilde, 227-28, and certainly known to Smith.)
125 Evans, Fabricating Jesus, 97.

Keener's assessment is fairly typical among the recent works of secondary literature on Secret Mark. He 1) takes the case for fraudulent Gospel, as presented by Stephen Carlson and Peter Jeffery, for granted, 2) does not mention that dissenting voices are occasionally heard, and 3) cannot avoid to bring at least one of the alleged 'clues' to the picture; this time it is 'Lord Moreton', an argument I first saw proposed by Chris Price at CADRE Comments, now cited from Evans' Fabricating Jesus. Although Keener does not say it aloud, the juxtaposition of 'Moreton' and 'Morton' is clearly intended to give the impression that the similarities between the two names are not idle coincidences.

Consequently, we need a further analytical distinction between the various 'clues' Morton Smith allegedly left behind. An argument that Smith took inspiration from Hunter's novel has the virtue of being at least fathomable if nothing else. But how on Earth is the name of a minor character, who is introduced in the last quarter of the novel, supposed to function as a clue to Smith forging Clement's letter to Theodore? Was he further inspired by the similarity to his own name? Should he have been inspired to reveal the forgery instead of propagating it, since Lord Moreton is the chief of the London Police? Or could we, at least with this one random connection, try and agree that the similarities between Lord Moreton and Morton Smith result from an insignificant twist of fate, and nothing more?

General Synod of the Lutheran Church in Finland Makes a Compromise

2010-11-13T19:35:00.000+02:00

International Edition of Helsingin Sanomat reports:

The Synod of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church voted on Friday morning to authorise the holding of prayer services for the union of same-sex couples.

The measure was passed by a vote of 78 to 30. Many delegates would have wanted to authorise a blessing ceremony for lesbian and gay couples, but settled for the compromise, under which next year’s Bishops’ Conference will be asked to prepare instructions for ministers and parish employees for prayers.

What was said?

"The decision accepts the human value of every person. No type of insulting or denigrating attitude toward homosexual people is acceptable."

The Archbishop Kari Mäkinen

What does it mean?

It is hard to read the decision in any other way than as a small but definitive step towards acceptance of homosexuality as a legitimate non-heterosexual preference in the Church, or, as Kari Latvus worded it in the title of his post, yesterday was the 'day when homosexuality ceased to be a sin in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland'. It is not a decisive victory for the vast majority of Finnish Christians, as the proper blessing ceremony has been postponed for Lord knows how many years into the future.

What is the most irritating thing in all of this?

That despite all of the popular jokes featuring Swedes in the limelight, it is the Church of Sweden that constantly outruns its sister in matters of human rights and progressive theological ideals put into practice. Let's hope the Parish Elections tomorrow will, in time, change the outlook of the General Synod for more representative of the average lay member of the Church.

Next in North America: A Secret Mark Symposium

2010-11-06T16:48:00.000+02:00

Tony Burke notes in his blog Apocryphicity that there is a Secret Mark symposium in the making, at York University in May 2011 if everything goes as planned. Of the scholars who have argued for the forgery hypothesis, however, only Peter Jeffery and Bruce Chilton have accepted the invitation to participate. Which, naturally enough, raises the question,

Is the argument in jeopardy, particularly with BAR's publication of the report of a handwriting expert? Or have efforts by Allan Pantuck, Scott Brown, and others to dismantle the argument for Morton Smith's creation of the text succeeded in silencing some of the proponents for the theory?

Could it really be that the tide is turning already? In the long run scholars will necessarily either argue for their case, as Jeffery and Chilton have in this instance decided to, or retract their support from the claims of forgery, should they have found other lines of argumentation more persuasive. There are dozens of scholars who have supported the case for forgery in published reviews and papers. Will one of them begin a wave of retraction, dropping the forgery hypothesis from the paradigm status it currently enjoys in the academia, I wonder?

Another Monday for a Graduate Student

2010-11-03T16:32:00.000+02:00

Actually, it's Wednesday, but I can't decide whether this makes it any better. Having just skimmed through two weeks worth of blogs and news on the internets, these pieces really made my day.

Spotted the video at the official blog of Robert Cargill. It's titled So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities, and has about as depressing a content as can be imagined.

DEAN: You cannot seriously be this stupid.
STUDENT: I am a motivated person who loves to read. I am going to be a college professor... Being a college professor will give me the flexible schedule that best suits my personality.
DEAN: No. Being a college professor means you will work on average 65 hours a week trying to publish an obscure article that no one cares about in an obscure scholarly journal that nobody will read, just so you can put it on your CV.

See the whole video at xtranormal.

Further examining the issue I stumbled upon a new blog, 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School, currently at reason number 27: The academic bubble may burst. Featured in the previous 26 reasons are the iron trilogy of 17: Funding is fleeting, 18: Fellowships are few and far between, and 19: These are the best years of your life. At least reason number 21: Graduate seminars can be unbearable has not been the case at Helsinki University (where I'm going to attend one the day after tomorrow, so I would probably not say otherwise even if they were). The comments on the blog are especially worthwhile.

Lastly, An und für sich discusses regularly the life of a PhD candidate. A week ago Adam Kotsko asked if there was some 'ritual satisfaction' to be had in complaining about the 'grim facts' connected to PhD studies, if it made PhD candidates to feel 'bad-ass' in their struggle along the 'self-destructive path' of graduate school. Kotsko disagrees with this perspective.

There’s no sacrifice involved here, because I didn’t finally do all this stuff so that I could get a job — I want to get a job so that I can continue doing all this stuff! I want to get tenure so that I can finally stop worrying about where the next paycheck is coming from and have all that emotional energy freed up for my work. The fact that it might not work out doesn’t make me a jaded self-destructive badass, it makes me a person living in a world where we don’t always get what we want.

Can't myself argue that complaining wouldn't be cathartic to a disturbing extent. And that I wouldn't place any inner value to the image of a tragic samurai(-pirate-ninja)-poet that emerges from all of the complaining. And that it wouldn't be nice to get paid at least something for the research and constant academic self-improvement one does week after week. But how far does the socialization into a 'life of the mind' has to be hold responsible for continuing one's studies, and how far do other reasons function as mere rationalizations for this indoctrination, that is the question I would like to have answered.

And, ultimately, can you write a whole dissertation under the amusement factor alone, even if it happens to be about the Secret Gospel of Mark, or should biblical scholarship have some other motivational source to stem from, as well?

12 Month Embargo

2010-10-27T17:39:00.001+03:00

It is not uncommon for academic journals to have 12, or even 24, month embargo on electronic material. But I was a bit taken back when I learned today that Finnish PhD candidates could also be forced to sign a 12 month embargo -- from their own universities!

It works along the following lines. It is not terribly hard to get accepted into PhD programs in Finnish universities. To balance things out, it is terribly hard to obtain decent funding, especially if one's field of study does not happen to coincide with any major research group, or if it happens to be anything in the Humanities. Trusts and other sources of funding are numerous enough, but they take applications in all over the year. Occasionally, students fall from their previous funding with a few months gap until the next one kicks in.

Such an unfortunate case was confirmed to happen to me very recently. A gap between funding options will last at least for three months, beginning from December 2010 and ending in February 2011. During that time period I could be applicable for the standard non-employment benefits -- or I could be not. I swear I'm not making any of this up!

Apparently, there exists a shadowy committee, located in some street in Helsinki beginning with the letter h (cannot remember). It assesses PhD candidates sharing my situation on individual basis, and decides whether non-employment benefits can be received without signing the embargo. I chatted with two clerks today concerning the committee, but none of them could shed any light on the principles used in deciding this or that. In the worst case, a PhD candidate is forced to sign the embargo. Apparently, it dictates something along the lines of 'the candidate cannot study for PhD degree in any way whatsoever in the university of X for 12 months', in an effort to ensure that the candidate is available for labour market should a position come open. But the clerks could not tell me much about the embargo, either, so I'm really just guessing.

It is more amusing than threatening, to tell the truth, but raises the serious question of why on Earth do I even want to write my dissertation in Finland.

Exodus from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland

2010-10-24T19:12:00.007+03:00

A fierce debate over the rights of homosexuals has kept the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland in the media spotlight for almost two weeks.

The incident began on October 12, 2010, when YLE (The Finnish Broadcasting Company) broadcast a current affairs show titled Homoilta (Gay Night), in which gay rights were debated. The show is still available in YLE Areena at http://areena.yle.fi/video/1354542. Among the debaters were representatives of the conservative wing of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, most notably Päivi Räsänen, the Christian Democratic Party chairwoman. The bishop in action was Matti Repo, while the progressive wing of the church was represented by Leena Huovinen, a priest who has already blessed numerous same-sex couples.

The discussion in Homoilta was about as first rate as can be expected. The conservative Christians rehashed the worn-out silly arguments (Bible says; unnatural; traditions), others contested. The most striking performance, as noted by many commentators, was that of bishop Repo, who could not -- or would not -- challenge the claims of the conservatives. As Kari Latvus observes in his blog Dosentin ikkunasta: Raamattu, kirkko ja köyhyys (translation mine):

Matti Repo just could not blurt out that Bishops' Conference had already managed to settle

1) a clear policy that implies the acceptance of homosexuals,
2) which implies, in principle, the acceptance of homosexual relationships, and
3) a decision that there is to be a formal prayer for homosexual couples and their relationship

If this was all, it would be business as usual. But the national psyche of Finns clicked, and a mass exodus from the church, perceived as rejecting the most basic human rights from homosexuals, began. In Helsinki, some 4,000 people have already resigned their membership, signifying a loss of circa 1.2 million euros for the church. Nationwide, over ~~24,000~~ 35,000 people have left, and the trend is not expected to diminish any time soon. The resign process is as simple as filling an online form, most notably at eroakirkosta.fi.

The numbers are huge, even though almost 80% of Finns (c. 4,000,000) still belong to the church. Some voices of the church have already cheered for the loss of the 'unbelievers', some are angry for the financial loss which means greatly diminishing resources for social work the church has been doing since WW2, and some are simply desperate and ashamed. I have seen many analyses of the situation during the past fortnight, none of them exactly convincing. What on earth is going on?

The aftermath of Homoilta reveals clearly how deeply the church has been tied to the mainstream Finnish culture. Until recent years the default option has been to belong to the church, a notion the church (or at least its progressive wing) has itself encouraged in claiming that the membership should not be connected to the amount of 'belief' an individual may or may not have regarding the classical dogma of (Protestant) Christianity; that should one approve only of the social work done in the church, one could very well remain a member and continue to finance it through her tax money.

The sudden mass resignation has challenged the status quo. Removing oneself from the church, in protest of its stance on homosexuality (even if it is a bit misguided notion), has become a genuine option for hundreds of thousands of people, a suggestion to be seriously considered eating lunch with one's co-workers, or having a cup of coffee (or a pint) with one's elders. The self-evident nature of belonging to the church has suddenly evaporated. People seem to be unsure of what a membership should entail. Do I believe as Martin Luther, or Paul or Jesus believed? Do I have to believe as Luther, or Paul or Jesus did to be a member of this church? Of any church? Is the church supposed to be an authority on religious issues? Do I want the church to be an authority on religious issues, or do I want the church to be a forum for discussing those issues? And ultimately, should I stay or leave if I wanted the church to be this or that?

Some have held that resigning one's membership is not a good form of protest -- if all the liberal Christians decide to leave, the church will never accept homosexuality for only the traditionalists remain. That notion is a half-truth at best: no one can claim that deciding to resign oneself at this moment would not be a good form of protest; the continued media hoo-ha shows it to be one of the more visible options available, clearly effective in keeping the topic on air.

Resigning one's membership is not, however, a sustainable alternative, at least not in the long run. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, even if it sounds a tad weird for the rest of the world, is a democratic community. The General Synod of the church has all the power in its hands, including drastic changes to the dogma, should the 3/4 majority decide to do it. In 1986 the General Synod decided to accept women as priests, after decades of battle between the progressives and the conservatives. The members of the General Synod are lay members of the church (2/3) and priests (1/3). The lay members are chosen by the members of the Parish Councils, who in turn are chosen in Parish Elections, where every member of the church is eligible to vote and to become a candidate.

And as it happens to be, Parish Elections are taking place on November 14, 2010. Furthermore, the ironic powers that rule the world have dictated that anyone who was a member of the church on August 15, weeks before the current brouhaha began, is eligible to vote, including people who have resigned their membership after that date. Whom should the faithful ~~24,000~~ 35,000 vote for, should they wish to transform the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland into a more inclusive religious community, then?

All the candidates are listed at the official site of Parish Elections 2010. The official Candidate Matcher opens tomorrow. And if in doubt, at least in Helsinki, go for Tulkaa kaikki (Come All), a grass roots movement of Finnish Christians who believe that 'The Church of Christ is open for all', and continues to lobby hard against the discrimination of female priests and sexual/gender minorities, among other things.

Soon after Homoilta some priests (and one or two other employees of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland) decided to illustrate the multi-voiced reality that is the church by means of singing. The gist of their humorous video is this: 'Homo[sexual] or hetero[sexual], does not matter in the slightest, everyone needs everybody'.

For me, the video signifies how the silly arguments against deserve only to be answered by silly arguments for. (Original from YouTube)

BAR Serves Up New Thoughts on Secret Mark

2010-10-18T15:04:00.000+03:00

As many other blogs have already noted (Stephan Huller's was the first), Biblical Archaeology Review has expanded its online section on the Secret Gospel of Mark with two new articles, a response by Peter Jeffery to the initial handwriting analysis by Venetia Anastasopoulou (the same response has been available from Jeffery's homepage since April 2010) and a further note by Anastasopoulou, in response to the question 'Does the document betray itself as a forgery?'

I have previously commented Jeffery's response, but wish to include one further observation here. Jeffery challenges the defenders of the authenticity to come up with "some level of consensus on a compelling interpretation that shows why their dating makes the most sense". Granted, in some other field, such a request could certainly be made. But biblical scholars are notoriously bad at agreeing with one another. Would the scholars studying historical Jesus need to reach a consensus before they could present their arguments? Would the scholars studying the theology of Paul need to reach a consensus, or scholars trying to interpret the Gospel of Judas? Not a chance (for a consensus, that is)! As far as I have come to understand the field through my studies, the persistent disagreements seem to be part of the 'normal discourse' in biblical studies, more so than in other historical enquiries. It is probably due to how little, in terms of sources, and how many, in terms of scholars, there are, 'an inch wide & a mile deep', as the saying goes. I sincerely hope that Jeffery will not wait for the consensus to emerge, but continues to offer his opinions, especially reacting to the counterarguments presented, as so far he remains the sole exception to the silence the defenders of authenticity face with the other proponents of the forgery hypothesis.

Now, Anastasopoulou's answer to the question 'Does the document betray itself as a forgery?' is a simple no, or to elaborate a bit more, "the only way to check whether the handwriting is genuine or not, is to compare [it] with a known handwriting". As suggested by many during the past years, Anastasopoulou observes that certain features, such as poor line quality, point to the possibility of forgery, while others, such as natural variation or good rhythm, suggest genuineness. She holds to her previous opinion, that Clement's letter is "written in a natural and spontaneous way", something Morton Smith could hardly have simulated.

Furthermore, the newest issue of BAR features an article by Hershel Shanks, First Person: Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford and Morton Smith (available online), in which the debate on Secret Mark is compared to the debate on Shakespeare, whether his poems and plays were really penned by himself or by someone else, such as Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Shanks acknowledges that "the parallels are inexact" but not too far-fetched, and at least the scholarly disagreement, the "trench warfare", is pretty much the same. Francis Watson's article from April 2010 is mentioned, as well as a new article by Craig Evans, to be published in a forthcoming collection of essays, in which Evans continues to treat Secret Mark with "grave suspicions", concluding that "[b]efore making his find at Mar Saba ... [Smith] spoke of the mystery of the kingdom of God, secrecy, prohibited sexual relationships, and Clement of Alexandria. That this unusual combination of elements just happens to appear in a document that Smith himself found should serve as a warning that ... we may well be dealing with a hoax."

Not too optimistic, Shanks thinks that "people who think Morton Smith is a forger will still think that Morton Smith is a forger. And, pari passu, those who find Secret Mark to be authentic will never be convinced that it is a forgery", a similar situation that pertains the question of Shakespearean authorship. Quoting Shapiro on Shakespeare, Shanks finds it "both impressive and demoralizing". "Amazing & Amusing", I would have worded it, but the fact remains that Secret Mark will continue to deliver far into the unforeseeable future.

Apurahojen hakeminen

2010-10-14T12:47:00.000+03:00

Apurahojen hakeminen on taitolaji, josta minulla ei ole aavistustakaan. Toistakymmentä lähetettyä apurahahakemusta ja yhtä monta hylkäävää vastausta; palautetta hakemuksista ei saa, joten kieltävien vastausten syyt jäävät aivan auki. Tyypillisesti rahasto tai säätiö vaatii hakemukseen 1-2 sivun tiivistelmän, josta ilmenee vaivattomasti työskentelyn aihe, sen ajankohtaisuus ja merkittävyys, ja suunnitelma työskentelyn läpivientiin. Liitteenä pyydetään usein yksityiskohtaisempi tutkimussuunnitelma (4-10 sivua), ansioluettelo, julkaisuluettelo, ja luettelo aikaisemmin myönnetyistä apurahoista tai vastaava rahoitus- tai kustannussuunnitelma.

Koska liitteinä pyydetyt luettelot ovat sisällöltään sitä mitä ovat, ja muotoiluiltaan neutraaleja, en usko niitä voivani parantaa. En myöskään voi uskoa, että yksityiskohtaista tutkimussuunnitelmaa olisi tarpeen lähteä tyhmentämään; jokin asiantuntemushan hakemusten käsittelijöillä täytyy olla. Ensimmäinen parannustyö kohdistuu siis tiivistelmään. Alla malliesimerkki, jonka variaatiot eivät siis ole vakuuttaneet apurahoja myöntäviä tahoja. Parannusesimerkkejä otetaan vastaan, suoraan kommentteihin tai sähköpostiin (linkki profiilissa).

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The Secret Gospel According to Clement of A (työnimi)

Väitöskirjatutkimus keskittyy Klemens Aleksandrialaisen kirjeeseen Theodorokselle (Theod.) ja siihen sisältyvään ns. Salaiseen Markuksen evankeliumiin (Sal. Mark.), jonka ainoan tunnetun käsikirjoituskopion Columbia Universityn professori Morton Smith (1915-1991) väitti löytäneensä Mar Saban erämaaluostarista vuonna 1958. Smith julkaisi käsikirjoituksen kriittisen edition vuonna 1973. Osa tutkijayhteisöstä on suhtautunut tekstiin suurin varauksin, ja Smithin on jopa epäilty väärentäneen sen. Väärennöshuhuja ruokki myös käsikirjoituksen katoaminen Jerusalemin ortodoksisen patriarkaatin kirjastoon 1970-luvun lopulla. Uuteen akateemiseen keskusteluun käsikirjoitus nousi Stephen C. Carlsonin vuonna 2005 ilmestyneen monografian The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark myötä. Carlson esittää Smithin väärentäneen kirjeen syistä, jotka eivät avaudu yksiulotteisilla väärennöksen paljastamisen työkaluilla. Klemensin kirjeen todellinen genre on huijaus (hoax), ei väärennös (forgery), ja tämä paradigman vaihdos on Carlsonin mukaan avain tekstin alkuperän selvittämiseen.

Arvioin Klemensin kirjeestä käytyä keskustelua toukokuussa 2009 ilmestyneessä pro gradu -tutkielmassani Salaisen evankelistan salaliitto: Uusin keskustelu Klemens Aleksandrialaisen kirjeestä Theodorokselle, joka hyväksyttiin arvosanalla eximia cum laude approbatur. Tarkastelin huijaushypoteesin jokaista osa-aluetta erikseen, arvioin niin puolustajien kuin vastustajienkin argumentteja, ja kiinnitin huomiota huijaushypoteesin yhteyksiin eräisiin pseudohistoriallisiin teorioihin, erityisesti siihen kuinka nämä muodostetaan yleisen historiatieteellisen metodin vastaisella tavalla. Johtopäätökseni oli kaksiosainen: toisaalta huijaushypoteesi ei vakuuta tai sen väitteitä ei saatavilla olevan evidenssin puutteellisuuden takia voi arvioida lainkaan, toisaalta se perustuu sellaisiin metodologisiin ratkaisuihin, joita ei voida pitää hyvän tieteellisen argumentointikäytännön valossa asiallisina. Tutkielmani englanninkielinen käännösprojekti onkin jo herättänyt huomiota akateemisten raamatuntutkijoiden muodostaman blogosfäärin (eli blogien kokonaisuuden), ns. biblioblogien piirissä.¹

¹http://salainenevankelista.blogspot.com/2009/06/masters-thesis-conspiracy-of-secret.html

Keskustelu Klemensin kirjeestä Theodorokselle on ajankohtainen juuri nyt, sillä tiedeyhteisössä seuraavan vuosikymmenen aikana muodostuva konsensus, erityisesti Salaisen Markuksen evankeliumin osalta, vaikuttaa merkittävästi siihen kuinka ensimmäisen ja toisen vuosisadan kristillisyyttä ja evankeliumien syntyä tutkitaan. Mikäli teksti hyväksytään autenttiseksi ilman sitä vuosikymmenet seurannutta epäilyksen varjoa, mikä minusta näyttää oikealta johtopäätökseltä, ymmärryksemme erityisesti Markuksen evankeliumin syntyhistoriasta ja kehityksestä muuttuu ratkaisevasti, riippumatta siitä onko “Salainen Markus” samalta ensimmäisen vuosisadan kirjoittajalta kuin kanoninen Markuskin (näin Scott G. Brown) tai toiselta vuosisadalta peräisin oleva imitaatio (näin Raymond E. Brown). Myös ymmärryksemme ensimmäisen ja toisen vuosisadan kristillisyydestä, erityisesti Egyptin suhteen, tulee muuttumaan.

Väitöskirjan kirjoitusprosessi on alkanut tammikuussa 2010 ja kestää neljä vuotta. Laskennallisesti varaan viidennen vuoden 60 opintopisteen jatko-opintoihin kuuluvien opintojen suorittamiseen. Käytännössä opinnot jakautuvat tasaisesti koko väitöskirjan kirjoitusprosessin ajalle. Teologian tohtorin tutkinnon kokonaisuus on valmis vuoden 2014 loppuun mennessä, väitöstilaisuus mukaanlukien. Aiheen ajankohtaisuuden huomioiden tavoitteenani on julkaista jokainen väitöskirjani pääluku itsenäisenä artikkelina vertaisarvioidussa tieteellisessä aikakausjulkaisussa. Tutkimus kirjoitetaan englanniksi, joskin julkaisutavoitteisiini kuuluu myös tekstin suomenkielinen käännös, joka voidaan julkaista lyhyellä kommentaarilla varustettuna Teologisessa Aikakauskirjassa. Koska Klemensin kirje Theodorokselle esiintyy vain harvojen tutkijoiden rekonstruktioissa käsikirjoitukseen liittyneiden väärennösepäilyjen vuoksi, lähestyn tekstiä väitöskirjani yksittäisissä luvuissa monia erilaisia metodeja hyödyntäen. Lyhyet tiivistelmät väitöskirjatutkimukseni pääpiirteistä alla:

[Annetuista ohjeista riippuen seuraa joko ylimalkainen tai yksityiskohtainen kuvaus seitsemästä artikkelista, jotka muodostavat väitöskirjani rungon.]

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How Many Books Published in the Last Five Years Mention the Secret Gospel of Mark?

2010-08-25T12:34:00.002+03:00

The answer, according to Google Books, is 1,590. Looks like my ultimate list of recent works discussing or even mentioning Morton Smith and his discovery will not be completed today nor anytime in the foreseeable future.

Among the amount there are gems to be found. At present time the very first hit is Albert Baumgarten's Elias Bickerman As a Historian of the Jews: A Twentieth Century Tale (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 131. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck) which devotes a whole sub-chapter to Morton Smith, regarding his friendship with Elias J. Bickerman, a colleague at Columbia. From page 205 onwards:

Smith's insight is revealed in a story told by Moshe Idel. When Idel came to New York to the Jewish Theological Seminary to deliver the lectures later published as Kabbalah New Perspectives (1988) there was an old man who sat in the audience at every talk, taking careful notes. At the last lecture, this man approached Idel and said that he had enjoyed the talks, but thought that the material could be organized differently. He then presented Idel with an outline of the topics completely redone. Idel saw the merits of this alternative way of arranging his subject and adopted it for the book. The old man, of course, was Morton Smith. (206)

[NOTE: The following section was edited after Baumgarten pointed out in the comments below that I had managed to seriously misrepresent his argument concerning Bickerman's faith. For details and my puny excuses, cf. the comments.]

Baumgarten goes on to discuss Smith's "loss of faith" and describes it as "[t]he key to understanding Smith's life, as well as his work as a scholar". (206) Smith's letter to Mrs. Hans Lewy (January 3, 1946) and his article Psychiatric Practice and Christian Dogma (Journal of Pastoral Care 3 (1949), 12-20) indicate to Baumgarten that Smith was undergoing a "personal crisis" regarding his faith. (207) The end result was summarised by Theodore Gaster, another Columbia colleague of Smith, by these words:

Morton Smith is like a little boy whose goal in life is to write curse words all over the altar in church, and then get caught. (209)

But how to combine this characterisation with the facts that 1) Smith never left priesthood but remained on an indefinite leave from clerical duties by the sanction of his bishop, 2) in the beginning of the 1970s replied to the bishop that he did not wish to leave priesthood since he preferred to keep his options open in case he changed his mind (again), 3) retired as a priest when he reached the age of retirement in the 1980s, and as Allan Pantuck noted here, 4) "when Smith died, he still had in his briefcase a card from the Diocese of Maryland identifying him as a priest of the Diocese".

Whatever we make of the character of Morton Smith, I have the feeling that it was far more nuanced than the simple accounts we have used to hearing suggest.

Select Bibliography (2005-) for Clement's Letter to Theodore

2010-08-20T20:47:00.023+03:00

For works published before 2005 cf. Scott G. Brown's Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery. ESCJ 15. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

NOTE: an on-going project. Errors and omissions can be recorded on the comments below.

Other bibliographies:

* Wieland Willker's The Secret Gospel of Mark Homepage records the most important new works.

* Peter Jeffery's Reactions to: follows the reception of his book The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Monographs and articles

2005

Brown, Scott G.
-Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery. ESCJ 15. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Carlson, Stephen C.
-The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press.

Foster, Paul
-Secret Mark: Its Discovery and the State of Research. The Expository Times 117, 46-52. Available online at http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/117/2/46

Gundry, Robert H.
-The Old Is Better: New Testament Essays in Support of Traditional Interpretations. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 178. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Mitchell, Margaret M.
-Patristic Counter-Evidence to the Claim that 'The Gospels Were Written for All Christians'. NTS 51, 36-79.

Rau, Eckhard
-Zwischen Gemeindechristentum und christlicher Gnosis: Das geheimen Markusevangelium und das Geheimnis des Reiches Gottes. NTS 51, 482-504.

Viklund, Roger
-Den Jesus som aldrig funnits: en kritisk granskning av Bibelns Jesus och kristendomens uppkomst. Röbäck: Vimi.

2006

Allerton, John
-The Secret Gospel of Mark and the Sexual Orientation of Jesus. Faith and Freedom: A Journal of Progressive Religion 59, 108-113.

Aubert, Jean-Jacques
-Christianisme antique, droit romain et homosexualité. In Michael Groneberg (ed.), Der Mann als sexuelles Wesen. L'homme – créature sexuelle: Zur Normierung männlicher Erotik. La normation de l'érotisme masculin. Ethik und politische Philosophie 13. Freiburg: Academic Press Fribourg, 103-125.

Brown, Scott G.
-Factualizing the Folklore: Stephen Carlson's Case Against Morton Smith. Harvard Theological Review 99, 291-327.
-The Question of Motive in the Case Against Morton Smith. JBL 125, 351-383.
-Reply to Stephen Carlson. The Expository Times 117:4, 144-149. Available online at http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/117/4/144

Carlson, Stephen C.
-Reply to Scott Brown. The Expository Times 117:5, 185-188.

Conner, Robert
-Jesus the Sorcerer: Exorcist, Prophet of the Apocalypse. Oxford: Mandrake.

Esler, Philip F. & Piper, Ronald A.
-Lazarus, Mary and Martha: A Social-Scientific and Theological Reading of John. London: SCM.

Humphrey, Hugh M.
-From Q to "Secret" Mark: A Composition History of the Earliest Narrative Theology. London: T&T Clark.

2007

Brown, Scott G.
-An essay review of Peter Jeffery, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery, Review of Biblical Literature [http://www.bookreviews.org]. Available online at http://bookreviews.org/pdf/5627_5944.pdf

Collins, Adela Yarbro
-Mark: A Commentary. Hermeneia – A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Craig, William Lane
-Contending with Christianity's Critics: Answering New Atheists and Other Objectors. Nashville: Broadman & Holman.

Jeffery, Peter
-The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Martin, Annick
-À propos de la lettre attribuée à Clément d'Alexandrie sur l'évangile secret de Marc. In Louis Painchaud & Paul-Hubert Poirier (ed.), Colloque international "L'Évangile selon Thomas et les textes de Nag Hammadi". Volume 8 of Bibliothèque copte de Nag Hammadi: Section "Etudes". Sainte-Foy, Québec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 277-300.

Perkins, Pheme
-Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Piovanelli, Pierluigi
-L'évangile secret de Marc trente trois ans après, entre potentialités exégétiques et difficultés techniques. Revue Biblique 114, 52-72, 237-254.

Russo, Nicholas V.
-A Note on the Role of Secret Mark in the Search for the Origins of Lent. Studia Liturgica 37, 181-197.

Strobel, Lee
-The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

2008

Black, David Alan
-Mark 16:8 as the Conclusion to the Second Gospel. In David Alan Black (ed.), Perspectives on the Ending of Mark: Four Views. Nashville: Broadman and Holman, ?-?.

Brown, Scott G.
-The Letter to Theodore: Stephen Carlson’s Case against Clement’s Authorship. JECS 16:4, 535-572.

Jay, Jeff
-A New Look at the Epistolary Framework of the Secret Gospel of Mark. JECS 16:4, 573-597.

Klauck, Hans-Josef
-Die apokryphe Bibel: Ein anderer Zugang zum frühen Christentum. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Morton Smith and Gershom Scholem, Correspondence 1945-1982
-Morton Smith and Gershom Scholem, Correspondence 1945-1982. Guy G. Stroumsa (ed.). Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture. Leiden: Brill.

Paananen, Timo S.
-Kuka kirjoitti Salaisen Markuksen evankeliumin? Osa 1: Morton Smith vs. Stephen C. Carlson. Vartija 121:3, 83-97.
-Kuka kirjoitti Salaisen Markuksen evankeliumin? Osa 2: Morton Smith vs. Peter Jeffery. Vartija 121:4, 123-132.

Pantuck, Allan J. & Brown, Scott G.
-Morton Smith as M. Madiotes: Stephen Carlson's Attribution of Secret Mark to a Bald Swindler. JSHJ 6, 106-125.

Pearson, Birger A.
-The Secret Gospel of Mark: A 20th Century Forgery. Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 4 Article 6, 1-14.

2009

Grafton, Anthony
-Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith. The Nation. Available online at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090126/grafton/single

Hedrick, Charles W.
-An Amazing Discovery. BAR 35:6, 44-48, 86.

Henige, David
-Authorship Renounced. The 'Found' Source in the Historical Record. JSP 41, 31-55.

Jaffé, Dan
-Jésus sous la plume des historiens juifs du XXe siècle: Approche historique, perspectives historiographiques, analyses méthodologiques. Paris: Cerf.

Keener, Craig S.
-The Historical Jesus of the Gospels: Jesus in Historical Context. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Koester, Helmut
-Was Morton Smith a Great Thespian and I a Complete Fool? BAR 35:6, 54-58, 88.

Köstenberger, Andreas J.
-The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament. Nashville: Broadman & Holdman.

Landry, David
-Noncanonical Texts: The Da Vinci Code and Beyond. Word & World 29, 367-379.

Meyer, Marvin
-Whom Did Jesus Love Most? Beloved Disciples in John and Other Gospels. In Tuomas Rasimus (ed.), The Legacy of John: Second-Century Reception of the Fourth Gospel. Leiden: Brill, 73-92.

Shanks, Hershel
-Morton Smith – Forger. BAR 35:6, 49-53, 86-88.
-Restoring a Dead Scholar's Reputation. BAR 35:6, 59-61, 90-92.

Solow, Andrew R. & Smith, Woollcott K.
-A Statistical Problem Concerning the Mar Saba Letter. The American Statistician 63, 254-257.

2010

Anastasopoulou, Venetia
-Experts Report Handwriting Examination. Available online at http://www.bib-arch.org/pdf/secret-mark-analysis.pdf

Beskow, Per
-Modern Mystifications of Jesus. In Delbert Burkett (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Jesus. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 458-474.

DuBois, Page
-Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rau, Eckhard
-Das Geheimnis des Reiches Gottes: Die esoterische Rezeption der Lehre Jesu im geheimen Markusevangelium. In Jörg Frey & Jens Schröter (ed.), Jesus in apokryphen Evangelienüberlieferungen: Beiträge zu außerkanonischen Jesusüberlieferungen aus verschiedenen Sprach- und Kulturtraditionen. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 254. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, ?-?.
-Weder gefälscht noch authentisch? Überlegungen zum Status des geheimen Markusevangeliums als Quelle des antiken Christentums. In Jörg Frey & Jens Schröter (ed.), Jesus in apokryphen Evangelienüberlieferungen: Beiträge zu außerkanonischen Jesusüberlieferungen aus verschiedenen Sprach- und Kulturtraditionen. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 254. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, ?-?.

Schröter, Jens
-The Gospel of Mark. In David E. Aune (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament. Volume 28 of Blackwell Companions to Religion. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 272-295.

Watson, Francis
-Beyond Suspicion: On the Authorship of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark. The Journal of Theological Studies 61, 128-170. Available online at http://jts.oxfordjournals.org.proxy.library.nd.edu/cgi/content/full/61/1/128

2011

Jeffery, Peter
-The Mystical Chorus of the Truth Itself: Liturgy and Mystery in Clement of Alexandria. In B. J. Groen & S. H. Teeples (ed.), Inquiries into Eastern Christian Worship: Acts of the Second International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, Rome, 17-21 September 2008. Eastern Christian Studies 10. Leuven: Peeters. (not yet published)

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Online (unpublished) articles

2005

Smith, Kyle
-‘Mixed with Inventions’: Salt and Metaphor in Secret Mark. Available online at http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/Secret/SALT-PAPER.rtf

2006

Carlson, Stephen C.
-Brown on Morton Smith’s Motives in JBL. Available online at http://hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2006/07/brown-on-morton-smiths-motives-in-jbl.html

2007

Jeffery, Peter
-The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Reply to Scott G. Brown. (1) Available online at http://www.music.princeton.edu/~jeffery/replytobrown.pdf
-The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Reply to Scott G. Brown. (2) Available online at http://music.princeton.edu/~jeffery/Review%20of%20Biblical%20Literature-Jeffery%20reply%20to%20Brown.pdf

2008

Shandruk, Walter M.
-Carlson's Handwriting Analysis on Secret Mark. Available online at http://neonostalgia.com/weblog/?p=484
-Statistics and Hapax Legomena in the Mar Saba Letter. Available online at http://neonostalgia.com/weblog/?p=496

2009

Burgess, Matthew
-“Whatever Makes for Progress Towards Gnosis”: Esoterism and Spiritual Advancement in the Stromateis and the Letter to Theodore. Available online at http://sites.google.com/site/moreconfessionsofabiblejunkie/Home/ClementPaper-Final.pdf?attredirects=0

Capps, Donald
-The Diagnostic Question. A conference paper for “The Secret Gospel of Mark, Sex, Death,and Madness; The Psychodynamics of Morton Smith's Proposal," session 21-330 ("Psychology and Biblical Studies") at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in New Orleans, November 21, 2009, 4:00-6:30 PM. Available online at http://psybibs.revdak.com/2009/capps.diagnostic_question.htm

Conner, Robert
-Magic in the New Testament – Chapter 12: A Letter to Theodore. Available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/36964375/A-Letter-to-Theodore

Jeffery, Peter
-The Secret Gospel of Mark Revisited. A conference paper for “The Secret Gospel of Mark, Sex, Death,and Madness; The Psychodynamics of Morton Smith's Proposal," session 21-330 ("Psychology and Biblical Studies") at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in New Orleans, November 21, 2009, 4:00-6:30 PM. Available online at http://psybibs.revdak.com/2009/jeffery.morton_smith.pdf (Handout available online at http://psybibs.revdak.com/2009/jefferysblhandout.pdf)
-Secret Gospel: Response to the Panelists. A conference paper for “The Secret Gospel of Mark, Sex, Death,and Madness; The Psychodynamics of Morton Smith's Proposal," session 21-330 ("Psychology and Biblical Studies") at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in New Orleans, November 21, 2009, 4:00-6:30 PM. Available online at http://psybibs.revdak.com/2009/jeffery.response.pdf

Jensen, Robin M.
-The Secret Gospel and Alexandrian Baptism: A Response to Peter Jeffery’s The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled. A conference paper for “The Secret Gospel of Mark, Sex, Death,and Madness; The Psychodynamics of Morton Smith's Proposal," session 21-330 ("Psychology and Biblical Studies") at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in New Orleans, November 21, 2009, 4:00-6:30 PM. Available online at http://psybibs.revdak.com/2009/jensen.baptism.htm

Lawrence, Raymond J.
-Peter Jeffery’s The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery. A conference paper for “The Secret Gospel of Mark, Sex, Death,and Madness; The Psychodynamics of Morton Smith's Proposal," session 21-330 ("Psychology and Biblical Studies") at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in New Orleans, November 21, 2009, 4:00-6:30 PM. Available online at http://psybibs.revdak.com/2009/lawrence.html

Morris, Lisa
-From History to Mystery: The Life and Teachings of the Historical Jesus. Self-published through Lulu at http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/from-history-to-mystery-the-life-and-teachings-of-the-historical-jesus/6456850

Viklund, Roger
- One Thousand and One Untruths: How Reliable Is the Account of Secret Mark by Lee Strobel and Craig Evans? Available online a http://www.jesusgranskad.se/strobel2.htm
-Reclaiming Clement's Letter to Theodoros: An Examination of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis. Available online at http://www.jesusgranskad.se/theodore.htm
-Den symboliskt utformade förlagan till Markusevangeliet – populärt benämnd Hemliga Markusevangeliet. Available online at http://www.jesusgranskad.se/hm1.htm
-Tremors, or Just an Optical Illusion? A Further Evaluation of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis. Available online at http://www.jesusgranskad.se/theodore2.htm

2010

Brown, Scott G. & Pantuck, Allan J.
-Stephen Carlson's Questionable Questioned Document Examination. Available online at http://salainenevankelista.blogspot.com/2010/04/stephen-carlsons-questionable.html (blog edition) and http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/Secret/Pantuck-Brown-2010.pdf (pdf)

Viklund, Roger
-A Quest for Secret Mark’s Authenticity: A Chain is as Strong as its Weakest Link. Available online at http://www.jesusgranskad.se/quest.htm

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Book reviews

2005

Bethune, Brian
-Mark's Secret Gospel. Maclean's 118, 48-49. Available online at http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20050516_105698_105698

Foster, Paul
-Books of the Month: Secret Mark is no Secret Anymore – Secret Mark: Uncovering a Hoax. The Expository Times 117:2, 64-68. Available online at http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/117/2/64

Kaestli, Jean-Daniel
-Rapport du secrétaire général sur l’année 2005-2006 (Assemblée générale de l’AELAC, Mont-Roland, Dole, vendredi 30 juin 2006 à 20 h. 30). Le Bulletin de l'AELAC 15-16, 13-18.

Pearse, Roger
-Review of The Gospel Hoax. Unpublished. Available online at http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/reviews/carlson_gospel_hoax.htm

Price, Robert M.
-Review of Mark's Other Gospel in The Journal of Higher Criticism 11, 155-159. Available online at http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/reviews/brown_mark_other_gospel.htm
-Review of The Gospel Hoax in The Journal of Higher Criticism 11, 153-155. Available online at http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/reviews/carlson_gospel_hoax.htm

Smith, Ben C.
-Review of The Gospel Hoax. Unpublished. Available online at http://www.textexcavation.com/secretmark.html

2006

Blomberg, Craig L.
-Review of The Gospel Hoax in The Denver Journal 9. Available online at http://www.denverseminary.edu/article/the-gospel-hoax-morton-smiths-invention-of-secret-mark/

Chilton, Bruce
-Unmasking a False Gospel. The New York Sun (October 25, 2006). Available online at http://www.nysun.com/arts/unmasking-a-false-gospel/42197/

Gray, Patrick
-Review of The Gospel Hoax in Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity 19, 51-52.

Holmes, Michael W.
-Review of The Gospel Hoax in Religious Studies Review 32, 123.

Kruger, Michael J.
-Review of The Gospel Hoax in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49, 422-424.

Marshall, Chris
-Review of The Gospel Hoax in Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought & Practice 14, 41-42.

Taylor, Nicholas H.
-Review of Mark's Other Gospel in Journal for the Study of the New Testament 28, 136.

2007

Blomberg, Craig L.
-Review of Stephen Carlson, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark, Review of Biblical Literature [http://www.bookreviews.org] (2007). Available online at http://bookreviews.org/pdf/5707_6023.pdf

Cameron, Ron
-Review of Mark's Other Gospel in University of Toronto Quarterly 76, 293-295.

Chilton, Bruce
-Review of The Gospel Hoax in Review of Rabbinic Judaism 10, 122-128.

Foster, Paul
-Secret Mark Again. The Expository Times 119, 50-51. Available online at http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/119/1/50

Harris, W. V.
-A Bible Fantasy. Times Literary Supplement No. 5455, 23. Available online at http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25371-2649536,00.html

Patterson, Dilys N.
-Review of Mark's Other Gospel in Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses
36, 352-353.

Shiell, William D.
-Review of The Gospel Hoax in Perspectives in Religious Studies 34, 111-116.

Tuckett, Christopher
-Review of The Gospel Hoax in Journal of Theological Studies 58, 193-195.

Webb, Robert L.
-Review of Mark's Other Gospel in Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 5, 106.
-Review of The Gospel Hoax in Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 5, 106.
-Review of The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled in Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 5, 216. Available online at http://jhj.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/5/2/205.pdf

2008

Le Boulluec, Alain
-Review of Mark's Other Gospel & The Gospel Hoax in Apocrypha 19, 308-313.

Jay, Jeff
-Review of The Gospel Hoax in The Journal of Religion 88, 98-99.

Johnson, Maxwell E.
-Review of The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled in Worship 82, 85-89.

Rousse-Lacordaire, Jérome
-Bulletin d'Histoire des Ésotérismes. Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 92, 849-850.

2009

Ellens, Harold J.
-Review of Peter Jeffery, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery, Review of Biblical Literature [http://www.bookreviews.org]. Available online at http://bookreviews.org/pdf/5627_7785.pdf

Kelley, Nicole
-Review of The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled in Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 4, 114-117. Available online at http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/magic_ritual_and_witchcraft/v004/4.1.kelley.html

Price, Robert M.
-Review of The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled. Unpublished. Available online at http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/reviews/jeffery_secret_gospel.htm

Jesus Granskad Resurrected

2010-08-10T18:03:00.000+03:00

I just realised that Roger Viklund's blog Jesus granskad has been resurrected after a three-year long hiatus. Roger deals with early Christianity, including the Secret Gospel of Mark, Testimonium Flavianum, and other topics of interest, though in Swedish only.

Some Facts and Confirmation Biases

2010-08-03T16:52:00.001+03:00

I am back from a three-week break, a vacation of sorts (if PhD students had the luxury), and tired of the left white margin this blog has had since the beginning. It is now gone, giving more space to the text. Some other minor tweaks are found around, including the complete list of blogs directly from my reader. Please, do note that it is a collection of the serious and the curious, and that I have all kinds of reasons from scholarly pursuits to private amusement to keep following them. Otherwise the visual style of the blog remains as simple as I have always preferred it to be.

Three interesting things I stumbled upon while on vacation.

First, Joe Keohane wrote for The Boston Globe an article titled How facts backfire. It looks like there is some trouble with the cohabitation of our own preferences and the facts:

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

How far does education help amend the situation? Keohane observes:

A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.

Insert witty comment here.

What kinds of mechanisms are responsible for such cognitive mishaps? Enter Eric Fernandez's Cognitive Biases - A Visual Study Guide for a great introduction to the field. How about having some Semmelweis reflex, defined as "The tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts an established paradigm". Or would you prefer some Clustering illusion, "The tendency to see patterns where actually none exist"?

Nowadays the biblioblogosphere talks about textbooks with less text (cf. James F. McGrath, and Mark Goodacre for some of the most recent entries). To my aesthetic eye, Fernandez' work - meant to be used as a memory aid for the dozens of different cognitive biases, in an effort to grasp a good understanding of the field as a whole - could serve as a model for biblical study material as well, being informative as well as pleasing to peruse. One curious connection should be pointed out. Fernandez' work has some close ties to the Wikipedia pages concerning cognitive biases i.e. most of the text in the Visual Study Guide is lifted straight out of Wikipedia.

It works because of one thing - that the Wikipedia articles quoted are in top-notch shape, as the case happens to be with e.g. Confirmation bias, thanks to the efforts of Martin Poulter, PhD and the Wikipedia community. In his blog Bias and Belief Poulter writes about the process of writing the Wikipedia entry that was chosen for "Today’s Featured Article" in Wikipedia for Friday 23rd, July. Regarding the topic, he thinks that people are generally not that stupid:

My reading of confirmation bias is different: people are very clever in how they defend belief systems or stereotypes that they are somehow attached to.

Oh, and a situation where people with different views evaluate the (ambivalent) evidence as supporting their particular point of view is known as biased assimilation in cognitive studies. Just for the record.

A Close Look at Francis Watson's "Beyond Suspicion: On the Authorsip of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark" - Part II

2010-07-08T21:10:00.001+03:00

On pages 132-144 Watson breaks Clement's letter to Theodore down into six parts:

1. Editorial Introduction (Theod. I.1)

2. Against the Carpocratians (Theod. I.2-15)

3. The Origin and Falsification of the Secret Gospel of Mark (Theod. I.15-II.10)

4. The Need for Secrecy (Theod. II.10-19)

5. The Content of the Secret Gospel (Theod. II.19-III.17)

6. Exegesis of the Secret Gospel (Theod. III.17-18)

He paraphrases the contents of the letter, and offers some choice commentary in each of the six sections. The latter is a true exercise of hermeneutics of suspicion in its most Ricoeurian sense, as nothing in the letter remains what is seems. To drive the point home, Watson ends the discussion of each section with a question that emphasises his perspective of suspiciousness to the limit. These include the following:

Is the more limited formulation the model or template for the broader one? [Having noted that the editorial introduction resembles the introduction found in Sacra Parallela of John of Damascus.] (134)

Or does the homosexual orientation of the Carpocratian Secret Gospel represent an anachronistic attempt to make it relevant for the mid-twentieth century? [Having read the the words 'naked man with naked man' (Theod. III.13) as referring to a homosexual practice of the Carpocratians.] (135-136)

Is the secrecy surrounding the Secret Gospel an indication that the letter is a modern fabrication? (139)

[I]s it easier to attribute such a compositional procedure to a second-century scribe or to a mid-twentieth-century scholar? [Having deducted the compositional procedure of Clement's gospel extracts.] (142)

In the end, Watson summarises his reading of the letter with the remark that "there are indications that the closest analogies may [emphasis original] simply reflect the use of sources and models by a modern author". (143) Considering all of the above, his final conclusion manages to surprise as it is certainly a sensible one:

The arguments presented so far do not as yet amount to a proof that Smith was the author of the letter. But they are hardly 'fantastic conjectures'. ... The debate about this text should rest on something more substantial than impressionistic observations about what other scholars seem inclined to accept. (144)

Paul Ricoeur, in his Freud and Philosophy (1970) presented the hermeneutics of suspicion as a method "geared toward unmasking and decoding hidden meanings", to cite one recent commentator. (David M. Kaplan: Reading Ricoeur. SUNY Press 2008, 198) It is one of the more fascinating ways to read a given text. The surface-level of the text becomes a veil that must be torn apart, for it hides the political interests encoded within; Whom does the text serve? Nothing is what it seems, and the naïve literal reading of the text the least. Instead and behind the fabulous façade of the plain text something completely different is going on.

That Watson is suspicious of Clement's letter to Theodore, that is perfectly well and even desired. That his suspicions result in reading every line of the letter as a signpost to the composition's modern origin, there there must surely lie something with perilous potential. My personal impression - note that my leanings towards the authenticity of the text have their say here - is that Watson tries too hard to find anachronisms from Clement's letter at this section of his article. He ends up somewhat careless with his choice of words, e.g. finding a parallel between Clement's use of the Gospel of the Egyptians and the Secret Gospel in the fact that both are non-canonical gospels used by "heretics" while Clement "chooses to reinterpret [them] rather than to reject" (135) - but the suggested parallels are all modern scholarly constructions, non-existent for the real Clement of Alexandria. On the same page Watson grounds his suspicion on "the love of 'naked man with naked man' (III.13)" (135), but there is no "love" mentioned in the letter, requiring another anachronistic reading from the part of Watson for the matter to become suspicious in the first place!

Here is the problem as I perceive it. When Stephen C. Carlson laid out the hoax hypothesis in The Gospel Hoax (2005), one of his arguments dealt with potential tale-telling derivations from the real Clementine writings. Thus Carlson remarked that "Clement's decision to quote Secret Mark [is] in the first place unnecessary, Clement's unusual care in doing so is inexplicable" (57) stating further that the letter "discloses far more details about the literary origin of the gospel of Mark than is typical for Clement's time" (58). In short, it is suspicious that the letter shows signs deemed not typical of the real Clement.

Now, Scott G. Brown, in The Letter to Theodore: Stephen Carlson’s Case against Clement’s Authorship (JECS 16:4 (2008), 535-572), has shown that in Strom. 3.4.38.2-5 Clement does precisely what happens in Theod. as well, citing a long passage of a questioned text, while in Strom. 3.6.50.1-3 he decides it necessary to insert contextual information into his discussion, just like in the letter to Theodore. With these considerations the letter to Theodore ceases to be un-Clementine, at least in these respects. The hoax hypothesis, however, does not need to budge. Watson, while discussing the last two lines of the letter and the interpretation of the gospel passages that never comes, notes the following:

A similar format may be seen in Clement's treatise on the salvation of the wealthy (Quis dives salvetur). Here too, a problematic Markan text is cited in full... Here too, the citation is followed by the promise of an interpretation of the scriptural words. (142-143)

The question Watson is compelled to ask is "Has this text provided a model for the letter to Theodore"? The question itself is fair enough, but perfectly illustrates the problematic nature of the hoax hypothesis. Whether individual details are judged Clementine or not, they can still be used as the basis for suspicions. Combined with a rigorous use of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion every individual detail becomes damning evidence. If Clementine, the forger has used real Clement as a template, if un-Clementine, the forger has produced an anachronism. The other side of the fence is placed between the devil and the deep blue sea. How can they still defend the letter's authenticity when every word practically screams either of the forger's use of real Clement or of her making a blunder? This perspective hardly gives credit to the defenders of authenticity, and at the end of the day, reading Clement's letter to Theodore as full of suspicious features simply shows that it is indeed possible, to put this insight into the workings of texts quite moderately, to read texts in a number of different ways, e.g. full of discrepancies, or perfect in every way. But why does a balanced take on both pros and cons of the various camps remain out of the question?

It is this undownable nature of the hoax hypothesis I am troubled with. In my estimation the style of conspiracy theorising really is that evident in Watson's one-sided reading of the evidence as always pointing to the possibility of forgery, in the complete lack of features that would shift the scale of probabilities towards the opposite side, i.e. nothing in the letter (at least in this one article) suggests to Watson that it could be anything else than a blatant forgery by Morton Smith. It is all fine and good to construct one's argument as fool-proof as possible, but to build it in such a way that no imaginable counterargument is able to shake it?

Since Watson, however, concludes with the statement I have cited above, that nothing he has found suspicious on pages 132-144 is sufficient for establishing "beyond suspicion" that Clement's letter to Theodore is a forgery, there is no need to debate the finer points of these suspicions. Instead, we will move forward to the remaining five arguments of Watson, granting that it is entirely possible, and in this particular case even desirable, to read Clement's letter to Theodore with eyes full of suspicion. To my mind, the need for such reading simply shows that the question of authenticity has not yet been decided for the satisfaction of all, and that the debate should continue.

Quote for the Day

2010-07-05T11:17:00.000+03:00

In a general sense, academic (or any other) discourse needs disagreements to keep the dialogue alive, interesting, and honest. At its best, academic discourse has a self-regulating character, in which sound arguments and reasons will prevail over weak and unwarranted ones. This is as close as academic discourse gets to “truth” – it is a discursive process that never arrives at the whole truth, but with honest effort will construct more adequate and instructive models for understanding. It is a multi-voiced Socratic dialogue, which requires both humility and erudition.

Ronald Hendel in his response to James Crossley's response to Hendel's original item concerning the current politics in the Society of Biblical Literature.

A Close Look at Francis Watson's "Beyond Suspicion: On the Authorsip of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark" - Part I

2010-06-24T20:44:00.001+03:00

In April 2010 a new article on the question of authenticity of Clement's letter to Theodore was published in Journal of Theological Studies. Francis Watson, a professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, argued that the case was literally "beyond suspicion". In his reading of the letter Watson claims to have found "a way... through its multiple concealments" (131). The author is not Clement of Alexandria, but the alleged discover of the text, late Morton Smith (1915-1991), whose handiwork is "clearly recognizable" (170) as "that truth hidden by seven veils". (Theod. I.26) The article, Beyond Suspicion: On the Authorship of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark (JTS, NS 61 (2010), 128-170), is found online here (subscription required). The following is the abstract:

The suspicion that the ‘discoverer’ of the letter from Clement of Alexandria to Theodore was in reality its author was raised shortly after its first publication in 1973, and has often been reasserted in the years since Morton Smith’s death in 1991. Yet the fragments of the ‘Secret Gospel of Mark’ are often still interpreted on the provisional assumption that the letter containing them is genuine. This article enquires whether the long-standing suspicion of forgery—occasioned largely by the circumstances of the text’s discovery—can be put beyond reasonable doubt. It proceeds by way of a close scrutiny of the letter itself against the double background of the undisputed writings of Clement of Alexandria on the one hand, and the published work of Morton Smith on the other. It is argued that the letter’s internal anomalies are incompatible with Clementine authorship, as are certain compositional techniques; and that it is the product of interests and influences that predate its supposed discovery at the Mar Saba monastery.

I will begin the close look at the article by noting some general agreements and disagreements between the perspectives of Watson and my own. Right at the beginning of the article Watson spells out the specific criteria by which the question of authenticity should be resolved.

"If the forgery hypothesis is to be substantiated, it must be on the basis of the internal evidence of the Clementine letter, read against the double background of the undisputed work of Clement (and Mark) on the one hand, and Smith's own work on the other. Careful analysis of the letter within the appropriate contexts may reach more nearly definitive results than can be achieved by analysing Smith's handwriting, raising questions about his conduct, or speculating about his psychological development." (131)

There is much in the quote I agree with. Certainly the case cannot be solved by coming up with plausible yet ultimately imaginary character traits, motives, and psychopathological conditions for Smith. The business of handwriting identification is not so clear-cut, especially when we recall how Venetia Anastasopoulou concluded recently that Morton Smith probably could not have simulated the handwriting in the letter. The internal evidence read in the appropriate contexts remains, however, the best option available, at least until the missing manuscript reappears.

Getting the article off to such a good start, it is somewhat striking to find the following sentence on the very same page as the above clear-headed marching order.

"Perhaps this enigmatic text actually solicits its own exposure?" (131)

In a moment of poetic motion of his spirit Watson proposes that we are, in fact, dealing with a genuine hoax, as differentiated from mere forgeries in Stephen C. Carlson's The Gospel Hoax (2005). A forgery aims to cheat us for good; a duel tough but fair. A hoax beckons us to approach, constantly whispering of the secrets it keeps from us. Only a genuine hoax (love the language of contradiction here) solicits us to try and solve its mysteries.

I swear I am one day going to make a queer reading out of the hoax hypothesis. Should I send it to Theology and Sexuality or maybe FAMA: Feministisch-theologische Zeitschrift?

In any case, this line looks like the choice candidate for making sense of Watson's approach to Clement's letter to Theodore. Lured by a text begging to have a full disclosure done, Watson is understandably eager to accumulate the evidence of foul play, leading to six main arguments against the letter's authenticity. The claims are reminiscent in style of the argumentation in Carlson's The Gospel Hoax, both for good and bad, as we will see in the subsequent parts of this series. For the end of part I, I wish to draw attention to the curious practice of non-engagement with scholars critical of one's own views, a scholarly practice that is found almost exclusively in the recent debate concerning the authenticity of the Mar Saba letter.

In 2005 things were fairly well. Carlson welcomed further assessments of his hypothesis e.g. in his reply to Kyle Smith (one of the first criticisms laid out against parts of the hoax hypothesis, available from Wieland Wilker's The Secret Gospel of Mark Homepage), and responded at length to Scott G. Brown's The Question of Motive in the Case against Morton Smith (JBL 125 (2006), 351-383) in 2006.

Then something happened. Brown's next article Factualizing the Folklore: Stephen Carlson's Case Against Morton Smith (Harvard Theological Review 99 (2006), 291-327) went without a response, as did Pantuck & Brown's Morton Smith as M. Madiotes: Stephen Carlson's Attribution of Secret Mark to a Bald Swindler (JSHJ 6 (2008), 106-125), Jeff Jay's A New Look at the Epistolary Framework of the Secret Gospel of Mark (JECS 16 (2008), 573-597), Brown's The Letter to Theodore: Stephen Carlson’s Case against Clement’s Authorship (JECS 16 (2008), 535-572), Roger Viklund's Tremors, or Just an Optical Illusion? A Further Evaluation of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis (2009; online here), and Brown and Pantuck's Stephen Carlson’s Questionable Questioned Document Examination (2010; (blog edition with comments; PDF from Wieland Wilker's The Secret Gospel of Mark Homepage). Only in the parallel debate with Peter Jeffery's The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled (2007) has there been any engagement to be had (mainly Brown's essay review & Jeffery's two responses).

Except for the debate centering on Jeffery's monograph (a debate which continues to thrive in a much healthier state), scholars have - or at least this is my sincere impression - simply pretended that the criticism does not exist. Consider, for example, Birger A. Pearson's The Secret Gospel of Mark: A 20th Century Forgery (Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 4 (2008), 1-14). The article includes Jeffery's book from 2007, and at the very least Brown's Factualizing the Folklore (2006), one which I see as a key article in the debate, should be expected to be included. But it is not. Instead, Pearson writes that "I cannot see how anyone... could entertain the possibility that the Secret Gospel of Mark plays any role at all in the development of the canonical Gospel of Mark". (9) Could he have been unaware that such possibilities were indeed entertained - in peer-reviewed scholarly articles, no less - just as Bart D. Ehrman, another pro-forgery scholar, seemed to be unaware in the 2008 SBL Annual Meeting? An oversight, or a deliberate attempt to downplay the other side of the debate?

Francis Watson, at least, is aware of Brown's criticism. He cites Factualizing the Folklore in Beyond Suspicion, starting from page 130, footnotes 5 and 7. Other instances where Brown gets mentioned take place on page 131, footnote 9; page 136, footnote 25; page 138, footnote 32; page 141, footnote 40; page 142, footnote 42; page 156, footnote 77; page 163, footnote 100; page 164, footnote 101. Am I reading too much on this when I perceive that not once is Brown mentioned in the actual text of the article, but all the engagement with him is relegated into the footnotes?

Furthermore, a meaningful dialogue happens only with those minor points Watson had himself rejected as inadequate for establishing "definitive results". Thus, Watson i.a. argues that Smith hold a "gay reading" of the gospel text in Theod., and cites the instances from Smith's books were such a reading is suggested (CA, 251; SG, 114). A discussion of this could certainly be had. But as Watson remarks on page 156, it is not surprising if Smith's views prior to and after 1958 happen to coincide. The real debate should be about the text, not about Smith's interpretation of it. Here we can all agree, but why then is Smith's interpretation debated in the footnote in the first place? Why not engage with Brown about the things that matter?

An optimist in me feels that things are getting better. The defenders of the hoax hypothesis, in its Carlsonian form, have allowed their critics to creep into the footnotes; for them the change from non-existence must come as a change long overdue. Next paper will, no doubt, start to engage with their arguments directly, and the one after that will finally give a definitive response to the most burning of the questions - How is Factualizing the Folklore not a death blow to the Carlsonian hoax hypothesis, not to mention the others that have been published since?

For one other thing: a chance to reflect my thinking about Watson's article has been offered by the_cave whose A Critique of Watson can be found in his blog, Synoptic Solutions.

Better Late Than Never

2010-06-22T11:28:00.000+03:00

It feels somewhat silly that I need to allocate special time to read through longer blog posts, or a series of posts, but without careful management of the 40 hours I'm clocking for PhD every week things could get out of hands all too quickly. Today I put some time to read through Ben Blackwell's retrospective regarding his recently finished PhD studies (in six parts: here, here, here, here, here, and here), and yes, it had waited patiently for its turn for about two months.

One practice I have not put into use so far concerns the reading of primary material vs secondary literature. In part 5 Ben advices:

* Read and do your research on your primary texts first, and then write the draft of your chapter. That is, don’t engage with secondary material until after you get your ideas on paper. This more than anything else will make your whole project easier and less stressful:

1. You let your understanding of the text drive your discussion. In a thesis you are required to detail all ancillary debates about issues. If you do the secondary research first, your argument might get lost in these debates. (I think this happened some in my Romans chapter.)
2. This allows you figure out the parts of the text that need more thought, and thus it will help you better choose which secondary material to look at.
3. This forces you to get the majority of your core writing done early. You will thus have more time to edit and craft the flow than if you left the majority of the writing to the end.
4. There are always unlimited amounts of secondary literature to read. If you spend all your time reading, you won’t have time to craft your argument and your writing. Clearly, there are issues that you will only learn about from secondary material, but let that come after writing the full piece based on the primary text.

Better late than never, to change my habits, although the secondary literature on Clement's letter to Theodore, except some of the more ancient and/or esoteric treatises, i.e. some of the works from the 1970s, I have already perused through. Nail gets hit on the head with remark #1: the framing of the questions in secondary literature has an enormous influence on my reading of the primary sources. The only alternative to defeat this tendency is to keep on questioning the things other authors take for granted. With this a moderate success is to be had, even though it is certainly an inferior method. That things are nothing in themselves, but are perceived to be one way and not the other simply because a habit to perceive them one way and not the other has been formed due to one's education/indoctrination/socialisation; a perspective roughly along these lines has allowed me in the past to think, as they say, outside the box. What if this statement is formulated differently? What if I give a primary status to this instead of that? What if I change this question to something a little more open-ended? What could an alternative argument look like?

Indeed, a compilation of the two, always starting with the primary sources and always trying to come up with alternative scenarios to deal with the evidence, looks like a sure-fire way to place oneself into the dreary margins of the academia.

Further Comments on the Recent Handwriting Papers - Part II

2010-06-14T13:41:00.000+03:00

Shortly after Brown's and Pantuck's paper Biblical Archaeology Review published the two reports it had commissioned with its November / December 2009 issue featuring four articles on the Secret Gospel of Mark. Or rather, BAR published the one analysis that was delivered on time. For reasons not quite clear (and to the apparent irritation of Hershel Shanks, the editor of the magazine) Agamemnon Tselikas, a Greek palaeographer, failed to meet "several agreed deadlines". Instead of a written report, Shanks had to relate the contents of several telephone calls with Tselikas, which came down to this:

Agamemnon Tselikas... has concluded that Morton Smith forged the letter containing Secret Mark.

Based on our conversations, this is the basis for Dr. Tselikas’s conclusion: He has examined other manuscripts from Mar Saba and concluded that the Secret Mark letter was not written by a monk there. He has located another document at another monastery that he believes was written by the monk whose handwriting Smith was attempting to imitate. He has also learned that Smith was at this other monastery examining manuscripts.

(Source: BAR May / June 2010)

The original news item, first in stephan huller's observations and then in here, saw a number of interesting comments. Not much more can be added with information this scarce. If Tselikas, however, has actually found another MS with a hand that resembles the hand in Clement's letter to Theodore, there are a number of possible conclusions we could reach, with divergent probabilities. That there was an 18th-century monk who penned both documents could be demonstrated. That the hands are different, despite some superficial similarities, is the option I would place my bet on; according to the one CV I found Tselikas does not practice forensic document examination, and even though palaeographers work with handwritings as well, the two fields "do not communicate with each other", as one recent commentator put it. (Davis, The Practice of Handwriting Identification, 251) On this notion, Tselikas' own hypothesis looks to be extremely tricky to demonstrate, bearing in mind that another analyst assessed Morton Smith to have been incapable of simulating the handwriting in Theod.

The other BAR expert who reached the above conclusion, Venetia Anastasopoulou, "a prominent handwriting expert... who has frequently testified in Greek courts" according to BAR, compared the handwriting in Clement's letter to Theodore with numerous examples of Morton Smith's own handwriting, including the complete transcription of Theod. from 1958, and Appendix A (Palaeographic Peculiarities) from Smith's Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (1973) illustrating the various ligatures and abbreviations found in the questioned text. The sample material was decided to be "sufficient in quality and quantity to be able to reach a conclusion" by her. (7)

Anastasopoulou begins by noting that the handwriting in Theod. "looks like an artistic design of good quality... the text is written spontaneously with an excellent rhythm". (9) Turning to the samples of Smith's writing, her tone is quite different:

"Conclusion: There is an obvious difference in his mother tongue writing and in his Greek writing. His writing in English language is fluent with letter connections between the words, with personal abbreviations and characteristics, whereas the Greek words are written letter-letter as copy book at a lower speed, without ease and the range of variations is very limited. His writing is like that of a school student." (18)

Based on these three observations - that the writing in Theod. is written with "freedom, spontaneity and artistic flair" (13), that the English writing by Smith is also "spontaneous and unconstrained, with a very good rhythm" (14), whereas in Smith's Greek writing "the movement is constrained" (15) and the overall impression is that of a "school student" (18) - Anastasopoulou concludes that "it is highly probable that Morton Smith could not have simulated the document of “Secret Mark”" (38). She further qualifies her expert opinion reminding that it is "based solely on the documents listed as having been examined... This opinion is subject to amendment if additional examinations are performed using additional exemplars which may exhibit evidence not observable in the documents upon which this opinion was based". (38)

So far, Anastasopoulou's report has received two responses. First, Peter Jeffery's Response to Venetia Anastasopoulou can be downloaded from his homepage that collects together various reactions to his 2007 monograph The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled and other related things. Second, Jason A. Staples' BAR “Secret Mark” Handwriting Analysis Unimpressive can be found in his blog, Zealot Outside the Building. Both are asking important questions, and some of the specific criticisms are likewise common to both. Below I wish to move the discussion forwards by offering an argument I believe both the defenders of the authenticity and the defenders of the forgery hypothesis are willing to accept.

Jeffery raises the issue of forger's tremor, lamenting that Anastasopoulou failed to express anything explicit about the matter. In fact, I believe she did just that, confirming the recent suggestion by Roger Viklund that there is no forger's tremor to be seen in the handwriting of Theod. I believe our use of the language, our suboptimal understanding of the principles of QDE has placed us at a vantage point where everything seems a bit twisted. We keep talking of forger's tremor when we should really be talking about line quality; the two are not synonymous. Line quality can be observed. It is the most significant detail a questioned document examiner looks for, for it exhibits the writer's ability to control the fine movements of the hand and consequently of the pen. Forger's tremor, however, cannot be directly observed. It is a particular interpretation of the causes producing poor line quality, when other options include age, stress, illness, drug consumption, environmental difficulties (lack of light, slanted writing platform), etc.

Even if we follow Albert S. Osborn and conclude that "[c]lose scrutiny of line quality alone often furnishes the basis for grave suspicion" (Osborn, Questioned Documents (1929), 273-274), it is my understanding that forger's tremor properly exists only in relation to some other writing from the purported author. Without known standards to compare the writing to, there is only poor line quality with unknown causes. Forger's tremor becomes an option only when the purported author can be shown to be capable of producing writing with good line quality i.e. poor line quality is not a characteristic feature of her writing.

On this basis I would conclude that Anastasopoulou, when she observes that "the text is written spontaneously with an excellent rhythm... [t]he letters and their combinations are curved fluently while at the same time the grammatical rules are followed... [t]he movement of the writing indicates a hand used to writing in this manner... [t]he letters are written unconsciously" (9), she implies that line quality in Clement's letter to Theodore is good - otherwise she would not assess its rhythm to be "excellent" and its letters to be curved "fluently".

Furthermore, both Jeffery and Staples challenge the validity of Anastasopoulou's analysis on the grounds that she makes a fundamental error when she compares the 18th-century calligraphic script of Theod. to the modern block Greek letters of Morton Smith. According to Staples, they are "two different types of writing and entirely different skills", while Jeffery holds that we have "an apples-to-oranges comparison" at our hands. Anastasopoulou herself reached an opposite conclusion. In her expert opinion Smith's transcription ("written in pen as an official script") "can be used in the comparison with the questioned document" (6), and the material is "sufficient in quality and quantity to be able to reach a conclusion". (8) What does she mean by all this?

It should probably be noted first that Anastasopoulou's analysis is not an in-depth guide to the mechanics of questioned document examination, but a simple report where she gives her conclusions but not her whole reasoning, nor does she spell out the basic philosophical assumptions at the bottom of QDE. Jeffery is right in remarking that analysts should distinguish "personal characteristics" from "style characteristics", i.e. idiographic features from allographic ones, but once again I believe this is just what Anastasopoulou did.

Every system, including biblical studies as a field, is built upon unfounded premises that are taken for granted. In questioned document examination, as I have come to understand it, the whole enterprise rests on a notion of a model hand, an internalised ideal hand that the handwriting of the individual will gravitate towards. To cite Davis one more time:

"[T]he basis of forensic document analysis resides in the belief that nonetheless a given writer will tend to produce writing that is idiographic: that a given piece of writing can have characteristics that are ascertainable by expert analysis, constant between different writings by the same individual, and unique to that individual."

(Davis, The Practice of Handwriting Identification, 261)

In other words, the foundation of QDE is the conviction that the model hand produces idiographic elements even when an attempt to disguise is undertaken. Consequently, in some but not in all cases it is possible to reach a conclusion, based on the lack of idiographic features in the handwriting, that a given individual did not write a given text. It should be remembered that the comparison is done letter by letter basis, i.e. isolating individual letters, and Anastasopoulou's resolution that the scripts are comparable is likely due to the fact that analysing the letters individually some of them, gamma and omicron for example, are drawn about the same way, thus showing the same idiographic features if there is something to be seen. Her conclusion is an expert opinion i.e. a subjective assessment on the scale of probabilities that Morton Smith probably could not have simulated the handwriting in Theod., but the fundamentals of QDE are not, according to my understanding of its principles, violated.

I am unsure if Jeffery and Staples are confused by the fact that Anastasopoulou's report includes all the letters of the Greek alphabet, even though some of them are drawn quite differently. In my mind the inclusion of the whole alphabet is a normal practice, but the conclusions reached are based only on some of them. As a forensic document examiner Anastasopoulou conducted both "[s]tereoscopic and macroscopic examination" (5), and likely knew how to focus on the idiographic features, though the difference between "personal" and "style" characteristics is, once again, an individual judgement call. The question seems to come down to "Is she really a professional analyst?", able to follow the rules of her industry to the letter. I would suggest that suspicions of her expertise should not be entertained if nothing concrete is produced to back them up, nor is it probably a good idea to dismiss the whole field of document examination on the basis that one's favourite hypothesis gets undermined.

It is for the credit of both Jeffery and Staples that they are willing to let go of this particular aspect of the forgery hypothesis. Jeffery admits that "it does raise the bar for those who argue that Smith penned the Mar Saba document in his own hand", for they will "need to show, if they can, that Smith acquired or attempted fluency in this type of Greek cursive, even though he did not habitually use it". For Staples "BAR’s expert witness is only able to tell us that we have no material from Morton Smith comparable to the Mar Saba letter". Does this, in Staples' view, invalidate Carlson's handwriting analysis in The Gospel Hoax? To a degree the answer is yes: "in the absence of better samples or more persuasive handwriting analysis, this kind of analysis is not a smoking gun for either side."

In conclusion, I propose that the handwriting aspect is done with.

When the proponents of the forgery hypothesis are willing to disqualify it, it is time to let it go. I wish to note, however, that this is not a decisive victory for anyone. For what it is worth, we may conclude that a small step, at least in some direction, has been taken, and at least one-third of Carlson's book (practically whole of chapter 3) has been adequately evaluated to the satisfaction of all parties:

On the basis of the handwriting in Clement's letter to Theodore Morton Smith cannot be accused of forgery.

Further Comments on the Recent Handwriting Papers - Part I

2010-06-04T14:05:00.000+03:00

(Previously an attempt to write A Short Comment, but to no avail.)

In the past two months a number of papers have dealt with the handwriting of Clement's letter to Theodore. Below I wish to collect together the papers and the responses they have received, and offer some further observations on the present state of the debate.

First, Scott G. Brown's and Allan J. Pantuck's Stephen Carlson’s Questionable Questioned Document Examination (blog edition with comments; PDF from Wieland Wilker's The Secret Gospel of Mark Homepage) reports of their recent contact with Julie C. Edison, a professional document examiner who wrote a letter to Stephen C. Carlson, assessing his methods of handwriting analysis. As Brown and Pantuck put it, the information they received leaves "both Carlson’s supporters and critics feeling deceived". Among other things, Edison did not read Greek, was able to study only the halftone reproductions of the Mar Saba MS, with no known standards to compare the handwriting with, while spotting natural variation in the handwriting - all details that seriously undermine the validity of Carlson's analysis in The Gospel Hoax (2005) chapter 3. The most disturbing part of the paper is the implicit accusation that Carlson had deliberately withheld this information, quoting only select parts of Edison's letter. Or did he really judge the above to have been unnecessary "discussion of the background", as stated in his blog Hypotyposeis.

Even more curious is the aftermath. When kindly asked to provide "a response, an explanation for what appears to be an attempt to selectively present facts that support his theories while suppressing others that might call these theories into question", Carlson indeed complied, and what better place to post a response than as a comment to a completely unrelated blog? A good blog, mark you, that Philip Harland's Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean, but still. And as for the response itself...

It is hardly damaging. Brown and Pantuck have misunderstood a fairly standard disclaimer and used to attack a position I have not espoused. All the disclaimer says, rightly, is that without a sample from the person is supposed to have written it, it cannot be shown to be forgery “solely on the basis of forensic document examination.” My book, of course, does not make that claim and more cautiously states that the examination raises a question of its genuineness.

Furthermore, Brown’s decrying of the lack of “known standards” is especially rich, considering that I was the first person to publish any comparison of the handwriting with genuine 18th cen. samples from Mar Saba, something which neither Smith nor Brown had done.

The book (The Gospel Hoax) actually concludes that "[i]nstead of being scribed by an eighteenth-century monk at Mar Saba, the evidence shows that it was penned by an imitator" (page 47), and again on page 73: "The manuscript was written in what may appear to be handwriting of the eighteenth century, but the hesitation and shakiness of its strokes and the retouching of its letters, coupled with twentieth-century letter forms, indicate that the handwriting is actually a drawn imitation of an eighteenth-century style."

To my mind, the wording - in the indicative mood suggesting that the statement's are either factual or have a strong probability of being factual - of shows, was penned, was written, and indicate that.. is actually does not "cautiously state" that the hoax hypothesis on the basis of the handwriting analysis is merely raising questions; it unapologetically claims the manuscript a forgery!

Why do we not get phrases like "the evidence suggests", "the manuscript appears to be written", "the hesitation and shakiness... point to the possibility", etc.? As I have noted previously, the language of probabilities in The Gospel Hoax is lacking to a degree where I can count the instances with only one hand. Why are the conclusions attached practically nowhere with qualifications like "probable", "possible", and "improbable"? Under conditions of normal science the assessment of probability is fundamentally important, for an argument is valid only if all of the individual units it is composed of are also valid. I propose that the opposite is true for non-science, pseudoscience, or the style of conspiracy theorising, whichever name one would like to use.

It is not just a question of language, of streamlining our literary expressions for aesthetic and interpretative reasons, or of shielding our arguments from criticism. On the contrary, our use of the language is the question of our thinking, and due to the nature of the multitudes of cognitive biases, we are better off thwarting them any way we can. There is no great mystery here. To take but one relevant example, Tom Davis in his fairly recent The Practice of Handwriting Identification (The Library 8, 251-276) emphasises the importance of keeping confirmation bias at bay, reached by applying the methods of QDE rigorously enough. In practice, Davis instructs the examiner to draw an analytic chart of all the letters in the sample document i.e. the document containing the known handwriting from the suspect, going through it industriously letter by letter. After this procedure the chart is to be locked away, and a similar process, a new chart, to be produced from the handwriting in the questioned document. According to Davis, it is of essence to begin the comparison of the charts only after both have been completed, for jumping to the questioned document too early we will tend to look for those significant similarities between the handwritings all too eagerly. Furthermore, Davis points out that the examiner is supposed to look for both significant similarities (pointing to the possibility of identical author) and significant differences (pointing to the possibility of different authors). That the latter is lacking in The Gospel Hoax, as observed by Brown & Pantuck in the article as well, may suggest that the confirmation bias was responsible for much of its interpretation, yet another sign that Carlson's handwriting analysis was not up to the standards of QDE.

Every time I make a qualitative statement I remind myself that my intuitive understanding of the interpretation of the evidence - an intuitive understanding I have developed in the course of reading myself into that particular field I have happened to read myself into - may not be shared by my colleagues, and the consensus in my particular field. Writing with the language of probabilities I keep it fresh in my mind that I may have gotten it all wrong, that my individual perspective on the interpretation of the evidence is not an all-encompassing, universal and "true" understanding of the matter, nor the end of the debate, nor are all the other scholars who disagree with me unqualified to do research.

On the other hand, if we go on writing nonsense, we will begin to lean in that direction in our thinking as well. If we start to write with strong propositions, we may very well forget that others approach the evidence from different angles, see different things, and construct their cases differently. This style of writing is one of the themes that crops up in numerous pseudoscholarly works. The author usually comes to her topic from the perspective of an outsider. She usually spots a great number of things the experts in the field have gotten all wrong. She usually has no grasp of the questions of philosophy of science pertaining to the field, and goes straightforward for "the truth" or "the true account". She asserts that her conclusions are natural, rising directly from the evidence. And finally, she has usually forgot somewhere along the way that true academic discussion is about having a dialogue with fellow scholars, not about making a case and defending it with ever more contrived arguments for all eternity - at least, this would be my ideal understanding of the workings of academia.

As for the latter part of Carlson's response, I am a bit puzzled. While it is true that Morton Smith did not publish pictures of MSS from Mar Saba, and that Carlson was the first one to do so, I fail to see the difference they are supposed to make. There is no doubt that MS65 looks like it was written in the 18th-century; we do not need the Mar Saba MSS for that. For what do we need them for? As far as I can see, it was Edison's and not Brown's and Pantuck's observation that "Mr. Carlson did not have known standards from Clement or the 18th century monk who may have transcribed his 3rd century letter". Without known standards there is no way to ascertain that MS65 is either genuine or forgery - even if there was a poor line quality to be seen (highly doubtful, cf. the work of Roger Viklund), it is irrelevant until we know if the alleged writer did or did not produce poor line quality in all of her other writings, too.

Voting for the New Bishop of Helsinki Just Started - Now Completed

2010-06-03T13:14:00.002+03:00

In the second round we have two magnificent candidates left, Irja Askola and Matti Poutiainen, both with years and years of experience working in the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church.

The results are due in just three hours, for the amount of voters is limited (cf. Archbishop Election back in March).

If elected, Askola would be the first woman in the position of bishop in the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church. As the more progressive of the two, she would also get my vote.

Update: Irja Askola will be the new bishop of Helsinki! Margins were extremely close, with Askola's 591 votes against Poutiainen's 567. Nevertheless, the church continues to take small steps into more inclusive, less discriminating direction, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Preliminary Sketches for the Cognitive Study of Conspiracy Theorising

2010-05-31T15:11:00.002+03:00

The following sketches result from the course Ritual and Magic in early Judaism and early Christianity held in the University of Helsinki from March till the beginning of May 2010 by István Czachesz and Risto Uro. Even though the course, concentrated on ritual and magic from the cognitive perspective, was as good as I have come to expect of courses in Helsinki, I felt I was unable to get a real grasp of the big picture. There were various scholars with theories. They utilized data collected by cognitive psychologists to explain religious practices; hence the name cognitive science of religion. But some of the theories and individual ideas were clearly overlapping – different titles for the same phenomenon. Sometimes I merely thought there must have been some commonality, but nothing was clearly spelled out. No wonder that Aku Visala – whose dissertation Religion Explained? A Philosophical Appraisal of the Cognitive Science of Religion (http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe200911272374) includes a useful general outline of the CSR movement – confesses in Acknowledgments that “[i]t took me about a year to realise what was going on in the cognitive science of religion, another year to find out a way to approach it”. In this regard I still have approx. nine months to go on clueless.

For starters, however, I wanted to read a single treatise on the subject, a single work that would let me see just how the cognitive approach really clicked when applied to a massively complex phenomenon like religion. Of the alternatives I chose Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors (2001) with a clear goal in my mind, to try and push the cognitive approach into an interrelated, equally complex phenomenon known as conspiracy theorising i.e. postulating conspiracies behind (usually) events of significant consequences. Following John Dewey and especially Thomas Kuhn, this method is the preferred way of training a new generation of scholars; simply make them try and imitate their predecessors, and they will quickly catch up, and develop their approach into new directions. For this essay I will first summarise Boyer's work, and then apply its method to a select few conspiracy theories, with a little bit of help from the psychologist Michael Shermer, who gets a brief mention in Boyer's book (Boyer 2001, 384), and who is about the only one who has begun to utilize cognitive approach in the study of conspiracy theorising. Various other works that have been brought to my attention during the course on ritual and magic will also be mentioned when relevant.

Summarising Boyer in one paragraph, he takes as his starting point the notion that the human mind consists of numerous modular inferences systems activated and deactivated depending on the information the brain receives. Religious thinking utilises these inferences systems, but they would continue to exist even if religious concepts did not. Consequently, religious concepts are parasitic in nature, though it would be a misunderstanding to take the word negatively – religious concepts are parasitic just like “[o]ur capacities to play music, paint pictures or even make sense of printed ink-patterns on a page are also parasitic” i.e. all of these benefit and depend on the existing inferences systems. (Boyer 2001, 357) Religion is also the probable outcome from the manner these inferences systems work. This origin of religious concepts explains easily why they are relatively similar all over the world, as we will see.

In the first chapter Boyer summarises the earlier attempts to explain religious behaviour and thinking. All of these have one thing in common: a belief that “there must be a single factor that will explain why there is religion in all human groups”, a single 'magic bullet' that gives the precise explanation for everything religious. (Boyer 2001, 56-57) Even though scientific enquiry favours theories that have less moving parts – the principle of Occam's razor – there is a line where the suggested explanations become too simplistic and lose their explanatory power. Religious concepts employ multiple mental modules and, consequently, require multiple interrelated explanations before their true power becomes fathomable. It seems that we humans have a tendency, following the philosopher Robert Nozick, to prefer hidden hand scenarios, where a single unifying principle is sought to explain a given phenomenon. (Boyer 2001, 343) It feels unintuitive to accept that no one explanation will suffice, but to unintuitiveness the scholar's mind must be trained – most phenomena in scientific discourse are not adequately dealt with only one all-embracing cause.

Following Boyer, I should also make a brief sketch of the earlier attempts to study conspiracy theorising. From the 1960s onwards scholars in the field of cultural studies like David Brion Davis and especially Richard Hofstadter began to write about conspiracy theories. Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964) is considered a classic. In this essay conspiracy theorising is approached as a style, rising from feelings of alienation and helplessness of the pathologically paranoid. The paranoid theorist views history in both apocalyptic and dualistic terms. The enemy, the core group behind the conspiracy, comes off as an almost divine force; no amount of negotiation will do. The paranoid style breaks loose in the conspiracy theorist's refusal to allow any possibility for error or confusion in the reality – instead, every detail must be placed into a rational order. After Hofstadter the conspiracy theory studies were dominated by sociological and psychological approaches. In the turn of the millennium a backlog of fine studies appeared, including Jodi Dean's Aliens in America (1998), Mark Fenster's Conspiracy Theories (1999), Paranoia Within Reason edited by George E. Marcus (1999), and Peter Knight's Conspiracy Culture (2000). Of the recent treatises I should mention David Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories (2009) and Arthur Goldwag's Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (2009), an encyclopedic treatment of all things conspiratorial. Some of the aforementioned authors have had something to say of the cognitive approach to their subject, but as Fenster comments in a recent interview, uncharted terrains “include insights from social and cognitive psychology, social history, extensive ethnographic research, and from comparisons across culture as well as time”. (Rorotoko's cover interview on May 21th, 2010 at http://www.rorotoko.com/)

In the second chapter Boyer tries to describe the supernatural, a key concept in the discussion of religion. His analysis concludes that a supernatural concept breaks down ontological categories, our intuitive understanding of the proper nature of objects, whether they are HUMAN, ANIMAL, PLANT, ARTIFICAL (man-made), or NATURAL (mountain, river, tree, etc.). A statue (artificial) that sheds tears (belongs to human) breaks its ontological category. A mountain (natural) that digests (human) does likewise. Spirits can be viewed simply as HUMANS that do not age or die, both non-human traits. Furthermore, Boyer and Justin Barrett have tested the effect of breaking ontological categories, and concluded that exactly one violation makes the concepts and stories more memorable that if they were simply “odd” without the single violation. The power of the ontological categories lies in the fact that they bring to our mind numerous inferences without much effort i.e. when we observe that we are dealing with a HUMAN, we will automatically infer that she possesses the whole cognitive apparatus, and will have intentions, thoughts, plans, and will be able to remember what we are saying, etc. With the supernatural these inferences come just as easily. It is worth noting that the religious traditions always posit the human cognitive apparatus to supernatural entities; there are no gods that do not remember what they observe, no spirits that are not in interaction with others, and no talking trees that are in existence only when no one is looking at them.

Following Boyer, some considerations regarding the terminology should be made here. What are we talking about when we conjure the phrase conspiracy theory up? Conspiracies certainly do exist; of that there is no doubt. According to Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/) a conspiracy is simply “the act of conspiring together” and “an agreement among conspirators”; “a group of conspirators”. There is no need to draw a complete chronological list of all the secret bandings between people, and their (usually) politically motivated effort to change the order of things, for they range too far and wide from the assassination of Julius Caesar to the Gunpowder Plot in the 17th century England to the recent Campaign Financing Scandal in Finland.

A much more modern phrase, conspiracy theory can be traced only to the end of the 19th century. A theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators” according to Merriam-Webster, and “the theory that an event or phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties” according to Oxford English Dictionary (where it was included only in 1997) are neutral descriptions. In popular speech the conspiracy theory is more multifaceted than the dictionary entries give it credit for. It can be used to describe a mild alternative interpretation of a particular chain of events, as well as an extremely bizarre alternative reality. For an example, the former happens when the Persian Gulf War is renamed to “the Oil War”, or attention is drawn to the fact that democratically elected leaders receive most of their information through civil servants who remain in their positions regardless of the election results (so-called Shadow Government Conspiracy). The latter actualises when the former BBC journalist David Icke depicts the elite all over the world as belonging to a race of shape-shifting reptilian humanoids, who originated from inside the hollow Earth, or when the late Michael Jackson is claimed to be still alive, that he is in fact La Toya Jackson, the fifth child of the Jackson family, having been his alter ego for years even before his “death”. The variety found among the conspiracy theories leads me to question if there is any sense in placing all of them under a common label. Furthermore, conspiracy theory is regularly used pejoratively, to deny the factuality of a belief thought as inconceivable if not downright crazy. The situation is complicated even further by scholars who have wished to retain the term for a specific usage. George Johnson, to take but one example, has used conspiracy theory in Architects of Fear (1983) to describe a construction that is based on certain methodological flaws.

It is well-known that the concept of religion is virtually impossible to describe without closing some traditions intuitively understood as “religious” out. With conspiracy theories we will most likely have to succumb as well; various conspiracy theories cannot be mapped out without the concept of family resemblance i.e. all of them are related to some other theories, but no essence, common to all of them, can be found. On the other hand, Boyer does not problematise the concept of religion. He has chosen a cast of religious traditions, and uses them repeatedly to illustrate his points – the Kwaio of the Solomon Islands and the Fang people of Cameroon. It feels like a good idea to choose some particular conspiracy theories for furthering the discussion. Let us begin with the following duo: Prieuré de Sion as a historically orientated conspiracy theory, and 9/11 as a conspiracy theory tied to a ground-breaking event (at least from the perspective of the Western world). To summarise these theories into one sentence each, Prieuré de Sion is a clandestine organisation created during the first crusade to place a descendant of Jesus to the throne of united Europe (basic text: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln), while 9/11 refers to the terrorist attack in New York in 2001 that was organised by the U.S.A. government, executed by the CIA (basic text: Loose Change (the documentary) that was directed by Dylan Avery in 2005).

The conceptual difficulties with conspiracy theory remain to be solved at some other time. We will still be able to follow Boyer and ask if the ontological categories are violated in conspiracy theories. Which one of the aforementioned categories is activated here? From Richard Hofstadter onwards it has been noted that the body of conspirators is viewed as an almost divine force, almost omnipotent and omniscient entity. This suggestion holds true in all of our test cases: Prieuré de Sion's behind-the-scenes existence for centuries, the CIA's ability to pull off a large-scale strike against its own while transferring the blame to a third party with no one blowing the proverbial whistle holds an almost supernatural aura over the actors. Are these actors placed into the HUMAN category? A concept invented by the anthropologist Larry Hirschfeld, naïve sociology, comes to the rescue. According the Hirschfeld the human mind is ill-equipped to handle complex interactions inside a social group, thus we intuitively think that social groups have intentions, desires, and other human features – the Church teaches, the committee suggests, this ethnical group holds that, etc. Naturally, any church and any committee consists of individual human minds with human features, and the collective itself does not have any – we just treat them as if they had (Boyer 2001, 288-291) Consequently, the correct ontological category for the body of conspirators is definitely HUMAN, whether they are secret societies, governments let loose, or aliens from another worlds.

The abundance of the word “almost” in the preceding paragraph gives the conclusion away. While religious concepts contain a violation of the ontological categories, conspiracy theories come close but do not go all the way. Boyer himself concludes that “the popular version of aliens – they have knowledge we do not possess, they have counterintuitive properties, they have huge powers (give or take the occasional aeronautical mishap) – would make them very similar to most versions of supernatural agents.” (Boyer 2001, 190) At the same time there are differences. Conspiracy theories certainly resemble religions and agents in the conspiracy theories resemble religious, supernatural agents, but only some of the dimensions of religion can be found in conspiracy theories. Following Boyer we could, at most, conclude that conspiracy theories are ersatz-religions in some, but not in all aspects.

The above consideration – that there is no adequate description for the concept of conspiracy theory for the field is too large and too varied, and that conspiracy theories, as opposed to religious concepts, do not violate ontological categories – can be challenged in a number of ways. Even though no one worships the Ickean shape-shifting reptilians, some cults do worship visitors from other worlds, come up with rituals for them and let them effect their personal day-to-day lives, as Boyer, too, agrees. (Boyer 2001, 190) Michael Shermer, on the other hand, juxtaposes “souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention” without distinguishing between them in any way – all are entities with “power and intention”. (Shermer 2009a, 36) The historian Robert Goldberg holds that the “conspiracy thinkers constitute a community of believers”. (Bower 2009, 11) I am inclined to speculate that conspiracy theorising, as Boyer thinks of doctrinal religions i.e. religions with a clear-defined dogma (Boyer 2009, 305), results from a chain of peculiar historical incidents and is not the rule; in the long run ordinary religions will still win the race. For now we will agree that it is still reasonable to distinguish between religions and conspiracy theories, even if the actors they posit share some striking similarities.

Boyer's third chapter lays down the basics of his understanding of the cognitive processes. The Brain, a machine that thinks, contains a myriad of inferences systems that are activated and deactivated depending on the information the brain is fed with. A particular human characteristic is the possibility of decoupling cognition i.e. the inferences systems can work even if the information used is known to be fictional – we have the ability to imagine possible worlds, and still draw inferences from our imagining. Examples of these systems, under the folk biology category, are the intuitive understanding that species have a permanent essence (it is “catness” that makes the cat a cat), the intuitive understanding that ANIMALs (including HUMANs) have intentions, the face-recognition system, and the contagion system that keeps us away from potential dangers through emotions of fear and disgust. No further comment is warranted; we have to begin from the assumption that at the intuitive level the conspiracy theorist's brain functions similarly to every other brain, just as Boyer assumes.

Finally, in chapter four Boyer gets some highly useful stuff nailed down. Religion is practical for we tend to use and interact with gods and spirits in connection with significant events. Citing Stewart Guthrie's anthropomorphic tendency – that our most natural inclination is to interpret environmental cues in human terms, including supernatural agents that always have a human cognitive apparatus in religious traditions i.e. they understand, remember, and have intentions and desires – Boyer concludes that “[o]ur imagination naturally turns to human-like creations because our intuitive understanding of persons is just far more complex than our understanding of mechanical and biological processes”. (Boyer 2001, 163) He refers to Justin Barrett's suggestion of a mental module called Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), responsible for postulating agents behind all sorts of signs. In Barrett's mind there is a clear evolutionary reason for the hypersensitiveness of HADD: in the middle of a hunt it is more preferable to have the occasional false alarm than to undervalue the signs pointing to a potential hunter.

Strategic information is another core concept in chapter four. Differentiated from neutral information, strategic information is knowledge that is evaluated to be important in the human game of social interaction, in which case it triggers those inferences systems dealing with social interaction. Furthermore, it helps to explain the perseverance of agents produced by HADD. For humans the strategic information is always incomplete, whereas the supernatural agents have access to all of it. Consequently, inferences systems dealing with interaction on a personal level are activated. The concept of relevance, first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, holds that those concepts that produce more intuitive inferences requiring less cognitive effort get passed around more. The supernatural agents fall into that category. In Boyer's words, “concepts that 'excite' more inference systems (or all of these) are more likely to be acquired and transmitted than material that less easily corresponds to expectation formats or does not generate inferences... because the way our brains are put together makes it very difficult not to build them”. (Boyer 2001, 187)

The chapter is heavy on theory, and some concrete examples are in order. First, I should note that Michael Shermer's concepts of agenticity and patternicity are yet other names for Guthrie's anthropomorphic tendency and Barrett's HADD. Patternicity is summarised as “the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise”, agenticity as the “human inclination to postulate intentional agents behind the patterns extracted from the 'noise'”. (Shermer 2009a, 36) The same general idea is yet again duly documented in the psychologist Bruce Hood's SuperSense (2009). Let us now observe these mental modules in action:

As we pondered this sequence of events, we became increasingly convinced that there was some pattern underlying and governing such an intricate web. It certainly did not appear to be random or wholly coincidental. On the contrary, we seemed to be dealing with the vestiges of some complex and ambitious overall design... Were we in fact dealing with a calculated pattern? If so, the obvious question was who devised it, for patterns of such intricacy do not devise themselves. All the evidence available to us pointed to meticulous planning and careful organization – so much so that increasingly we suspected there must be a specific group of individuals, perhaps comprising an order of some sort, working assiduously behind the scenes. (Baigent 1983, 92, 94)

In the above quote Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln justify the existence of Prieuré de Sion behind various historical incidents. They have gone through an awful lot of historical detail, connected them to other historical details, and finally began to see some pattern in all of it. They are absolutely right in saying that the obvious question was who devised it, an obvious question rising from the mental modules handling the agency identification. Lest I be misunderstood, one thing should probably be said aloud: these mental modules are not conspiracy-theory-generating-systems in themselves. Every bit of data that our brains receive is more or less “noise” for it is the function of the brain to construct a coherent perception out of the data, and to effect a coherent placement of the individual into a relation with the world outside of the mind, i.e. the brain does not “see”, instead it builds a picture based on the data feed to it by the senses. The same mental modules are responsible for common survival in the world of information, and the paranoid style of postulating grand conspiracies behind incidents. In other words, some of the patterns our brain construes are, to take a naïve stance of scientific realism to the world, “real” while other patterns are “not real”. Likewise, sometimes our tendency to find agents “gets it right”, sometimes it does not. The epistemological questions are way out of the scope of this paper, but interested parties are directed to Brian L. Keeley's essay Of Conspiracy Theories (1999) and Charles W. Lidz's essay Conspiracy, Paranoia and the Problem of Knowledge (2006) for starters.

Consequently, Baigent et al. are using the exact same inferences systems that I use when I try to make sense of the compositional history of Markan gospel(s). I, too, go through an awful lot of historical detail, and make connections. I, too, begin to see a pattern at some point – a hypothesis of a possible historical reconstruction, if you will. Contrary to a conspiracy theorist, I maintain rigorously that the pattern I let my mind draw is acceptable by other scholars i.e. it conforms to the rules of the game, the scientific method (generally) and the historical method (more specifically), and the specialised methods used in the exact field of biblical studies (most specifically). I am able to do this – at least this is my sincere hope – because I have been trained to deal with nonintuitive i.e. scientific reasoning (to borrow the concept from Elisa Järnefelt), instead of the intuitive reasoning my brain is naturally attuned to, and the counterintuitive reasoning prominent in religious thinking. As McCauley and Lawson put it in Bringing Ritual to Mind (2002), “[h]uman beings' preoccupation with agent causality typically results in their underestimating both the influence of variables outside of agents' control and the role of the environment in shaping events around them”. (McCauley & Lawson 2002, 21-22) Under normal conditions we wish to find agent-centric explanations because of their intuitiveness. Receiving training in scientific thinking helps us to restrain this tendency. The brain, however, is still structured in the same way in both the historian's and the conspiracy theorist's head, and the same mental modules are activated.

In the end, only epistemological considerations dictate who will get published in academic journals, and who will get ridiculed as a crank. In the study of history there are limits to the available conclusions a historian is able to draw. Naturally, these limits are not set in stone – scholars in the margins of the Academia like Robert Eisenman, Barbara Thiering, Robert M. Price, etc. are constantly trying to move the boundary marker from the consensus position it happens to sit at any given moment; a necessity for the scholarship to continue moving on.

A similar pattern-agency inference happens with 9/11. When the conspiracy theorists have sorted out the available data, they have concluded that i.a. three skyscrapers collapsed even though only two were hit by planes, the words George W. Bush used soon after the second hit were ominously “apparent terrorist attack”, there were eyewitness stories including the sound of explosions, and rumours that the Muslims (or the Jews, or insert-an-ethnic-group-here) had been forewarned and stayed at home that day, etc. It does not really matter what kind of anomalies the conspiracy theorist comes up with. The inferences system dealing with patterns kicks in at some point, presumably (for I am unaware of any psychological test cases) the increased complexity makes the pattern creation easier – that would be, at least, my working hypothesis. If we view the conspiracy theorising as a paranoid style, as suggested by Hofstadter, then every single anomaly needs an explanation for every detail must be placed into an internally coherent, rational order. As noted above, the human mind is prone to postulate agency equipped with human cognitive apparatus. Such agent will have to have intentions and desires, an ability to calculate and to think ahead. With such cognitive tendencies it is small wonder that 9/11 has become one of the most cheered for conspiracy theory in the world.

One thing, however, cannot be adequately explained. If the pattern-agency inference produces deductions of intentional agents behind random occurrences, why is the culprit the government of the USA? What is wrong with the theory of Al-Qaeda Conspiracy – do we not have as much intentional agency there as we want? The answer to this particular question must be similar to the answer we will have to give to one of Boyer's examples. In chapter seven on rituals he poses the question why the Kham Magar of Nepal have an initiation rite for the new shaman in which the candidate tries to bite a ram's tongue. Why is he biting a ram's tongue and not a chicken's foot? (Boyer 2001, 265-266) The question is too precise. The cognitive approach at our hands can only be applied statistically, predicting likelihoods and general trends. Individual variations cannot be explained. For this reason it should be emphasised that the cognitive study of conspiracy theorising will not make other approaches meaningless. Our understanding will still increase when people continue to apply sociological theories, political theories, literary theories, etc. to the phenomenon. For this particular question we would do better to cite the fragmentation of reality or the “unmanageable reality” of the postmodern world (Knight 2000, 115-116, 135), and the increasing distrust regarding politicians (especially) and governments (generally), multinational corporations and the Academia (Goodman 2006, 360).

To end the discussion of Boyer's chapter four, a brief note on the concept of strategic information is in order. In Boyer's model, together with the concept of relevance, it explains the continued survival of pattern-agent inferences. What about conspiracy theories? We will begin by noting that not all of them are created equal. We react with much more seriousness to 9/11 than to the elven sock conspiracy, a notion that socks are actually larval coat hangers cultivated by the elves, a deduction drawn from the observation that while socks keep disappearing, coat hangers in closet keep multiplying. For supernatural agents the situation is the same. Gods and spirits are more believable than monsters, santas, or tooth fairies. Why is this so? According to Boyer those supernatural entities that have access to strategic information are intuitively perceived as more important than supernatural entities without access. Likewise, large-scale conspiracy theorising focuses on events with political, religious, or cultural importance. Hardly anyone is seriously interested in disappearing socks, or willing to invest much energy on developing a grand narrative out of them. Patrick Leman's research published in 2002 indicated that “people often assume that an event with substantial, significant or wide-ranging consequences is likely to have been caused by something substantial, significant or wide-ranging”. (Leman 2007, 36) He echoes Knight in speculating that we would rather live in a “predictable, safe world”, and that conspiracy theorising allows us to hold firm to this notion. Are there really conspiracy theories that make the world feel like a safe place? Highly debatable, I would venture to say.

In chapter five Boyer argues that religions are not needed for morality. Moral intuitions come early to humans, regardless of religious thinking, and only the availability of supernatural agents due to our cognitive tendencies brings about the connection between morality and religion. Since gods are equipped with human cognitions they are perceived to be interested in moral choices, and since they have unlimited access to strategic information they can always make the right judgement in any given situation – thus gods are naturally attached to morality. But enough of religion's connection to morality. Is this relevant for our discussion of conspiracy theorising? In the blur line between religions and conspiracy theories – aliens in governments / cultic worship of aliens / actual religious cults – there is a point when the conspirators are no more connected to morality. There is, however, a moral dimension in most of the conspiracy theories. Many adherents view themselves as noble and unselfish, altruistically aiming for the truth when the rest of the world keeps it eyes shut. Space does not allow an excursus to this topic, but Mark Fenster's Conspiracy Theories discusses the psychological roots of the “totalizing conversion” in conspiracy theorist's worldview.

The second part of chapter five deals with accidents. Boyer narrates an anecdote from Cameroon where he was instructed that “there was more than meets the eye” when something bad happened to people. (Boyer 2001, 219) Usually the accidents were effected by witchcraft. How come we begin to search for such explanations in the first place? Boyer suggests that “[s]ome events are such that they naturally suggest questions (Why me? Why now?) that are simply not answered in terms of ordinary causal processes”. (Boyer 2001, 225) The formulation of these questions creates a certain format for the possible answers – and the most intuitive answers, as we have seen above, contain intentional agents; John Gartner even claims that we can pinpoint the source for the feelings of reward after finding a pattern and ascribing agency behind it to a certain neurohormone, Dopamine. (Gartner 2009, 38) The importance of choosing valid research questions is highly emphasised in the study of history as well, where subtle changes in wording can lead to unforeseen consequences. In most of the standard methodological treatises the historical sources are opened-up only after the historian has posed her questions. (E.g. Kalela 2002, 92-97) Preceding questions and expectations direct attention and result in divergent readings.

In Boyer's model inferences systems responsible for social interaction become activated, and the possibility to use agency related systems in decoupling mode offers the framework for ascribing a supernatural agent behind the accident. Gods are equipped with great powers because they obviously need them to get the accidents to happen, while the stories featuring the great powers of gods assist in spreading this particular connection around. In the naturally suggested questions an event with significance elicits we have another partial answer to the question of popularity certain conspiracy theories enjoy compared to some others.

For the rest of Boyer's treatise the differences between religions and conspiracy theories become accentuated. Chapter six concludes that every religious tradition is interested in treating dead bodies for their encounter produces conflicting inferences, creating a state of dissociation in our cognitive system. Chapter seven talks about rituals, and Boyer concludes that they do not produce social effects. Instead, we think they do, for our intuitions following the aforementioned concept of naïve sociology cannot be put into words adequately, and we perceive only the event and the effect of social change it represents, leading to magical thinking, that the ritual is the cause and the social change the effect. Chapter eight demystifies the society. Humans have a cognitive tendency to form social groups. Religions are not required, nor do they have a major role in keeping the existing groups together.

Finally, in chapter nine Boyer weaves the threads together. From his cognitive perspective religions are the outcome of combined relevance, emerging for the functions of multiple inferences systems. What can we conclude of the cognitive basis of conspiracy theorising? Asking this question from Shermer, he views the concepts of patternicity and agenticity as central, but other factors are taken in as well: “Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.” (Shermer 2009b, 30) The process of conspiracy theorising would also need, as its starting point, Boyer's naturally occurring questions giving the format for the possible answers. Inside these lines the pattern-detection inferences can then begin their work. Shermer's mention of the confirmation bias, known also as the amplification illusion, and the hindsight bias needs a further refinement. Conspiracy theorists are not merely seeking strengthening evidence. In both our primary test cases, Prieuré de Sion and 9/11, the authors work hard to transform counterevidence to fit into their theory, thus making it ultimately unfalsifiable in Popperian sense. Consider, for example, the following quote.

According to the “Prieuré documents” Sion was an organization of considerable power and influence, responsible for creating the Templars and manipulating the course of international affairs. The references we found suggested nothing of such magnitudes.” (Baigent 1983, 165)

Is this the end? Of course not, for from scraps of contrived and highly speculative evidence Baigent et al. conclude that Prieuré de Sion was simply hiding behind various façades like La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, different Masonic traditions (Scottish Rite, Oriental Rite of Memphis), even Le Hiéron du Val d'Or – it is, after all, supposed to be a secret society with great influence. The authors have morphed the counterevidence into supporting their reconstruction. How can one argue against such a construction? For 9/11 something similar happens. Modern conspiracy theorists are keen on quoting disinformation as the source of opposing arguments i.e. a counterargument is simply wrong, a deliberate attempt by the conspirators to hinder the search for truth. In the words of James H. Fetzer, a prominent conspiracy theorist, “[o]ne of the telling signs of many disinformation artists... is that a lot of their claims are simply too strong to be true”. (Fetzer 2001, 2) How can one argue when one's bad arguments are bad, while good arguments are “too strong to be true”?

Thus, with all of the above considered, we can tentatively sketch out the phenomenon of conspiracy theorising. A question following a significant event sets a format for the answer – pattern-recognising inferences system locates a pattern – agency-postulating inferences system posits an intentional agent behind the pattern – the confirmation bias keeps the counterarguments at bay – the hindsight bias together with paranoid style assures that no evidence is left from integration into the conspiracy theory. And for the last time, just in case. These inferences systems function in all human minds. Only epistemological considerations, complex political, religious, and cultural interactions with other human minds result in some of the possible reasonings being labelled as acceptable, and others as conspiracy theories.

Bibliography

Aaronovitch, David
2009 Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. London: Jonathan Cape.

Avery, Dylan
2005 Loose Change. http://www.loosechange911.com/

Baigent, Michael & Leigh, Richard & Lincoln, Henry
1983 Holy Blood, Holy Grail. New York: Dell.

Bower, Bruce
2009 Tracing the Inner World of Suspicion. Science News 175, 11.

Boyer, Pascal
2001 Religion Explained: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors. London: William Heinnemann.

Dean, Jodi
1998 Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Fenster, Mark
1999 Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fetzer, James H.
2001 Signs of Disinformation. Assassination Science. http://www.assassinationscience.com/

Gartner, John
2009 Dark Minds: When Does Incredulity Become Paranoia? Psychology Today 42, 37-38.

Goldwag, Arthur
2009 Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies. New York: Vintage Books.

Goodman, David S. G.
2006 Mao and The Da Vinci Code: Conspiracy, Narrative and History. The Pacific Review 19, 359-384.

Hofstadter, Richard
1965 The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Knopf.

Hood, Bruce
2009 SuperSense: Why We Believe The Unbelievable. London: Constable & Robinson.

Johnson, George
1983 Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Kalela, Jorma
2002 Historiantutkimus ja historia. Helsinki: Gaudeamus.

Keeley, Brian L.
1999 Of Conspiracy Theories. The Journal of Philosophy 96, 109-126.

Knight, Peter
2000 Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to The X-files. New York: Routledge.

Leman, Patrick
2007 The Born Conspiracy. New Scientist 195, 35-37.

Lidz, Charles W.
2006 Conspiracy, Paranoia and the Problem of Knowledge. Qualitative Sociology 1, 3-20.

McCauley & Lawson
2002 Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paranoia Within Reason
1999 Paranoia Within Reason. Edited by George E. Marcus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shermer, Michael
2009a Agenticity. Scientific American 300, 36.
2009b Paranoia Strikes Deep. Scientific American 301, 30.

Visala, Aku
2009 Religion Explained? A Philosophical Appraisal of the Cognitive Science of Religion. PhD Dissertation for the University of Helsinki. http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe200911272374

Concealed Neuroanatomy of Michelangelo

2010-05-28T21:14:00.001+03:00

Neuroanatomists Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo propose in their new article Concealed Neuroanatomy in Michelangelo's Separation of Light From Darkness in the Sistine Chapel (Neurosurgery 66, 851-861) that Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) deliberately concealed a neuronanatomic structure in the Separation of Light From Darkness, part of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Others remain sceptical. R. Douglas Fields wonders, with pictures, if this is merely another Rorshach test where "anyone can extract an image that is meaningful to themselves" - neuroanatomists spotting neuroanatomy.

Obviously, Clement's letter to Theodore is not the only academic debate where the existence of hidden messages is argued.

Quote for the Day

2010-05-18T10:05:00.000+03:00

While accepting a historical Jesus, the scholarship also tends to suggest that the search for him is a little like the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes: there were intellectual-minded detectives around, and Conan Doyle had one in mind in the eighteen-eighties, but the really interesting bits — Watson, Irene Adler, Moriarty, and the Reichenbach Falls — were, even if they all had remote real-life sources, shaped by the needs of storytelling, not by traces of truth. Holmes dies because heroes must, and returns from the dead, like Jesus, because the audience demanded it.

From Adam Gopnik's essay What Did Jesus Do? Reading and unreading the Gospels in The New Yorker.

Spotted at TaborBlog.

Doctoral Training Course: Some Further Thoughts

2010-05-13T16:59:00.002+03:00

Last week I wrote down some live notes from a Doctoral Training Course organised by the Finnish Graduate School of Theology. Having just corrected some silly grammatical mistakes (not all of them as some sentences were just too weird to bother with, due to the high speed I had to produce text), I feel like writing down some further observations and clarifications.

There was a second day for the course with workshops and stuff, but that I couldn't attend. The first day with the general lectures was very interesting, and offered some good ideas I will have to put into use. Tiina Kosunen's talk regarding the academic portfolio was one that I liked. The idea of documenting one's competence in various fields and summarising it into a single portfolio is a good practice to follow. My initial despair - the urge to hit myself with heavy objects - was caused by the sudden realization that should I follow Kosunen's advice, I would have to allocate another month for doing something only remotely academic or interesting; an experience I have already had in January 2010, writing a perfect funding application that in the end has not yet had much success, if it ever will.

Theo van der Zee went through the process of getting a paper fit for publication, with enough detail and thoroughness that I have no further questions regarding the technical aspect. An ideological consideration, however, remains. In my relationship with the library of the department of theology in Helsinki University I have witnessed that prices for monographs and journals are high, while library budgets are tight. From my humble perspective the situation looks completely artificial. Libraries pay heavy sums to the publishers because there is no other option. Universities allocate heavy sums to the libraries because they need to obtain the necessary material for both students and faculty. Universities beg for funding, etc. From the amount of revenue the authors receive (judging from hearsay) one would think that the publishers are struggling to make the ends meet. And to add some insult to the injury, the end result manifests itself e.g. in prohibitions to quote (!) authors who are writing for different publishers. Next time you see a scholarly treatise where the author paraphrases an ancient text instead of offering a complete translation made by some other scholar, the reason may well be that the other scholar's publisher has denied the use of his or her translation.

The following questions bug me. If only some North American publishers have the resources to give a good peer-review process to a monograph and European publishers like Brill do not do this, how come the volumes are still so exorbitantly priced? If I wish to publish my own writing e.g. in this very blog, could my publisher forbid that? How can I combine the need to publish in peer-reviewed journals and my own conviction that information should not be kept restricted, an ideal promoted e.g. in the philosopher Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic (2001)? The last question could be solved by publishing in peer-reviewed open-access journals, but will that decision put me into an academic marginal, for good?

Returning to the training course, after the coffee break Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner was her usual overwhelming self, with lots of great ideas. Of the panel discussion I had time to listen to the first three opening speeches before heading to train some swordsmanship, giving me the impression that for the individuals who were not working as part of the academic community in its strictest sense (holding a position in a university), the advantage of having a PhD had only to do with one's own virtue, so to speak, with one's own development into the cultivated and cultured person one happened to be at the moment of the panel discussion. That in itself has to be worth something.

Last, I can't resist but congratulate the good sense of humour Kulervo exhibits in this comment:

You should bring your sword to future panel discussions of your work on Secret Mark. It will help keep the discussion civil. And if you need to run off to the salle again before the end, you can use it to cut the discussion short.

I mean that metaphorically of course. I just mean that you could wave your sword in the air and shout "I have to go now!" and they'll understand that you need to head off for practice.

In RL people have actually asked casually if I noticed the comment I received, for they had found it extremely funny. The humorous aspect is transcended further when one realises that the sword in question looks like this:

Just imagine waving that bastard sword around, a movement that, unsurprisingly, is not found in Fior di Battaglia, the early 15th-century manuscript used as the basis for the school's curriculum.

Next I am writing a short comment on the recent papers dealing with the handwriting in Theod.

Live Blogging A Doctoral Training Course

2010-05-06T11:41:00.012+03:00

For a fun experiment, I am going to write down notes from a Doctoral Training Course of the Finnish Graduate School of Theology while attending the event. I have no previous experience of such gatherings, and as far as I know, anything can happen.

6th May, 2010

10:15 - Welcome to the Course

Mikko Ketola, Rope Kojonen, and Eeva Heiskanen welcome everyone, and give some details of the day; there's bound to be something for everyone. Ketola remembers to mention the sponsors. The course starts with a positive note - free coffee is served in the afternoon.

10:30 - Documenting Your Academic Competence

Tiina Kosunen, the speaker, is introduced both from the perspective of her CV and from the perspective of her portfolio. The portfolio feels a lot more comprehensive document of her competence than the CV, but it deliberately lefts some details out; e.g. Kosunen does not say anything of her ability to produce Swedish in writing, although she handles oral presentation quite well.

Why portfolio? Because, as Kosunen clearly states at the beginning, not everyone in the room will ever work with research questions in the university setting. One has to be able to express one's abilities outside this setting.

In practice:

1) Collect every document (course material you produce, columns, articles, contracts, email correspondence), etc.) in the basic portfolio, for your own use, so that you will have a good idea of what you have been doing.

2) Produce specialized individual portfolios from the material collected in your basic portfolio - teaching portfolio, research portfolio, administrative portfolio including computer skills - and finally, academic portfolio that includes everything above.

3) Everything should be summarized into 4-6 pages (plus appendices).

4) Academic portfolio is not a document of wishful thinking, of what I might become. However, compared to a bland CV, academic portfolio does include parts of self-reflection and analysis, and discussion of the future potential. If CV is a landscape, portfolio is a clearly focused photograph - some parts are deliberately blurred.

5) Academic portfolio contains references; list of publications and other relevant documents are included in appendices; stuff in the basic portfolio has to be made available upon request, and this fact should be mentioned in the portfolio.

6) Follow the instructions (titles, topics, maximum number of pages, etc.), if given!

7) Some good online references: google "Academic Portfolio"; "Documenting Evidence of Your Work"; "Documenting Academic Work"; "Developing a Portfolio".

Academic portfolio:

Personal information
Education (from the most recent backwards)
Other

| Regarding research

Experience in academic context
Personal research philosophy
Important publications
Grades and awards
Other academic merits
Visions and plans
Other

| Regarding teaching

Experience in teaching
Pedagogic principles and education
Skills with technology and producing material
Grades and awards
Experience in teaching assessment and development
Visions and plans
Other teaching experience

| Regarding administrative skills

Experience in administration
Experience in administration outside university setting
Positions in the society
Publications, presentations and popularizations
Other

--

Emotion of the moment: wanting to bang head on the wall.

Discussion follows. How to include nursing leave? How to include work in the Church? Is it a good idea to summarize one's academic career in one or two sentences somewhere; Kosunen suggests beginning with an introductory sentence, or summarizing all at the end. Where to include positions of trust; Kosunen suggests that only relevant positions should be included.

12:00 - Lunch

A 45-minute block of piece and serenity. North African couscous salad, an apple and pure spring water, instead of the industrial tasting lunch at the local UniCafe. Piece of mind restored.

13:00 - International Publishing

Theo van der Zee begins with an introduction to the differences between Netherlands and Finland; it is very quiet here compared to the rest of the world, e.g. people speak with much less volume.

All of us are asked to write down a single question regarding international publishing. My question: How do I choose between journals, how do I find out which journals I should aim for with a particular article I have written?

Assumption in the beginning: I have something to tell to other scholars in my field. International (i.e. English-language) journals offer the most wide-spread forum for discussion. Monographs, even in the field of biblical studies, look like to be the thing of the past.

Design of an article:
0. Cover Page
1. Abstract
2. Introduction - Problem / Issue
3. Theoretical reflections - Diagnosis
4. Research Questions(s) and Hypotheses
5. Method - Design, Instruments, Population
6. Results
7. Conclusions and Discussion - not only a summary
8. References

Cover Page should be the only place with personal information; other sections get sent to referees. Abstract should include points 2-7 in the given amount of words. Under #7 should be discussed how the results corroborate with #3 and with other scholars' results and in practice. Focus of the article should be kept sharp, keeping it clear what are the new questions, new results, new conclusions, new contribution to the progress of science.

But wow, according to van der Zee historians (I am counting myself into that population at this moment) do not deal much with theoretical concerns, because - apparently though not explicitly stated - there is this single historical method, no fudging with this.

Now we come to my specific question: How to choose a journal? Simply put by van der Zee: Choose the journal(s) your colleagues are publishing in, because that is the forum you are having your discussion in, especially when the ranking of a journal is not really important in theological studies. After receiving a receipt that the journal has received your submitted article, the peer-review process commences. Based on the anonymous evaluations the editors of the journal decide between yes, probably, or no. The anonymous comments are sent to the writer, and in case of probably the article can be changed to get accepted for publication. It is a humbling experience; even senior scholars get their articles refused, for only a few papers get an immediate green light. Patience is required, as well. It will take at least six months for the paper to get published, if one is lucky. It is better to reserve 18 months for the process.

And just what kind of papers do various journals prefer? This really depends on the journal. The Journal of Empirical Theology headed by van der Zee has seven criteria by which it judges potential articles. Skipping the self-evident criteria the most important ones have to do with the focus of the journal, and if the potential article has some theoretical considerations for the field that belong to the focus of the journal. One more time: It all depends on the journal. Get to know the journals in your particular field, submit a manuscript after careful consideration, be patient.

Some do's from van der Zee

Submit to only one journal at a time
Submit only finished manuscripts
Wait patiently for the peer-review process to end
Keep yourself within journal guidelines

Some interesting discussion follows. The level of English is stressed; most people are encouraged to get professional help with the language, even writing in one's own mother tongue and getting it translated into English, not trying to do it themselves. Is the peer-review process really anonymous? Do letters of recommendation from eminent scholars help in publishing papers? No to the first one, yes to the second - though van der Zee himself stresses that he personally is not very amused with these letters of recommendation. Are the articles really replacing the monographs? Depending on the exact field, in biblical studies the monograph is still the rule; however, only the American publishers do have the resources to do a proper peer-review of a monograph.

14:30 - Coffee Break

Had the Ancients known coffee, we would call that the Medicine of Immortality.

15:00 - Dissertation as a Process

Emotion of the moment: Mmmm, good coffee. And the previous presentation was both interesting and useful, and not stressing in the least.

We begin the section with some general comments. Antti Marjanen heads the next year's doctoral training, feedback and ideas are welcome. Tapani Innanen advertises the benefits of a poster; training course in 2011, everyone aboard. The poster he has as an example looks like a mixture between a giant diagram and a placard, and yes - I have never heard of that before.

Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner talks about pursuing a PhD as a process. But first, The Chicago Manual of Style is essential in writing academic papers. Starting the actual presentation from historical considerations, the university began as an institution for producing civil servants, experts, teachers, and critical scholars. Even today a PhD should transform people into critical thinkers who are able to assess situations where clear solutions are lacking, able to defend arguments, able to take the big picture into consideration. How can we express these abilities so that others can see them, too?

It is necessary to know oneself

Skills relating to expressing
Skills relating to reasoning
Skills relating to time management
Technical skills
Language skills
Social skills

Group discussion follows (even though the auditorium is about as ill suited to this task as possible). Can I summarise my dissertation topic into two or three sentences, and relate it to some larger cultural phenomena? Yes, we can. I am dealing with an apocryphal gospel known as the Secret Gospel of Mark. The current context is the general interest in the apocrypha, which has lasted some two or three decades, and the fierce debate concerning the authenticity of the gospel fragment, a discussion that has been moving outside the boundaries of normal academic argumentation.

How can we verify the research process we have had, e.g. to get further funding after spending a year in a library? An article is probably the best option (even in non-academic publications, e.g. popularising accounts); giving presentations abroad, either in conferences or visiting a university is another good option (even if only writing a report of an international conference); seminar papers in one's own university are certainly adequate; one's university instructor could also write a convincing recommendation.

Last, it is a good idea to get as much feedback as possible. Anywhere, everywhere, all the time. As many people as one can convince to comment on one's texts and ideas. Maybe one should write a blog and hope for massive amounts of expert commentary?

Emotion of the moment: Overwhelming presentation, but absolutely interesting material.

Especially the end of the presentation, due to time running out, went fast-forward in warp 9.

16:30 - Panel Discussion

Hmmm, battery's running a bit low. In any case, I have to leave before the end of the panel, to get in time to the salle where I practice to become the world's best mediocre swordsman. Further analysis coming when I get some time to reflect.

The Joys of Pursuing a PhD

2010-04-30T11:38:00.000+03:00

It is official: from January 2010 onwards this blog has dealt, and will continue dealing with reporting the high and low points of pursuing a PhD. The readership will likely have three different reactions to the moderate amount of whining this policy entails. Those who are living through a similar situation will find lots of things in common, and be generally sympathetic for these rants. Those who have already got their degree will say a prayer to their chosen deity (whether existent or non-existent), recalling the time they themselves were in a similar situation - it is my sincere hope that the inevitable flashbacks are not too disturbing. Finally, those who have made the ~~right~~ sane choice in some point of their career history, will wonder why on Earth I scramble on when I could also be a happy dilettante, dealing with these questions at my leisure.

In a time like this, with articles and responses and blog post series all over the place, I find it extremely irritating to have received three more rejections to my funding applications during the past fortnight, all of which have not helped me to concentrate on the issues I should be concentrating on. In the meantime, two new trusts have opened their doors for applications, signifying that yet more time will be thrown away in honing the said applications to perfection, in the vain hope of getting some measure of financial safety, and peace of mind, to do those things that enable this PhD to go forward, instead of everything else.

Both literary theorists and cognitive psychologists have taught me that much of our so-called conscious decisions are, in fact, nothing of the sort. Instead of being in charge, we are socialized into our particular use of language, in this particular time and place, with these particular values and notions, with this particular understanding of rationality we happen to have. Even though many things could be said to my rational-argument-responsive part of my brain - that most of the applications are not accepted due to the high numbers of them, that most of the beginning PhD students do not really stand a chance, that honing that application to perfection is a skill in its own right, requiring time to learn properly - it is still hard to evade the notion, the feeling rising from the depths of my being, that something, either in my application or (gasp!) in my person, is just not fit for receiving a funding.

It does not matter how well versed I am in cognitive studies, being able to ascribe this mechanism to a particular mental module in my brain; the feeling remains.

The Other BAR Expert: "Morton Smith Forged the Letter Containing Secret Mark"

2010-04-18T10:04:00.002+03:00

Stephan Huller notifies in his blog stephan huller's observations that the newest issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (May / June 2010) contains a contrasting opinion from the other handwriting expert, Agamemnon Tselikas, whom BAR also hired to assess the handwriting in Clement's letter to Theodore. Hershel Shanks reports (thanks to Stephan for the transcription):

Agamemnon Tselikas, on the other hand, has concluded that Morton Smith forged the letter containing Secret Mark. I report this conclusion based on several very pleasant telephone conversations with Dr. Tselikas. However, Dr. Tselikas has failed to submit a written report, missing several agreed deadlines, the last of which was shortly before we went to press. When and if we receive a written report, we will let our readers know.

Based on our conversations, this is the basis for Dr. Tselikas’s conclusion: He has examined other manuscripts from Mar Saba and concluded that the Secret Mark letter was not written by a monk there. He has located another document at another monastery that he believes was written by the monk whose handwriting Smith was attempting to imitate. He has also learned that Smith was at this other monastery examining manuscripts. This, as best as I can reconstruct it from our telephone conversations, is Dr. Tselikas’s reasoning. If I have erred, I hope Dr. Tselikas will correct me.

One version of Tselikas' CV can be found here.

Opinions should be placed on the comments below, thank you.

BAR Expert: "It Is Highly Probable that Morton Smith Could Not Have Simulated the Document of “Secret Mark”"

2010-04-16T21:17:00.000+03:00

First, Scott G. Brown and Allan J. Pantuck once again challenged the first handwriting analysis of Clement's letter to Theodore in Stephen Carlson’s Questionable Questioned Document Examination. Carlson's two-paragraph dismissal of the article can be found in Philip Harland's blog Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean.

Right after that, the Greek handwriting expert Venetia Anastasopoulou, hired by Biblical Archaeology Review to do a professional analysis of the handwriting in Clement's letter, publishes her findings. The resolution: "[i]t is highly probable that Morton Smith could not have simulated the document of “Secret Mark”".

The short BAR article accompanying the report is found online here. The actual 36-page report can be downloaded from here. Anastasopoulou's concluding remarks are worth quoting in full:

OPINION

The following opinion is based upon an examination of the documents submitted to me for this purpose using the application of appropriate handwriting principles, and my experience and training as a forensic document and handwriting examiner.

It is my professional opinion that the writers of the questioned document of “Secret Mark” on the document listed as Q1, Q2 an Q3 and Morton Smith's handwriting on the documents listed as K1 – K27, are most probably not the same.

Therefore it is highly probable that Morton Smith could not have simulated the document of “Secret Mark”.

QUALIFYING STATEMENT:

This opinion is based solely on the documents listed as having been examined. Due to the limitations imposed in examining document photographs, this opinion is highly probable. This opinion is subject to amendment if additional examinations are performed using additional exemplars which may exhibit evidence not observable in the documents upon which this opinion was based.

Stephen Carlson’s Questionable Questioned Document Examination: A Guest Post by Scott G. Brown & Allan J. Pantuck

2010-04-14T00:31:00.002+03:00

The following article represents the second collaboration of Scott G. Brown and Allan J. Pantuck. Their previous effort - Morton Smith as M. Madiotes: Stephen Carlson's Attribution of Secret Mark to a Bald Swindler (JSHJ 6 (2008), 106-125) - has already been established as one of the key articles in disqualifying the first of the so-called clue arguments, a series of Stephen C. Carlson's more elaborate attempts to prove that the real author of Clement's letter to Theodore was Morton Smith, the discoverer of the document. Having gone through Smith's archives, located in the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Pantuck was able to procure an uncropped photograph of MS 22, the alleged hiding place of the Madiotes-clue. New information gathered from the photograph showed that many of the features necessary for Carlson's argument were either not there, or completely misconstrued due to the insufficiency of information before the new photograph find. (For a more substantial summary of the article, cf. here, about 2/3 down.)

The present text builds upon a more recent archival find, the letter of Julie C. Edison, a professional questioned document examiner whom Carlson hired "to help verify his methods for uncovering the truth", as seen in Carlson's blog Hypotyposeis. As with the Madiotes-clue, Brown and Pantuck again disclose missing information that puts the evidence in a very different light. But whereas some of the vital information omitted from Carlson's presentation of the Madiotes-clue can be excused due to his ignorance of the uncropped photograph, this is not the case with his presentation of Edison's letter. It is considered to be a good scholarly practice to disseminate important information in its entirety, in an effort to let the data speak for itself, so the strengths and weaknesses of an argument can be properly weighed by the reader. Misrepresentation, suppression, or incomplete presentation of data may suggest a hidden agenda or problematic, uncontrolled personal bias.

I have written before of my commitment to the principle of benevolence, an idea that scholars should treat their peers and their arguments with goodwill, unless there are specific reasons for doubting the integrity of others. I am still willing to extend that principle to Stephen C. Carlson, and invite him to write a response, an explanation for what appears to be an attempt to selectively present facts that support his theories while suppressing others that might call these theories into question.

With these thoughts, I present to you Scott G. Brown and Allan J. Pantuck, and their newest cooperative effort:

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Stephen Carlson’s Questionable Questioned Document Examination

Hershel Shanks’ announcement that Biblical Archaeology Review had arranged for an expert in Greek paleography and a Greek forensic document examiner to analyze the handwriting of the sole manuscript of Clement of Alexandria’s Letter to Theodore (Mar Saba 65) brought us back to a question that has received surprisingly little attention over the past five years: how capable was the handwriting analysis made by Stephen Carlson? Then a patent attorney, Carlson had no training or prior experience in questioned document examination yet applied its principles to argue that the handwriting of this manuscript was forged by its discoverer, Morton Smith. This autodidactic approach is frowned on by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners (ABFDE), which asserts that competency in distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic documents is acquired, not from textbooks or correspondence courses, but from “a legitimate structured training program” and at least two years of mentoring in “a recognized forensic laboratory or with an examiner in private practice who has previously received proper training,” followed by “comprehensive written, practical and oral examinations that are based on a wide range of problems frequently encountered in document examination.”¹ As J. F. McCarthy put it, “the judgments of those dabbling in the field are quite apt to be wrong.”²

Given the unlikelihood that Carlson attained the necessary competence without any training or experience, and the fact that he misapplied these same methods when he incorrectly identified some semiliterate scribbling in Mar Saba 22 not only as a forgery but also as a forgery in the same handwriting,³ it is surprising that his ability to detect forgery has gone unquestioned by so many readers of his book The Gospel Hoax. The most likely reason for this is Carlson’s appeals to a professional document examiner named Julie C. Edison, who advised him and wrote a letter assessing his methods.⁴ Prior to the release of his book, Carlson posted an excerpt from this letter on the Yahoo Group textualcriticism, which the group’s moderator, Wieland Willker, subsequently reposted on The Secret Gospel of Mark Homepage.⁵ Shortly after the book’s release, Carlson reposted this excerpt on his blog Hypotyposeis.⁶ By way of introducing this excerpt, Carlson explained that he “hired a professional forensic document expert” to “review my work” and write a “report.”⁷ This vague description of Edison’s role is the source for the common belief that a professional forensic document examiner conducted a study of the handwriting in the photographs and concluded that the manuscript is a forgery.⁸ Craig A. Evans, for example, has vigorously promoted this idea to the evangelical world, turning Edison into a cadre of “experts in the science of the detection of forgeries” who studied the color photographs and discovered “clear and compelling” evidence of fraud.⁹

It is not surprising that some people think that Edison validated Carlson’s competence and conclusions, for Carlson explains that he sought her services to find out “whether my analysis of the handwriting is competent,” and the excerpt he posted from her “report” is wholly positive. A few eyebrows might have been raised by the fact that he posted only an “excerpt” from the letter, and the two curious ellipses within that excerpt likely raised a few more, but Carlson assured us that whatever salient information he left out could only further bolster his case: “Here’s part of her report to me (omitting discussion of the background as well as another suspicious feature she found).” Yet one author of this paper always wondered, Why do the flattering remarks about Carlson’s research that follow the first ellipsis begin with the word “However”? And the other author wondered, Why did Carlson never appeal to or even name this additional evidence of forgery discovered by a forensic document expert?

Eventually, our curiosity about the things that Carlson does not disclose about Edison and her letter got the better of us. We wanted to know, for instance, what kind of images she was working with. Were these the same halftone reproductions of Smith’s black-and-white photographs that Carlson displayed in his book? Was she aware that Charles Hedrick possesses original color photographs? The difference between real photographs and halftone reproductions is essential. Whereas original photographs can reveal more information through enlargement or magnification, halftone images actually lose essential visual information (the entire spectrum of shading between black and white) and distort the line quality when magnified or enlarged to the point at which the individual dots become distinguishable. At the normal viewing distance the evenly spaced black dots meld together in our perception to create “the optical illusion of a continuous tone picture.” But as the apparatus that creates this illusion, the dot formations themselves differ in significant ways from the illusion they create. What up close appears as a jagged line might appear as a smooth gray line in the original photo. Curved lines and straight lines angled away from the orientation of the screen have a stepped appearance that resembles a halting pen movement. The result is phantom tremors and blobs and disconnections that do not exist in the original photographs.¹⁰ Evidence like this is worthless, as document examiners have long realized. In 1956, when Ordway Hilton published his findings on the utility of different forms of photographic reproductions in forensic document examination, he stated, “Both half-tones and line cuts have valuable applications, but not for the reproduction of material which is to be subjected to questioned document examinations.” He noted that they do not reveal hidden detail through their magnification. Rather, “with the use of a low-power magnifier the actual make-up becomes apparent even when a fine screen is used. This curtailment on the use of magnification is a serious limiting factor in document examination.”¹¹

The question of what images Edison used was therefore of primary interest. But we also wanted to learn the details of her expertise, the amount of time she devoted to the study of the handwriting, and her entire professional opinion regarding the authenticity of the manuscript. The information she provided us will leave both Carlson’s supporters and critics feeling deceived.

When first contacted, Edison responded, “Regretfully, I do not recall offering a professional opinion regarding Morton Smith’s Letter of Clement.” With further prompting, she recalled having spent a single afternoon in 2005 with Carlson looking, we presume, at the black-and-white halftone reproduction of the letter in Smith’s book: “We only looked at a book containing writings attributed to Clement; and possibly a sheet containing symbols of the 18th century Greek alphabet.” She recalled that “Mr. Carlson spent a great deal of time regarding who may have written Clement’s letter; he was considering writing a book.”¹² She was quick to add, “However, please be advised, no professional evaluation of mine was put into writing. Mr. Carlson paid me for my consulting time, but we did not communicate after than [sic].” We discussed the possibility of retaining her as an expert to generate a written report, but after some consideration she rejected the offer, and without our requesting it she forwarded the full text of the letter that she had previously sent to Carlson with the explanation, “There is nothing further for me to add on this subject, as it is not my area of expertise beyond what is written in the report.”

The missing sections from her letter answered our questions only too well. The “background” information that Carlson omitted precedes the section he excerpted. The contents excised by the first ellipsis read as follows (emphasis original):

Although my undergraduate degree is in history, my knowledge of ancient Greece, Rome, and early Christianity is basic at best. And I have a limited knowledge of the Greek alphabet.

However, some fundamentals exist when determining if a handwriting sample is fraudulent.

Most important: we need to compare the questioned document to known standards. And although Mr. Carlson has Greek writing samples attributed to the 17^th or 18^th century, he has no known handwriting from Clement or the unknown monk who allegedly transcribed his letters. Therefore, Mr. Carlson may not be able to conclusively state this text is non-authentic – solely on the basis of forensic document examination.

All of this information is at odds with Carlson’s description of what he left out. Edison made two vital points here. She plainly indicated that she herself cannot read the manuscript, and she identified the absence of known standards for comparison as a fundamental problem with his approach to questioned document examination. We will offer our thoughts on these two matters later. Here we note that Carlson’s suppression of this portion of Edison’s letter under the rubric of unnecessary background misled all interested parties to believe that she was properly qualified to render an opinion on this text and unequivocally endorsed his work.

The section omitted by the second ellipsis reveals the possible suspicious feature:

Although Mr. Carlson did not have known standards from Clement or the 18^th century monk who may have transcribed his 3^rd century letter, Mr. Carlson offered examples [of] Greek writing attributed to the 18^th century. This examiner noticed that these letters appeared as though they had been mechanically reproduced.

Before the industrial age, professional penmen – and religious writers – transcribed essential texts and records. This uniform quality of the letters is also found in early American writing, such as the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and many early land records.

Based upon Greek standards supplied by Mr. Carlson and this examiner’s exposure to early American documents; this examiner noticed the questioned manuscript contained a far greater degree of natural variation than what was typical for professional penmen of that era. Natural variation in known standards became more common in the 20^th century, when a greater number of citizens learned to write. [Albert S.] Osborn devoted an entire chapter to it – “Chapter XIII. Variation in Genuine Writing.”

This section largely conforms with Carlson’s description of the second thing he omitted. Yet we still wonder, Why would he omit it?

Two possible reasons present themselves. First, the omission begins where Edison reiterates her description of a fundamental problem with Carlson’s analysis—the absence of samples of authentic handwriting in this particular eighteenth-century hand to use as known standards for comparison. Carlson has to eliminate both references to this problem if he is to keep his readers ignorant of it. Second, the additional “suspicious feature” identified by Edison turns out to be a high degree of “natural variation”; all of the textbooks on forensic document examination identify the phenomenon of natural variation as a feature that favors authenticity. Anyone who consulted Osborn’s book would learn that forged documents rarely display natural variation.

There are, then, three important issues raised by the material Carlson removed from Edison’s letter: her inability to read Greek, the necessity of having known standards for a proper analysis of the signs of forgery, and the fact that the manuscript handwriting displays a high degree of natural variation. We will offer our own thoughts on these matters in the sections that follow.

Professional Examination of a Foreign Script

The question of whether a document examiner can professionally assess a document that is written in an unfamiliar script occasionally arises in the secondary literature. In an article on this issue, Jay Levinson explained that the basis for any professional judgments about what is unusual about a particular writing is expertise in what is usual. Someone working on a document in an unfamiliar script does not possess that expertise. Hence, “It is clear that the examiner not knowing a script (even familiar with it enough for reading, but lacking extensive examination experience in it) cannot professionally examine materials as he should.”¹³ The cause for concern, as McCarthy noted, is that “Examining writings in foreign alphabets and scripts may lead the unwary experienced examiner to make the same kinds of mistakes that a novice examiner may make in the examination of domestic systems of writing.”¹⁴ According to Levinson, such an examiner is “working in the dark,” “working from insufficient knowledge[, which] is little more than guesswork.”¹⁵ The appropriate thing for an examiner to do in such situations is acknowledge his or her limitations: “But, can the document examiner admit professionally that there are certain types of handwriting problems that he cannot handle? Yes, he can make that statement, because sometimes it is the only honest statement that can be called professional.”¹⁶

Edison is aware of her limitations and made the proper acknowledgement, both in her letter to Carlson and in her discussion with us. Whether she should have commented at all on this document is an individual judgment call.¹⁷ Her acknowledgement that she does not have the expertise to conduct her own investigation and render a professional opinion about this document and the fact that she met only briefly with Carlson raise the question, Is she really in a position to attest to the competence of Carlson’s analysis? Carlson implied that she can and did do this by stating that he hired her in order to find out whether his analysis was competent and by hiding her inability to work in Greek and her criticisms of his method. Edison herself, however, more realistically stated that Carlson “asked me . . . to help verify his methods for uncovering the truth.” In other words, she was writing about the validity of his methods, not certifying that he applied them competently, which is something she cannot do without acquiring the necessary expertise and conducting a study of her own using standards of authentic writing. What she does venture to certify is his “research into the questioned document field,” which she believes “has been exemplary.” She is impressed that he “carefully studied” Albert S. Osborn’s 1929 book of 1028 pages. How she is in a position to verify this is not explained.¹⁸

The Necessity of Standards of Genuine Writing

When studying questioned handwriting, document examiners pay special attention to features they call the signs of forgery and the signs of genuineness. The latter,¹⁹ which were strangely neglected in Carlson’s analysis, comprise the characteristics of free and spontaneous handwriting and therefore normally point to genuineness,²⁰ whereas the former suggest lack of spontaneity and conscious attention to form and are therefore potentially suspicious. Their actual significance depends on whether or not they are found in the known standards or make sense within the particular writing situation. As Katherine Koppenhaver put it:

Presence of any of the signs of forgery does not necessarily indicate fraudulent handwriting. Any of the signs of forgery could be present in genuine handwriting. The signs reveal the fraudulent nature of the handwriting if they are not present in the known handwriting.²¹

Obvious signs of forgery include patched writing, hesitation as revealed by ink blobs and breaks in the line of writing, pauses in the writing, tremor causing poor line quality, and erasures. Presence of any of the signs of forgery does not suffice to indicate that the document in question is not genuine as any of the signs could be part of the writer’s normal habits.²²

Similarly, Osborn wrote:

The fact to be kept in mind in a handwriting investigation is that the genuineness or the identity of a handwriting is determined by the number and nature of its characteristics, and a positive opinion is not given by the competent witness unless an adequate amount of standard writing for comparison is supplied. In this, as with other subjects, superficial knowledge or hasty examination often leads to serious error.²³

Accordingly, the secondary literature contains caveats like the following:

The common belief that the presence of tremor indicates a forgery is not correct as, if the same type of tremor is present in the disputed as well as the specimen writings or signatures, it will then be one of the points of similarity rather than pointing towards forgery or non-identity.²⁴

If the writer places the pen on the paper before starting to write, the lines will have blunt initial strokes. Some writers habitually place the pen on the paper before starting to write, resting the pen on the paper long enough to leave a small blob of ink at the beginning of the writing line.²⁵

The standard textbooks on questioned document examination echo Edison’s emphasis on the need for standards of genuine writing.

The pitfalls of attempting questioned document examination without adequate standards were well illustrated by an experiment in which “two court-qualified state forensic document examiners” examined authentic samples of signatures without being informed that the writing was impaired by arthritis. The examiners incorrectly judged 68 percent of the arthritic-impaired signatures to be forgeries and classified the remainder as inconclusive. They were misled by the fact that the impaired handwriting contained all the usual signs of forgery (“laborious, shaky, or nervous lines”; “retouching/patching”; “retracing of strokes”; pen-lifts within connecting strokes; “lack of rhythm, inconsistent letter formations, and the general appearance of ‘drawing’”; and “blobbed ending strokes”), whereas the standards did not reveal that these features were sometimes normal. When the examiners were provided with larger samples of known normal and arthritic writing for the same writers but were still not told about the impairment, they changed their minds and classified 92 percent as authentic with the qualification “attempted to disguise.” In other words, they correctly identified the arthritic-impaired signatures as authentic writings of the writers in question when they knew that these people sometimes wrote this way, but they incorrectly inferred that the writing was unnatural due to disguise rather than arthritis.²⁶ The more one knows about the writer and the situation, the less likely one is to misinterpret the signs of forgery.

Natural Variation

Natural variation in writing is generally considered to be evidence of authenticity, as variation in a hand generally shows natural, spontaneous, unconscious writing. With respect to forgery, it is the lack of natural variation that is suspicious, not its presence, because forgers tend to write words the same way each time, always copying from the same few instances of those words in their exemplars:

Forgers limit the letter forms they copy, making fraudulent writing more consistent than genuine writing. Forgers duplicate words exactly when they are repeated in a text. Therefore, lack of variation and exact duplication are signs of spurious writing.

The forger doesn’t recognize the need for natural variation and makes the words and letters as close to the known writing as possible. This is obvious when he or she attempts to copy extended writing. The forger will exactly duplicate the letter form, crossing the “t” at the same angle and in the same place, dotting the i in the same location, forming the design of the letter exactly like the model, giving the writing a rubber stamp look.²⁷

Edison’s impression that the extent of natural variation in Mar Saba 65 is suspicious is a hypothesis based on her familiarity with important American documents and the Greek book hands that Carlson used as comparisons. Writing of this sort has an artistic quality for the reader to appreciate. Mar Saba 65, however, is a documentary hand, a form of writing used to make everyday records. It needs to be compared to other Greek documentary hands of the period. The Greek documentary hands that the authors have seen do not display that mechanical quality with which Edison is familiar.

Concluding Thoughts

The people who read Edison’s letter on the internet would have been far less impressed had they known that Carlson’s consultant is unable to read Greek, that she met with him for only a few hours, that they looked exclusively at halftone reproductions of Smith’s photographs, that she disavows having expressed an opinion on the manuscript’s authenticity, and that her positive comments were prefaced by the “most important” observation that the absence of “known standards” in Carlson’s analysis violates one of the “fundamentals” of forgery detection.²⁸ Clearly he hoped that this letter would discourage concerns about the objectivity, validity, and competence of his handwriting analysis, but now that we know the omitted contents and the manner in which he suppressed them, he has ultimately made us more dubious about these things than ever.

It is not hard to imagine that a handwriting analysis by a properly qualified questioned document examiner would look very different from what we see in The Gospel Hoax.

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¹ABFDE, “Frequently Asked Questions” and “Certification,” American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, http://www.abfde.org/FAQs.html; http://www.abfde.org/Certification.html.

²J. F. McCarthy, “Some Aspects of Normal Behavior: Their Use in Understanding Problems Encountered by Document Examiners,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 21 (1976): 205. Albert S. Osborn frequently complained about untrained document examiners. The following is typical: “There is sometimes greater danger from half-knowledge, ‘a little learning’, than from complete ignorance. If a smattering of knowledge from limited experience or superficial reading or information, is accompanied by presumption, as is often the case, then truth and justice are in peril when one thus prepared testifies in court regarding grave and important issues.” Questioned Documents (2d ed.; Albany, N.Y.: Boyd Printing Co., 1929), 374.

³See Scott G. Brown, “Factualizing the Folklore: Stephen Carlson’s Case against Morton Smith,” Harvard Theological Review 99 (2006): 293–98; 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): 106–25.

⁴Stephen C. Carlson, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2005). Carlson thanks Edison for her advice on p. xix and her assistance on p. 112 n. 9.

⁵Stephen C. Carlson, “Re: The Gospel Hoax - my opinion,” textualcriticism, posted October 23, 2005, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/textualcriticism/message/1224. Wieland Willker, “Discussion of Carlson’s Gospel Hoax on the Textualcriticism List Nov–Dec 2005,” no date, http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/Secret/discussion-hoax.html.

⁶Stephen C. Carlson, “Some Initial Reviews and a Second Opinion,” Hypotyposeis, posted November 26, 2005, http://www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2005/11/some-initial-reviews-and-second.html.

⁷The two introductions are similar. We quoted the phrase “review my work” from the post on textualcriticism, and the other phrases from the post on Hypotyposeis.

⁸Timo S. Paananen, for instance, cited the excerpt from Edison’s letter on Hypotyposeis to show that, “Contrary to what [Hershel] Shanks suggests . . . , Stephen C. Carlson has in fact consulted a professional forensic document expert, Ms. Julie C. Edison, whose testimony confirms the findings of Carlson: ‘Mr. Carlson’s research into the questioned document field has been exemplary’” (italics removed). Paananen, “As the Secret Gospel of Mark Walked in to a BAR . . . ,” Salainen evankelista, posted November 28, 2009, http://salainenevankelista.blogspot.com/2009/11/as-secret-gospel-of-mark-walked-in-to.html.

⁹Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity, 2006), 95; repeated in Craig A. Evans and Emanuel Tov, Exploring the Origins of the Bible: Canon Formation in Historical, Literary, and Theological Perspective (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 169; idem, “How Scholars Fabricate Jesus,” in Contending with Christianity’s Critics: Answering New Atheists and Other Objectors (ed. Paul Copan and William Lane Craig; Nashville: B&H Academic, 2009), 144. In an interview related in Lee Strobel (The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ [Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity, 2006], 49, 50), Evans refers to Carlson “bringing in handwriting experts” and vividly describes how, “When experts examined the magnified photos of the text, they could see what they call ‘forger’s tremor.’” Edison actually does not refer to “forger’s tremor” in her letter.

¹⁰Roger Viklund, “Tremors, or Just an Optical Illusion? A Further Evaluation of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis,” The Jesus Character Critically Examined, http://www.jesusgranskad.se/theodore2.htm; idem, “The Difference Between Real Photographs and Printed Photographs,” Salainen evankelista, http://salainenevankelista.blogspot.com/2010/02/difference-between-real-photographs-and.html (Part One, posted February 7, 2010); http://salainenevankelista.blogspot.com/2010/02/difference-between-real-photographs-and_10.html (Part Two, posted February 10, 2010); http://salainenevankelista.blogspot.com/2010/02/difference-between-real-photographs-and_13.html (Part Three, posted February 13, 2010).

¹¹Ordway Hilton, Scientific Examination of Questioned Documents (Chicago: Callaghan & Co., 1956), 282–83.

¹²We are unsure whether Edison’s recollection is fuzzy here because Carlson referred on his blog to “Chapter III of my forthcoming book” four days later: “My SBL Paper Proposal Accepted,” posted May 10, 2005, Hypotyposeis, http://www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2005/05/my-sbl-paper-proposal-accepted.html.

¹³Jay Levinson, “Questioned Document Examination in Foreign Scripts,” Forensic Science International 22 (1983): 250 (emphasis original).

¹⁴McCarthy, “Normal Behavior,” 205.

¹⁵Levinson, “Foreign Scripts,” 250, 252.

¹⁶Levinson, “Foreign Scripts,” 250.

¹⁷Levinson, “Foreign Scripts,” 251.

¹⁸The body of that book actually ends on page 689, after which comes a Part Two consisting of brief quotations from legal rulings pertaining to the matters of questioned document examination covered in Part One. The rulings would be of interest to lawyers in Osborn’s day who needed to know what kind of evidence and testimony the courts of different states permitted in 1929 but would not be of much assistance to someone interested in learning how to study Mar Saba 65.

¹⁹See “Proof of Genuineness of a Disputed Document” in Osborn, Questioned Documents, 363–76.

²⁰The signs of genuineness can point to forgery when the questioned writing displays a higher degree of skill or vitality than known samples. For example, forged deathbed signatures tend to be stronger and smoother than authentic signatures from the same day.

²¹Katherine M. Koppenhaver, Forensic Document Examination: Principles and Practice (Totowa, N.J.: Humana, 2007), 93. She makes the same point in idem, Attorney’s Guide to Document Examination (Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 2002), 90.

²²Koppenhaver, Attorney’s Guide, 90 (list numbers omitted); cf. 142. Carlson cited this book in Gospel Hoax, 112 n. 9, and he cited this page of this book (i.e., p. 142) in connection with the forger’s lapse in Gospel Hoax, 117 n. 64.

²³Osborn, Questioned Documents, 261.

²⁴Dewan K. S. Puri, “Tremor: Forged or Genuine,” International Criminal Police Review 282 (1974): 242. Cf. Joe Nickell, Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents (Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 68–69, 149.

²⁵Koppenhaver, Attorney’s Guide, 89 (bold emphasis omitted from first sentence). See also idem, Forensic Document Examination, 114. On the subject of retouching in genuine documents and the difference between ordinary and suspicious retouching, see Roy A. Huber and A. M. Headrick, Handwriting Identification: Facts and Fundamentals (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC, 1999), 290; Osborn, Questioned Documents, 332–33. Osborn notes that retouching is suspicious insofar as it is “unnecessary, delicate and hidden.” Is this what we see in Carlson’s examples? See Roger Viklund, “Reclaiming Clement’s Letter to Theodoros: An Examination of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis,” posted February 7, 2009, http://www.jesusgranskad.se/theodore.htm#4. Retouching. A few points are worth noting. Illegibility and obvious overwriting are characteristic of genuine writing, not forgery. Likewise, ugly letterforms—especially simple ones that are normally written well—are indicative of inattention to writing; forgers pay too much attention. And places “where the pen comes off the paper but is not stopped and shows continuity of motion are, as a rule, indications of unconsciousness of the details of the operation and point toward genuineness” (Osborn, Questioned Documents, 364).

²⁶Larry S. Miller, “Forensic Examination of Arthritic Impaired Writings,” Journal of Police Science and Administration 15:1 (1987): 51–56 (quoting from 53, 52, 54); also summarized in Huber and Headrick, Handwriting Identification, 206–7.

²⁷Koppenhaver, Forensic Document Examination, 99, 125; cf. idem, Attorney’s Guide, 142 (as mentioned in n. 22, above, this is a page that Carlson cited in Gospel Hoax, 117 n. 64). For additional discussion, see Osborn, Questioned Documents, 296, 369–70.

²⁸Carlson has avoided setting the record straight. For example, when Walter M. Shandruk suggested that Edison was likely unfamiliar with “18th century Greek script” and that “the blame should ultimately lay with her for not suggesting a more rigorous analysis or not offering any serious warnings over the photographic evidence,” Carlson neither confirmed her unfamiliarity with the Greek alphabet nor acknowledged that she criticized his method, although he posted comments defending himself. See Walter M. Shandruk, “Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis on Secret Mark,” Thoughts on Antiquity, posted August 5, 2008, http://neonostalgia.com/weblog/?p=484.

New Article by David Landry Touches the Authenticity Debate of Secret Gospel of Mark

2010-04-08T18:24:00.000+03:00

Noncanonical Texts: The Da Vinci Code and Beyond (Word & World 29:4 2009, 367-379) by David Landry offers an overview of the recent debates concerning the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Judas, and the Secret Gospel of Mark. The author remarks on the popularity of noncanonical early Christian texts, both within the Academy and with the public at large, the latter owing to the influence of works of popular culture. He cites Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent et al. and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, as well as the National Geographic television special on the Gospel of Judas as landmarks in raising many obscure texts to their current prominence.

While not entirely without merit (a phrase that my teachers used in describing my thesis, to my on-going amusement), in his treatment of the debate concerning Clement's letter to Theodore Landry promotes some erroneous views, e.g. when he claims on page 374 that "[t]he letter uses an exceptionally high number of Clement's favorite words" - a claim that has not been substantiated in any way since Andrew Criddle's now famous study dealt only with the least used words found in Clementine writings. Of Stephen C. Carlson Landry has a high opinion (from pages 374-375):

The stalemate was broken in 2005 by a brilliant little book by Stephen Carlson.⁹ At the time, Carlson was a practicing attorney who dabbled in serious biblical scholarship, and he used his forensic expertise and facility with biblical scholarship to construct a rock-solid case against the authenticity of the letter to Theodore and Secret Mark. Carlson further concluded that the forger in all likelihood was Smith himself. Familiar with the techniques used by law enforcement to identify forged signatures on checks, Carlson found many of the tell-tale signs of forgery in the handwriting of Theodore.

⁹Stephen Carlson, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005).

Aware that the debate has two sides, as is necessary for the debate to exist in the first place, Landry presents and dismisses the critics of Carlson with the following paragraph (from page 376):

Some have attacked Carlson for his supposed lack of expertise (he is now enrolled in the PhD program in New Testament at Duke University), but others counter that his knowledge of early Christianity is not insubstantial and moreover that it was precisely his legal expertise that enabled him to see what biblical scholars had not. Some of Smith's old colleagues have come forward to defend Smith on the basis of their confidence in his personal and scholarly integrity, but this is only to be expected and does not carry a great deal of weight in comparison with the overwhelming evidence of forgery. The only sustained scholarly defense of Secret Mark's authenticity has come from a series of articles by Scott G. Brown.¹⁰ But Brown's arguments are shrill and unpersuasive, besides which one must bear in mind that his dissertation on Secret Mark (the first ever on the dicey subject) was written on the assumption that it was authentic, and that hence his entire career depends on Stephen Carlson being wrong. The verdict is not yet in, but the jury is leaning strongly in the direction of Carlson. The end result of the controversy over the Secret Gospel of Mark is that we can probably scratch one gospel from the list of noncanonical texts.

¹⁰See 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 6/1 (2008) 106-125; Scott G. Brown, "Factualizing the Folklore: Stephen Carlson's Case against Morton Smith," Harvard Theological Review 99 (2006) 291-397; idem, "Reply to Stephen Carlson," Expository Times 117/4 (2006) 144-149; idem, "The Question of Motive in the Case against Morton Smith," Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (2006) 351-383.

Nevertheless, it is a step forward. While in the past it has been a rare feast to extract a comment, any comment on the peer-reviewed articles by Brown (and Pantuck), the scholarly assessment of the criticism of Carlson's The Gospel Hoax looks like it's just about to start: for Landry "Brown's arguments are shrill and unpersuasive", and in the future someone will surely elaborate on this, explaining with a bit more detail just why he or she finds the counter-arguments "shrill and unpersuasive".

Vinkkejä väitöskirjaprosessin nopeuttamiseen

2010-04-07T10:31:00.000+03:00

No, minulla niitä ei ole, mutta Oulun yliopiston Pekka Belt, Matti Möttönen ja Janne Härkönen vaikuttavat tietävän aiheesta yhtä sun toista hyödyllistä. Kolmikon Vinkkejä väitöskirjaprosessin nopeuttamiseen voi ladata Oulun yliopiston sivuilta. Yleispätevänä, tiiviinä (29 sivua) opuksena se soveltuu kaikkien tieteenalojen edustajille, niin monografioiden kuin artikkeliväitöskirjojenkin kirjoittajille.

English Summary: Pekka Belt, Matti Möttönen, and Janne Härkönen have written a concise Finnish presentation on getting a dissertation done. Recommended in case one can manage the language.

New Manuscript Find Sheds Light on the Marriage of Jesus

2010-04-01T19:36:00.001+03:00

A new book, The Lost Gospel: Jesus' Marriage to Mary Magdalene, Bride of God, accompanied with a documentary, will be out before Christmas 2010. According to HarperCollins, the publisher of the book, we will have "the first solid written [!] evidence that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, recounting that Magdalene was a gentile [!!], that Jesus and Mary had children [this is old news], and that there was a plot to kill Jesus [with only moderate success, I gather], abduct Mary [!] and murder their offspring [!!]."

And where has this written evidence been hiding? In the British Museum, in plain sight, for centuries! The manuscript is said to be "at least 1,600 years old, possibly dating to the first century and the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth". But no one knew it was there, or could understand the clear implications such a document describing the marriage of Jesus would have, hence the late publication. Once again the Academy is taken by surprise. Once again we will have to change our paradigm. And to think that this will happen just when we were recovering from the other paradigm shifts, first the mythical Jesus, and then the bones and tomb of Jesus.
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In case you were wondering, this is not an April Fools' joke, but a new Simcha Jacobovici documentary, with a book The Lost Gospel supporting it, written by Barrie Wilson, co-authored with Jacobovici.

Why I Shouldn't Pursue a PhD - Part III

2010-03-30T20:03:00.002+03:00

Let's draw the trilogy close with a realization I made last Friday, while participating in a seminar session for PhD students. Let's link for the last time to The Chronicle of Higher Education and Thomas H. Benton's three columns suggesting that people should not pursue an academic career, unless they are willing to live in relative poverty, insecurity and misery for the rest of their lives, or they are one of those privileged few with the right connections, wealth, and/or independence without a need to support anyone else.

Previously, I had presumed that there are some differences between university systems in the United States and in Europe. I was, however, speaking nonsense as it turns out that there are no real differences. Students in the graduate school do teach undergraduates in Europe. Graduate programs in Europe do seem to be "structurally dependent on people who are neither privileged nor connected", to borrow Benton's disturbing observation, evidenced in Finland by the need of PhD students to work as adjuncts, doing whatever odd jobs they can find at the university or anywhere else to support themselves. And as I have now personally witnessed, given enough time, all of this does turn PhD students into cranky, disillusioned, and depressed lot, both in the USA (according to the link 54 percent of graduate students felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning during the previous year) and in Finland (according to the linked study 26 percent of all university students, both graduate and undergraduate, had problems with their mental health; English summary of the study begins on page 70).

At least I finally know why I wanted to continue my studies:

PhD Comics November 8th, 2000
Link to the original

Come Easter, and I try to write more cheerful posts next month.

Bermuda Shorts of Morton Smith

2010-03-17T16:32:00.000+02:00

The newest issue of Biblical Archaeology Review prints two letters to the editor, both dealing with the character of Morton Smith (and articles of clothing he has worn). Spotted them at stephan huller's observations, kindly transformed to computer-understandable format by Stephan himself:

--

MY MOM DATED MORTON SMITH

Bravo! In the past you fought the good fight for the release of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now you've taken on the issue of 'the Secret Gospel of Mark' and Morton Smith.

I studied with Morton Smith at Columbia University (while attending Barnard College) from 1957 to 1960. He was an inspiring, brilliant and intellectually honest mentor.

In 1958 he told me of his experience at Mar Saba, where he found the Clement letter. Working around the monks' sleep-and wake schedule was difficult. At times he couldn't access the library. The atmosphere was one of secrecy. The food didn't agree with him either. The first night at dinner, he was the guest of honor. The monks floated a live baby squid on top of his soup, which he was obliged to eat! The food got worse after that!

About Morton Smith's "alleged homosexuality" - he dated my mother Miriam Chesterman from late 1957 to 1958. She was a recent widow, British-born, beautiful, vivacious and highly intelligent.

I strongly support your efforts to reach the truth about Secret Mark and clear Morton Smith's reputation.

Ethne H Chesterman
Pompano Beach, Florida

--

MORTON SMITH HAD A JEWISH GIRLFRIEND

My favorite vision of Morton Smith is this bowlegged little guy in Bermuda shorts clambering up the side of Mt. Tabor, looking for evidence that Jesus was a magician and how he managed to pull off the Transfiguration. It was on a trip in 1965 when I guided him to the Galilee.

I loved Morton: I admired him as a genuine historiographer. Morton would be delighted with your efforts, and he would revel in the vilification as well as the praise.

As for his homosexuality, I think he was just spoofing the trend that had begun back in the 1960s and 1970s to find gays in all the great Biblical literature. As for himself, I suspect that he was just an Anglican clergyman who had had an unsuccessful love affair and afterward condemned himself to bachelorhood. (Professor) David Flusser told me that, in 1941, Morton had a Jewish girlfriend in Jerusalem, probably a student at the Hebrew University. Flusser is dead so we can't get more details.

Anson F. Rainley
Emeritus Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures and Semitic Linguistics
Tel Aviv University, Israel

--

The picture from Nov/Dec 2009 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, illustrating the articles on Secret Mark. More on the picture, more on the articles.

On occasion, Morton Smith did wear Bermuda shorts.

Kari Mäkinen - New Lutheran Archbishop in Finland

2010-03-12T21:12:00.003+02:00

The election yesterday was surprisingly close, 593 votes for Kari Mäkinen, while Miikka Ruokanen had 582. News media in Finland celebrated the winner as "a reform-minded liberal" or as "a reformist". I am pleased with the result, as Mäkinen would have been my candidate also (i.e. lesser evil of the two), had I been eligible to vote.

Some interesting tidbits:

* Mäkinen becomes the archbishop on June 6th, 2010.

* The people eligible to vote numbered 1,226 - two-thirds were ministers or deacons, one-third laypeople. Most were from the geographic area of the archdiocese.

* Turnout was 96% - 1,175 votes were casted.

* There are c. 4.3 million members in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. That is some 80% of the whole population.

* According to the international edition of Helsingin Sanomat, Ruokanen commented on the razor-thin election with the following quip:

“Half now feel that the church should operate according to public opinion, and the other half feel that the church should be faithful to its teachings.”

[Fuck Yeah, because the progressive theologians are just going with the "public opinion", while the other side remains "faithful to the church's teachings". Insert here the obvious below-the-belt retort known to most Finns who have followed the election debates.]

* The new archbishop reminds that the church is not of "one opinion and one truth only", that the dialogue that began during the election process should continue.

"I wish to search for more open, more honest, and more authentic discussion, that is mainly not about being right, but about sharing."

* The above means that Kari Mäkinen will be a better archbishop than I would. With these thoughts, congratulations!

Archbishop Election Today

2010-03-11T09:51:00.002+02:00

The second round to elect the Archbishop of Turku and Finland, for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, takes place today. The old archbishop, Jukka Paarma, retires 1.6.2010. The two candidates, Kari Mäkinen, the current bishop of Turku on the left, and Miikka Ruokanen, the current professor of Dogmatics in the University of Helsinki on the right, are the favourites of the liberal wing and the conservative wing, respectively. Mäkinen seems to have had his fill of the opponents of the ordination of women, while Ruokanen would not dream of giving his blessing to homosexual relationships.

Of course, the situation is hardly that simple. Ruokanen is not really loved-to-death by the most conservative members, since against the clear words of Jesus (e.g. Mark 10.9), he accepts divorce, while Mäkinen... Mäkinen is actually a good candidate, holding many theologically progressive ideas, even on my scale. If I were entitled to vote, I would not hesitate to cast it for him.

In any case, Mäkinen would be 'lesser of the two evils', as the saying goes, when Ruokanen proclaims opinions like "the general welfare experienced in Finland today is all due to Christian ethos" - an insult to the working class movements of the early 20th-century in Finland, the real ideological power behind the change of society (for better), with atheistic tendencies, as everyone knows. If the Church, opposing everybody and everything that wanted to change the status quo, would have had its way, we would still have serfdom (i.e. slavery) and death penalty, with little democracy and a horrifying class society to weigh us down.

If one feels I am exaggerating, one has not read enough ecclesiastical publications from the period.

And if the election goes bad - from my point of view - I can still comfort myself with the fact that archbishop in my church is only primus inter pares i.e. "first among equals", and not in the same position as pope in the Catholic Church.

Why I Shouldn't Pursue a PhD - Part II

2010-03-09T20:24:00.000+02:00

According to an older PhD student, it is better to get used to letters of rejection right from the start. Here's my latest:

[name withheld] has decided on the recipients of the young researcher's grants at a board meeting held on March 2nd 2010. Unfortunately You have not been awarded a grant in this year's application round.

The silver lining is found in the fact that no letter of rejection could be as depressing as Thomas H. Benton's columns in The Chronicle of Higher Education, like The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind', and - even though I am in much, much better position than the people described by Benton (or found in the comments section underneath), having no need to pay enormous tuition fees since University of Helsinki has none - the long-term consequences Benton hints at, the thought of having to invent a good cover story for the dozen or so years spent at the university instead of gaining something of worth to put into my CV.

(That was a long sentence. Obviously, I have used all of my short sentences writing a first draft of an article/chapter I intend to get published once it is ready.)

The questions I have to ask are these: 1) am I writing a dissertation merely because I have been indoctrinated/socialized into believing that someone with my leanings and interests should be working in a university setting, and 2) have I stayed at the university merely because I have no idea how to do otherwise since the current PISA-efficient schooling system in Finland is all I know about?

(There is, of course, the Church in which I have even worked for some time, but let's not go in there. I believe that every time I consider getting myself ordinated, a random conservative member sees vivid and terrifying nightmares the following night.)

Of course, if funding remains unavailable, I will not have to come up with an answer myself.

Alexa Ratings and BiblioBlog Rankings: Where's the Fun?

2010-03-02T21:07:00.004+02:00

As an undergraduate, I remember stumbling upon April D. DeConick's blog The Forbidden Gospels by pure chance. The year must have been 2007. Not long after I learned that there were many other of those so-called biblioblogs around, and that some sites, like Biblioblogs.com, were doing a good job collecting the blogs together. The Biblioblog Top 50 in its various incarnations was the most comprehensive of the bunch, and I found many entertaining and interesting sites browsing through its collection of blogs.

Nowadays, the legacy of Top50 is continued by Jeremy Thompson at his Free Old Testament Audio Blog. One of the funnier aspects of the listing is the organizing of blogs according to their Alexa rating, with the lowest rank receiving #1 spot, implying that it is the most popular of all biblioblogs. My own blog, Salainen evankelista (the one you're reading right now) reached its all time high position, #23 in February 2010. Considering that my blog deals with a really niche subject even among the biblioblogs, it is curious to receive Alexa ranking of 619,284. How did this come to happen?

Dispelling the myth of Alexa rating

Let us start with the basics. Contrary to popular belief, Alexa rating has practically nothing to do with people visiting a given site. Even if certain conspiracy theorists believe that Internet is monitored by the FBI, the U.S. Government, or by extra-terrestrials, there is no evidence that Alexa would be capable of managing such a feat. When the constant monitoring of all the internet traffic for all the sites out there in an effort to rank their popularity is out of the question, Alexa does the next best thing: monitoring the internet traffic of a select few, and ranking sites based on the small-scale sample.

Want to join the test group? Install Alexa Toolbar to your browser, and Alexa will know every site you land upon. For more privacy, with extended functionality, I can recommend SearchStatus, available for Mozilla Firefox internet browser. The requirement of a specific browser add-on, sure enough, means that those sites that attract the most techno-savvy audiences will do much better in the rankings.

How to gain a higher Alexa rating: a true story

I confess freely that from February 1st, 2010 onwards I did a number of small tweaks that I knew would transform my Alexa rating for the better.

1) I decided to post frequently. Producing quantity over quality ensures more absolute hits - that is, real people visiting my blog - since people will at least skim my posts through, even if they end up skipping the actual reading bit.

2) I decided to post quality. Yes, I just stated that quantity beats quality, but quality does not hurt, either. On the contrary, quality posts get circulated and commented more, turning into more absolute hits. And even if one cannot post quality, one can always try to be witty. People love to laugh: just look at the top 50 biblioblogs closely, very few of them are done entirely without a humorous touch here and there.

3) I decided to utilize my social networks. There are lots of friends who are not actively reading my blog since my target audience is pretty niche; people interested in Clement's letter to Theodore and the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark it has two extracts of. So I hinted that everyone was welcome to stop by and check out a post or two, inviting other people to do likewise. Some of my friends seem to have taken this suggestion quite seriously, as my normally international audience (judging by the origins of IP addresses) was c. 97% Finnish past February. Thanks, and you can lay it off now, guys!

4) I decided to get people to link to me. This one was really a question of luck, but James D. Tabor gave a flood of hits when on February 2nd he gave his approval of Roger Viklund's work on the photographs and other reproductions of the Theodore-letter (original here, shorter blog version here). Or, as Tabor himself put his words down:

"I consider these forgery charges to be utterly baseless, and frankly, slanderous, and I am pleased to note that Roger Viklund has just recently published a very persuasive paper, “Tremors, or Just an Optical Illusion? A Further Evaluation of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis”"

Having a link in a prominent blog was good, and even better was the presumed fact that most of the new visitors went through lots of other posts, as well, including the (almost) complete English translation of my Master's Thesis, A Conspiracy of the Secret Evangelist.

But, the absolute popularity of a site is not enough. In order to get a high Alexa rating - and a low Alexa ranking - we want to ensure that every real visitor to our site gets noticed by Alexa. Obviously, I cannot convince the majority of visitors to install Alexa Toolbar, or SearchStatus, or make them change their current browsers to Mozilla Firefox. I can, however, place Alexa Traffic Widget somewhere on my blog.

5) I decided to place Alexa Traffic Widget on the bottom of my blog. There it is, at the bottom of every page in this blog. It transforms every real hit into Alexa hit, giving me an enormous advantage over those biblioblogs not using one. For statistics, of the top 10 blogs Bible Places (#4), Kingdom Living (#6), Dave Black Online (#8), and Participatory Bible Study Blog (#9) do not have Alexa Traffic Widget installed. Should they put one in place, we would likely have a new #1 for March 2010.

How to gain a higher Alexa rating by cheating

So far, everything has been pretty legitimate, right? But you wish to reach that #1 position? It is time to label black & white as different shades of grey.

For every situation there is always the option to cheat. Alexa rating is quite forgiving in this regard, as it is practically impossible to get caught red-handed. Whether one utilizes commercial software (link withheld), community-based efforts (link withheld), or simple scripts that utilize anonymous proxies for generating unique hits IP address wise (link withheld), it is certainly possible to gain a very low Alexa ranking. The legitimate means can easily get you under 1,000,000, as happened with this blog. It is an educated guess only, but I believe that it is possible to get a ranking that is under 20,000 by cheating, or even lower if one is prepared to spend some cash on the commercial software designed to do the trick. Ranking less than 20,000 would mean that the current biblioblog #1, Joel L. Watts' The Church of Jesus Christ, with Alexa Rank of 79,210, would be beaten by a wide margin.

Why would you want to cheat? Is the #1 spot really that important to you? I will just leave these links here, for everyone to decide themselves what is at stake here:

John Loftus is not a Biblioblogger by Joel L. Watts (#1 in February 2010)

An Open Letter to All Bibliobloggers by John W. Loftus (#3 in February 2010)

(Pre-emptive strike: people may claim that it is not about rankings but eligibility to the list of biblioblogs Watts & co. and Loftus & co. are arguing over. I agree that that's what it looks like, at face value.)

Where's the Fun?

The FUN is in the fact that everyone currently listed in the top list of biblioblogs can claim the #1 spot this month, March 2010. And if you do not mind an ounce of grey thrown in, so much the better (for your ranking, not your soul). Act quickly, before everyone puts these tricks into action and it becomes a level playing field once again.

Correct Tools of Trade

2010-03-01T17:05:00.004+02:00

Recently I have learned the importance of using correct tools for the endeavour at hand. When a PhD student spends a lot of time sitting in front of a keyboard, it is only common sense that the chair she is using should be as ergonomic as possible. Unfortunately, the requirements for common sense kept me from improving my own situation for a number of years, resulting in i.a. pains on my lower back. Well, not anymore.

A wood artesan friend of mine, Väinö S. Forss who blogs in Finnish over at his personal site Väinölä, built a chair that ensures I have an ergonomic position while writing. The change this chair has brought to my general well-being is so enormous that I fail to see the reason we ended up sitting in our regular office-chairs in the first place. The workmanship is professional, and the colour and material of the cushion blends well with the other furniture of my "office". Great many thanks, Väinö!

The other tool I utilize right now, some 15 kilometres from my home, is something completely different.

Samsung NC10 Mini Notebook has likewise proved its worth during the past two months of my PhD studenthood, enabling me to work with Clement's letter to Theodore in previously unacceptable places, including the public library in Jakomäki where I am sitting right now, going through the scholarship on the composition history of the Gospel of Mark. The question of syncing my documents when working with two computers has been handily solved with the free personal cloud service, Ubuntu One, requiring zero input from myself after I had configured the service properly. The only problem with the improvement of my working conditions is the running out of excuses for not getting anything done.

Oh, and Salainen evankelista reached #23 at the grand list of BiblioBlogs for February, a sure signal that something is deeply wrong with the way Alexa rating is formed. No, I mean seriously, there is something deeply wrong with Alexa rating, but I will write more on that topic tomorrow. The bottom line is, however, that anyone can top the BiblioBloggers list, just by employing a few quick techno-tricks, most of which could not even be consired cheating.

Master's Thesis: Chapter 5.1 Stephen C. Carlson and the signs of the times

2010-02-22T09:48:00.001+02:00

Biblical studies closely follows the signs of the times. James G. Crossley examines the influence of historical and political context on the studies of Christian origins in his 2008 monograph "Jesus in an Age of Terror: Scholarly Projects for a New American Century". He comes to a firm conclusion: predominant ideologies direct the scholarship from choosing a research question onwards.¹ David S. G. Goodman summarizes this observation in the following way: "Writing of all kinds - fiction as well as academic writing - contributes to the creation of an intellectual environment." The created intellectual environment, in turn, influences the manner in which preserved sources are read in the study of history: the production of texts evolves in a constant interaction with the interpretation of texts.²

In chapter 4.3 we analyzed the birth of the culture of modern conspiracy theory thinking as parallel to the birth of the culture of postmodern, and the development of electric tools of communication. I argued there that the rise of HTTP as the standard protocol of the Internet with the popularity of WWW during the 1990s, the possibility for effortless connection to the Internet, and the culture of blogging, have transformed conspiracy theory thinking into a wide-spread alternative viewpoint to the world of postmodern shattered. In the 3rd millennium an important literary genre comes to complete the list: "textual puzzle -thriller", or as Joshua Gunn and Thomas Frentz choose to label it, "page-turning, puzzle-solving mystery".³ The core element in this genre is the classic tale of mystery, in which the protagonist solves a puzzle. "Textual puzzle -thriller" aims to hook its reader by utilizing numerous minor mysteries during the course of the narrative. In their most simple form these minor mysteries are e.g. plays on words, and riddles. According to Gunn and Frentz novels that define the genre are e.g. Ian Caldwell's and Dustin Thomason's "The Rule of Four", Umberto Eco's "Il Pendolo di Foucault", Arturo Perez-Reverte's "The Club Dumas", and Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret". As the brightest of the crown jewels shines, naturally, Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code".⁴

Every contemporary writing construes the cultural space in which even scientific research is conducted. For this reason it is easy to be worried together with Goodman about the future of scientific inquiry: conspiracy theories - whether fictitious or those espoused in all seriousness - make the distinction between fiction and scientific fact ever more laborious to uphold.⁵ In the field of biblical studies "textual puzzle -thriller" is clearly represented by John Dart's "Decoding Mark" from 2003, which even in its name assures us that it is solving a puzzle, this time from within the Gospel of Mark. In his monograph Dart tries to decode the hidden message of the Gospel of Mark. Chiastic structure - ABCB'A' - is a known technique of memorization used by ancient rhetoricians and poets. If the Gospel of Mark gets to be reconstructed as a single, giant chiastic structure, have we arrived at the original Markan composition? According to Dart the answer is yes, even though the argument seems to be simply circular in nature. For Dart builds an enormous, multi-leveled chiastic structure, and argues from the exercise that the existence of said structure proves that his exercise of building the structure is valid.

In a likewise manner, Stephen C. Carlson seems to follow the signs of the times. He, too, wishes to solve a "great puzzle" the Theodore-letter provides.⁶ He, too, basis his answer on numerous small mysteries, plays on words, and riddles. As is the case with the novel of Dan Brown, it is hard to discern the exact place where factuality gets substituted with fiction. Even though I have argued in this thesis that Carlson's hoax hypothesis as a whole is improbable, and that his clue arguments, those subtle hints Morton Smith hid, are pseudoscientific, I feel that I can sympathize with Carlson's general attitude. As his witty blog post on "Opposite Day" under the pseudonym "Carl Stephenson" shows, Carlson has a predilection for textual puzzles; furthermore, he has the ability to present them interestingly, and solve them in ingenious ways.⁷

In the end, the problem we are facing is not that it would have been impossible for Morton Smith to hide clues of the writer's true identity to the Theodore-letter. The real problem is in the impossibility to control the search for these clues in any sensible manner, in any methodologically sound way. The best hoax is the one that cannot be shown to be a hoax by any tool at our disposal. If Smith performed the best possible hoax with the Theodore-letter, the Academy can do nothing but use the Secret Gospel of Mark as a valid historical source, as is appropriate for the current paradigm in the field of Biblical studies.

¹Crossley 2008, 3-19. There is nothing controversial in the analysis for it represents the standard conviction among historians; cf. e.g Kajava 2005, 254.
²Goodman 2006, 363.
³Gunn 2008, 214.
⁴Gunn 2008, 216-217, 232.
⁵Goodman 2006, 363.
⁶Carlson 2005, xvi.
⁷http://www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2006/07/opposite-day-carl-stephenson-on-secret.html

Quote for the Day

2010-02-19T16:40:00.002+02:00

Debates about the historical Jesus are frequently debates over the true myth of Christian origins: In the Beginning, did God create orthodoxy (a unified church that correctly interpreted God's act of salvation through Jesus as canonized in the New Testament writings and faithfully preserved by us conservatives) or heterodoxy (a variety of Jesus movements with enough diversity in the interpretations of Jesus' significance to be inclusive of people with unorthodox conceptions of "the gospel," like us liberals)? To search for Jesus within the gospels that were not included in the New Testament is to question the validity of the image of Jesus presented by "the Church."

From Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery by Scott G. Brown. ESCJ 15. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 18.

Inappropriately Partisan: Engaging with the Anonymous Scholar

2010-02-17T19:53:00.000+02:00

An anonymous person "leaked" an email from an anonymous scholar in these two comments. I raised an eyebrow, when the anonymous scholar suggested that the high-quality scans of the colour photographs Roger Viklund has used, after obtaining them from Scott G. Brown, with a permission from Charles W. Hedrick, may have been "retouched or altered", another instance in a long line of "inexcusable character-assasination [sic] attempts" to portray the proponents of the hoax hypothesis as "evil", "stupid", and "shoddy". The anonymous scholar fears that people critical of the hoax hypothesis are playing it foul, doctoring evidence to back their arguments up.

I have heard stories of, and in some cases witnessed myself, discussions turning fierce. Not only in politics, but scholarly subjects are equally suitable for flaming rhetorics. And Morton Smith's discovery, Clement's letter to Theodore, has seen them all. The situation is nicely summed up by Shawn Eyer in his 1995 article, available here. For a more recent collection of weird sayings, I cherish Scott Brown's gathering of Jacob Neusner's characterisations of Morton Smith. Neusner titles Smith "a crank and a crackpot", a "nasty old fool", "a conceptual bungler", a "know-nothing", and a "fraud" (in Mark's Other Gospel, 2005). Even more recently, many commentators have felt that Peter Jeffery's The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled (2007) handles the character of Morton Smith less than benevolently. In the other side of the fence, Scott Brown's reply to Jeffery, available here, is not exactly a model of toned-down rhetorics, either. Ditto for the other review by J. Harold Ellens, but leaning to different direction.

Why has Morton Smith's discovery dwelt in the eye of a raging storm since the 1970s? Was it because the text was so controversial? Certainly not: the innocent raising of the youth is nothing compared to e.g. necrophilia practiced in the Acts of John. Was it because the interpretation of Smith, when it clearly baited for angry reviews with its homosexual reading, was so controversial? Certainly this has much more to do with the reception of the letter, but I find it hard to put everything on top of it. Who has actually embraced Smith's reading of the letter? No one! Why should it be an issue, then? Was it because of Smith himself, of who he could be in speech and in print (i.e. not too nice)? Pure personality issues must be the factor behind e.g. Neusner's dismissal of anything and everything by Smith. For how long must Smith lie buried, perhaps a bit uneasy, perhaps greatly amused, until his strong personality loses its potency to affect the assessment of his legacy - next year it will be 20 years since his passing?

When people begin to lose their temper, the discussion tends to escalate with ever more insulting remarks flying all around. It is difficult to come back to a state of neutrality - in normal online discussions such flame wars eventually die down, but with nothing settled, and no further dialogue possible. In order to go on, everyone must take a step backwards, and drop their demands, even though it might seem, at first, unreasonable to just back off.

Back in August Greg Reeder asked, if Stephen C. Carlson had already "apologized for his attacks on Smith". When I protested that Carlson's "monograph is very reasonable with its handling of the person and character of Morton Smith", Reeder pressed on:

"I see a difference in disagreeing with someone over an theoretical issue or interpretation and accusing someone of fraud or perpetuating an outright hoax. Now that so much of Carlson's theory has been demolished he owes it the memory of Morton Smith to help set the record straight. It is the right thing to do."

I find myself in an uncomfortable position. The anonymous scholar suggesting that others with whom he or she disagrees are forging evidence looks to me an unreasonable accusation, being not something that will help people feel better in their endeavours to assess Clement's letter to Theodore. Likewise, I feel that a demand for an apology is not going to further discussion, especially when it is already quite difficult to extract comments from the proponents of the hoax hypothesis. Double that difficulty if we expect them to publicly humiliate themselves before continuing! In itself, the suspicion of foul play the anonymous scholar demonstrates could be seen somewhat justified, since the high-resolution scans were, indeed, not used in an article that has passed a proper peer-review, even though many people did read it and comment it before it was made public; I intend to come back to the question of peer-review in the near future. Justified or not, playing around with such doubts, even privately, is not going to motivate scholars of the different opinion to work better nor will it further the future discussions, where real people are, eventually, going to debate directly, even face-to-face, the issues that separate them. There is a "principle of benevolence" - that scholars should treat their peers and their arguments with goodwill, unless there are specific reasons for doubting the integrity of others - in every other book on scientific methodology for a reason: it is much more fruitful to discuss things when you can be sure that the other debater is not holding an opinion that you are both a liar and a fraud.

The long-winded rant above is mainly to say this: even if I cannot find a fault in Reeder's logic, I still feel that the demand for an apology is counter-productive, and should be dropped. Except one: I can picture myself in Carlson's shoes, around 2004 or so. I have an argument, and even if I do not quite like the implications, I genuinely believe that it is a good argument. I must go forth with it, even if I have to accuse a deceased person of being a fraud. That is what I do; it is the right thing to do. No apologies. Note that it is i.a. the "principle of benevolence" that does not let me evaluate Carlson's inner thoughts as malevolent, but I have to think of him as sincere, as I have to think other scholars as sincere, unless there are specific reasons to think otherwise.

When the criticisms start to accumulate, it may seem for the critics that a hypothesis has been truly devastated. The scholar himself or herself usually does not see it that way; everyone loves their pet theories, no matter how contrived they may have become. As Thomas Kuhn used to say, science advances because scholars are laid to rest: only a new generation of scholars will be able to assess the legacy of their elders dispassionately enough. Consequently, it seems to me doubtful that Carlson, or other proponents of the hoax hypothesis, see the critical arguments the same way I do. For all I know, Carlson himself still stands behind his original arguments. And even if he falters, it is not unheard of to change one's opinion. But an apology for being wrong, that should not be demanded. We should not try to humiliate our colleagues, but maintain a scholarly environment where it is all right to get it occasionally wrong, all right to change an opinion, and all right to discuss scholarly issues in the spirit of goodwill and benevolence.

Bottom-line: there is nothing wrong with apologizing, everyone should probably do it more often. It is just not going to be a good scholarly practice, demanding an apology every time the consensus shifts, for quite human reasons.

Blogging for Really Niche Audience

2010-02-15T18:31:00.000+02:00

No, I don't mean people who read Salainen evankelista, being interested in Clement's letter to Theodore: you're definitely a niche audience, but not that niche. For a real niche topic, I just have to mention the other blog I have had for some two months, Push-ups We Can, recently described as a "bizarre little site", featuring only push-ups - the normal way, on one hand only, upside down, etc. - and nothing more! Now co-blogging on the topic with Sabio Lantz, our joint efforts will surely transform the world (of push-ups) to something radically different, as long as we will keep the sacred writings (of push-ups), Guy Windsor's The Little Book of Push-ups: For Martial Artists, Athletes and Coach Potatoes clear and unspoiled in front of us.

The Difference Between Real Photographs and Printed Photographs: Part III - New Evidence

2010-02-13T21:23:00.010+02:00

As Roger Viklund summarized few days ago, there are four variables we have to keep separated when discussing Clement's letter to Theodore:

1) Smith’s b&w photos from 1958. They are likely to be deposited among the property left by Smith at JTC in New York and as far as I know, no one has access to them (apart from maybe Allan Pantuck).

2) The colour photos taken by the librarian Dourvas at the end of the 1970s. I do not know who owns them. They are perhaps the property of Nikolaos Olympiou, unless Charles Hedrick has them.

3) The b&w reproductions of Smith’s photos which were printed in his 1973 book.

4) The colour reproductions of Dourvas’ photos which were printed in Hedrick’s and Olympiou’s article in The Fourth R in 2000.

Of #1 there hasn't been much information to be had, but Allan Pantuck confirms the following:

"Smith took three different sets of photographs of MS65 at Mar Saba, and only one and a half of these sets have been published. JTS has multiple iterations of each set, including "1st generation" photos donated by Smith, presumably from Smith's original negatives. I have copies, and some were able to be made from Smith's negatives, while others had to be re-photographed by the archive when negatives could not be located. They also have the photographs that were used for the orinigal publications, and they still have printer's/cropper's marks on these copies of the photos, presumably returned to Smith by the publisher. There is certainly no question that the original photographs are sharper than any halftone dot, printed reproductions."

Upon request, Pantuck kindly scanned in 300 dpi the word φιλοσοφίαν from Theod. III.18 from the original black-and-white photograph by Smith. Viklund placed the words together. Topmost we have a scan from the original colour photograph (#2). In the middle is the new scan from an original B/W photograph Pantuck provided (#1). At the bottom we have the scan from Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, which printed Smith's B/W photograph in 1973 (#3). The other two scans have been made in 1200 dpi, but upon this simple comparison exercise this fact has no bearing.

(Full-size image: http://www.jesusgranskad.se/tillf/filo.jpg)

Let me pass the microphone back to Viklund; everybody else can just focus on the fourth letter from the left, the small omicron:

"Now, I believe you all can see the difference in quality... In his book, The Gospel Hoax, Carlson says that he found signs of tremors "in the square-like omicron of φιλοσοφίαν" in line 18 on page 3... Now, this is a huge difference! I cannot really imagine who could still believe that Carlson’s study of the handwriting is worth anything after this. And notice that he claims that the b&w "photo" to the right to be of better quality than the colour one. I believe this issue is done and over with."

Finally, let's have another picture featuring only the omicrons from the scans, from left to right #2, #1, and #3, also compiled by Viklund.

(Full-size image: http://www.jesusgranskad.se/tillf/omicr.jpg)

It would be swell to include #4, scans from the printed colour photographs (published in The Fourth R in 2000), to the mix as well. Fortunately, at least one copy exists in Helsinki, a personal copy of professor Ismo Dunderberg. Unfortunately, during the recent change of his room at the university, this copy was misplaced, and we were unable to locate it last time we tried. Parallels nicely with the possible misplacement of Clement's letter to Theodore in the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, to state the obvious.

Why I Shouldn't Pursue a PhD

2010-02-12T11:18:00.005+02:00

January 2009 Thomas H. Benton offered a clear piece of advice for people who are considering getting a PhD: Just Don't Go. Given the state of the job market for budding scholars, Benton could find only few exceptions to his rule:

"* You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.

* You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere.

* You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household.

* You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it."

(The whole article, Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go from The Chronicle of Higher Education, available here.)

In March 2009 a follow-up appeared. This time Benton would see the rare exceptions to be even more rare, for "preparing for an academic career on the basis of your partner's financial support is a very risky proposition, given how graduate school breaks up many seemingly stable relationship".

(The whole article, Just Don't Go, Part 2 from The Chronicle of Higher Education, available here.)

The trilogy is now complete, with Benton's latest titled The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind' that appeared on February 8, 2010, available here. In many ways it is the most disturbing of the three.

Benton notices the class background and its effect. Only below the upper-middle class there exists a myth that more education means more opportunities, when the real deal is about connections with the right people, a situation similar in both the USA (that is the focus of Benton) and in Europe, including Finland. The realization that even in Scandinavia, long hailed as the model of equality, there is a deep-rooted class society at the bottom of it all, has been one of the more painful realizations in recent years, both personally and for the society as a whole, as is demonstrated by growing number of pamphlets dealing with this issue, like Luokkaretkellä hyvinvointiyhteiskunnassa (2008) by Katriina Järvinen & Laura Kolbe [translates roughly as "On a Class Trip in a Welfare Society", including a pun on the imagined possibility to rise from one class to another].

But it gets worse. For graduate schools are "structurally dependent on people who are neither privileged nor connected". They cannot just walk away, not without taking heavy damage in the process. They work as adjuncts, they do whatever odd jobs they find at the university to support themselves, not having the courage to leave since they have been socialized "into believing that it is shameful to abandon 'the life of the mind'", even if the said life does impoverish them.

And how are graduate students generally feeling. In another article Piper Fogg summarizes the situation in the USA as this:

"67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide".

I remember seeing similar statistics for Finland, and certainly my own experience of discussing these things with graduate students and post-doc scholars who are not holding permanent positions at the university, confirms the figures.

One major difference between Benson's description and the European system, following the standardization of university studies in the Bologna Process, should be noted: in Europe the undergraduates' teachers are generally permanent members of the faculty. Otherwise, I cannot see a major difference between Benson's description and my own situation, confirmed further by the fact that I could name a dozen people in my field in Finland who have ultimately abandoned the academia for doing something else. It doesn't matter if you are brilliant, if all the other candidates for the rare academic positions are equally brilliant.

Finally, let's stop with a positive notion. In the second article Just Don't Go, Part 2 Benton names, tentatively, a person who should consider writing a PhD:

"Perhaps members of a generation that enters graduate school with no expectations of an academic position — who never even consider, for one moment, that they will become tenure-track professors — will bring about positive change in the way things are taught. Such students will be less beholden to advisers, and empowered to demand that courses have some relationship to existing opportunities. With an eye to careers outside academe, they will challenge the tyranny of the monograph; they might seek technical skills; they will want to speak to a wider public; and they will be more open to movement between academe and the "outside world" than previous generations, who were taught to regard anything but the professorial life as failure from which one could never return."

Well, perhaps.

Spotted Benton's articles at Confluence.

The Difference Between Real Photographs and Printed Photographs: Part II - A Guest Post by Roger Viklund

2010-02-10T21:42:00.008+02:00

After I had published the first part of The Difference Between Real Photographs and Printed Photographs, two lengthy comments appeared. The second one was written by an anonymous person (Part I and Part II), and featured a reply from an anonymous scholar who questioned i.a. the "purity" of the photographs Roger Viklund used in Tremors, or Just an Optical Illusion? A Further Evaluation of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis, and the decision to publish these observations outside the normal peer-review process. Furthermore, the anonymous scholar promulgated the age-old myth of historians writing history and journalists reporting the history historians have written.

But let's not go into these questions directly. The first set of comments contained a helpful clarification of the crucial difference between photographs and prints of photographs by Roger Viklund, who edited his comments upon my request to a genuine guest post. Without further ado...

--

I wrote a two-part comment on Timo’s blog post from February 7, and Timo thought we should raise those comments to a genuine guest post. I have accordingly only slightly modified the original comments I made then, which were meant as comments upon my previous comment on Stephen Carlson’s blog.

I said that I was a bit reluctant to write this, but as the tactic of dealing with my criticism of Stephen Carlson’s handwriting analysis—not only by Carlson himself but also by other scholars involved—seems mostly to be silence, I believe I have to explain this. There are a lot of misconceptions involved, so let me try to set the record straight. Other scholars have unofficially said that Carlson has defended himself by claiming that the colour photos were of a lower resolution and less sharp than Morton Smith’s b&w photos (after I wrote this an "Anonymous" person published such statements from an e-mail correspondence by an unnamed scholar: "Are you aware that Carlson claims that the color photos are actually *lower* resolution, and not as sharp and clear as Smith's own b&w ones?"). The b&w photos Carlson used for his study of the handwriting would accordingly be of higher quality than the colour photos that I have used in my two studies (here and here). This is a very odd statement which certainly shows that the scholar who said this did not understand what this is all about. The issue was never between the colour and the b&w images, but between the originals and the copies. I was however not sure that Stephen Carlson really had said this, as I haven’t heard it directly from him.

Now, however, Carlson seemingly confirmed this on his blog. When someone asked him if it was true that he only consulted Smith’s b&w photos and not the new coloured ones, he wrote that this charge was not true and that he "consulted both the black-and-white photographs that Smith published in 1973 as well as the color photographs that Charles Hedrick published in 2000." The odd thing with this statement is twofold. First of all, Carlson did not consult any photos at all, only printed images. Secondly, the question is not whether to use the black-and-white or the colour photos, but whether to use the originals or the copies. I hope Stephen will eventually explain his position.

When I wrote my previous two articles on Carlson’s handwriting analysis, I did not really describe how a printed image was produced. The reason for this was first of all that I was not sure exactly how it was done back in 1973, when Smith’s book was printed. I know how the process was in the 1980s, but not in the 1970s, although I am pretty sure there were no major differences. I have now afterwards made such a short description, which Timo reproduced on his blog as The Difference Between Real Photographs and Printed Photographs. Furthermore, I did not think that it was that essential to describe the technique, as I thought that the mere visual seeing of the images would be enough to convince the readers. But I did believe that people would understand the difference between a photograph and a printed image of that same photograph. I guess I was too short-sighted, maybe because one tends to think that what is obvious to oneself also is obvious to others.

Anyway, we have to deal with four different variables.

1) Smith’s b&w photos from 1958. They are likely to be deposited among the property left by Smith at JTC in New York and as far as I know, no one has access to them (apart from maybe Allan Pantuck).

2) The colour photos taken by the librarian Dourvas at the end of the 1970s. I do not know who owns them. They are perhaps the property of Nikolaos Olympiou, unless Charles Hedrick has them.

3) The b&w reproductions of Smith’s photos which were printed in his 1973 book.

4) The colour reproductions of Dourvas’ photos which were printed in Hedrick’s and Olympiou’s article in The Fourth R in 2000.

Carlson has used images scanned from Smith’s book, accordingly point 3. He also says that he consulted the images from Hedrick’s article, accordingly point 4. Both these are printed copies - not originals. I have used images scanned directly from the original colour photos, accordingly point 2.

These scanned images I got from Scott Brown after been given permission from Charles Hedrick (he did not have these scanned images anymore and asked Brown if he could provide them). In order not to be accused of forgery (which I evidently have been anyway) I have not done anything in order to enhance the quality apart from darkening the images taken from page 2, which were much lighter than the scanned images of the other two pages.

It is accordingly irrelevant to discuss the difference in quality between 1 and 2 (both originals), or as Carlson and the anonymous scholar between 3 and 4 (both copies). It is possible that the b&w photos look sharper and have higher resolution than the colour photos and it is possible that it is the other way round. But since we do not have access to the b&w photos, nor scans made from them (1), this is irrelevant concerning my studies contra Carlson’s. It is also possible that Carlson found the printed b&w images (3) to be of a better quality than the printed colour images (4), but also this is irrelevant in this case as they both are mere reproductions of the originals.

The interesting part is that the images which are reproduced in Smith’s book (3) do not have sufficient quality to be magnified for evaluation. The low resolution in combination with the line screen seemingly makes the letters appear shaky. My images were never part of any printing process, but scanned directly from the colour photos in 1200 dpi (2). Also the b&w images I used for comparison in my article Tremors or Just an Optical Illusion were scanned in 1200 dpi and then from the same book (Smith 1973) as Carlson used (3). The figure of 1200 dpi is also really not that important as the printed images in Smith's book probably have no more than 200 dpi at the most (difficult to say since they were printed with another technique than what is used in modern digital printers or printing presses, meaning that the resolution is measured in a different way) and so the limitation will not be in the scanning process but in the printing process. If the difference would turn out to be 1200 vs. 200 dpi, the 1200 dpi scans would produce 6 x 6 = 36 dots for every dot printed in 200 dpi.

Dpi means dots per inch, and refers to the number of dots that can be produced along a straight line which is 1 inch (25.4 mm) long if the dots are just touching each other. Simplified: the higher the figure, the smaller the dots, the higher the resolution and the sharper the image. In a printing press in the 70s the sharpness would however be measured in lpi, lines per inch, and this is not directly comparable to modern laser printing technique.

It is the fact that Carlson settled for evaluating the printed reproductions (3 and 4) and not the original (scanned) photos (1 or 2) which seems to be the cause for him spotting tremors, retouching and so on. So Carlson’s defence that the b&w "images" in Smith’s book were sharper than the colour "images" in The Fourth R, and that he anyway used both sets of "photos", really is no defence. The criticism comes solely from the fact that he settled for using poor copies instead of the originals, whether b&w or colour. Similar tremors could possibly also be spotted in the printed colour images (4) in Hedrick’s article in The Fourth R. I do not know since I have not examined these. I have only seen that when the same images which Carlson used are scanned in 1200 dpi (3) there are tremors in those images, whereas none of this really can be seen in the images scanned directly from the colour photos (2), and I am pretty sure they will not be seen in images scanned directly from the b&w photos (1) either, no matter how bad they are and how poor the resolution is, since these are analog photos and lines will not be stepped by the photographic method.

Unless there are tremors and stepping in the letters on the original paper where they were written, there will never be tremors and stepping in the letters of the analog photographs, no matter how poor the quality is. The image can become blurred but the lines of the letters can only become stepped if the photos are digitally transformed; either scanned or printed in a resolution which is too low, and then especially if a screen is added.

I think it is essential that people understand what this all comes down to, since it seems like many people, seemingly including also Carlson (please inform me Stephen if I am wrong), has not understood this. They are unaware of the most fundamental facts concerning printing techniques.

The sharpness of the photos is one thing (it has to do with things like the camera, the lens, the photographic film, the light and other conditions when the photos were taken, the development of the photos and how they were stored and so on). But no matter what, the photos will not be pixelated, as they are analog photos. If the letters in the photos are stepped, then the letters probably are also stepped in the original. But a printed image from a sharper photo of higher quality could seem to be of higher quality than a poor analog photo, yet having stepped letters which do not occur in the poor analog photo.

Roger Viklund

The Difference Between Real Photographs and Printed Photographs

2010-02-07T18:13:00.010+02:00

Last December Roger Viklund put the 1973 prints of Morton Smith's B/W photographs and high-resolution scans of Father Kallisto's photographs side by side. His online article Tremors, or Just an Optical Illusion? A Further Evaluation of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis gives a detailed look at the differences, for an abridged version cf. the shorter blog version. I consider it hardly an overstatement when I myself concluded that Viklund "draws yet another bold question mark over [Stephen] Carlson's assessment of the handwriting of Clement's letter to Theodore".

As I wrote then, one of the first questions I had regarding Stephen C. Carlson's The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark (2005) concerned his choice of sources: why did he utilize the B/W photographs that were published in Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark in 1973 instead of the colour ones Charles W. Hedrick and Nikolaos Olympiou published in 2000. Somewhat indirectly Carlson produced an answer to this question over at Hypotyposeis:

"That charge is not true. I consulted both the black-and-white photographs that Smith published in 1973 as well as the color photographs that Charles Hedrick published in 2000."

Some half a year ago, I collected the existing photographs of Clement's letter to Theodore together, totaling to

4 sets of B/W photos, one of them published (the first page of the MS twice)
1 set of colour photographs, published
1 set of colour slides, not published
1 set of (presumably) colour photographs (by Quentin Quesnell), not published

At that time, as well as at the time of writing the chapters on handwriting analysis for my thesis, I did not make a distinction between a photograph, a high-resolution scan of a photograph, a print of a photograph, and a high-resolution scan of a print of a photograph. I should have done otherwise. The comment Roger Viklund left in Carlson's blog clearly demonstrates the need for greater clarity in these matters:

Stephen, could you please enlighten me? You say that you “consulted both the black-and-white photographs that Smith published in 1973 as well as the color photographs that Charles Hedrick published in 2000”. But didn’t you consult just the printed b&w images in Smith’s book “Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark” and the printed colour images published by Hedrick in “The Fourt R”? Smith never published any photographs, neither did Hedrick. There is a huge difference between photographs and printed reproductions made from those photographs. It actually involves that the photographs are being photographed a second time and a screen being added.

The technique in 1973 (when Smith’s book was printed) would have been something like this. His developed original b&w photographs were put on a desk and photographed a second time with a reproduction camera. Between the actual photo and the film was put a screen, This screen was normally, as in Smith’s book, a line screen made out of lines of dots, often at 45 degrees angle, and at fixed distances. The sizes of the dots decided the overall darkness of the images produced. This film, call it a Master, was developed with a photographic developer, then fixed and finally dried into a negative film. Then the separate negative films were mounted with glue or adhesive tape on to a reproduction original. Then this original was “burnt” with a special light on to an aluminium plate, so that an image was created on this plate. That image was a positive image. The plate was finally mounted on a drum in a printing press and the image would be transferred from the plate to a rubber blanket and then to the paper. The plate would be wetted with ink and then cleaned each revolution of the drum.

As you see, a photograph is something completely different than a printed image. Apart from the many steps in the process away from the original photograph, also the lower quality of a paper, and particularly the line screen, make the image worse. Especially the line screen distorts the image. These screens are employed in order to make the printed image look better for the naked eye seen from a distance. If no screens were used, the images would appear much too contrasted; the shades between dark and light would vanish. So by using these screens of dots we fool the eye into believing that the printed image looks good. But that is only when viewed from a distance. If these images are enlarged like ten times or more, all the dots will be visible and the curves of the letters will be following the lines of the screen and will appear to be stepped, although this cannot be seen in the images scanned directly from the original photographs.

There is a huge difference between using scanned enlarged images made from the original photographs and scanned enlarged images made from distorted printed images in a book or a magazine.

Kindly, Roger Viklund

There was never any doubt in my mind that Carlson was familiar with everything that had been written on Clement's letter to Theodore, just as he confirms above regarding the two sets of printed photographs. I can only repeat the original ending of my commentary on Viklund's newest:

"We do not know why Stephen Carlson chose to use the B/W photographs instead of the colour ones. Viklund has, however, presented a strong case for why Carlson should have left... [them] out of his hoax hypothesis entirely."

I have to ask: would it be at all possible to make high-resolution scans of all the photographs and pass them to anyone interested, just to prevent a similar situation - where everyone works hard on the basis of something many times removed from the original (photograph - printed photograph - scan of a printed photograph) - from happening again?

Secret Gospel, or Just A Little Bit Longer?

2010-02-03T16:52:00.009+02:00

FACT 1: Clement of Alexandria, in his letter to Theodore (abbreviated Theod.), quotes two extracts from a Gospel. (Theod. II.23-III.11; III.14-18) Clement has two titles for the Gospel: in I.21-22 he designates it as πνευματικώτερον εὐαγγέλιον, a more spiritual Gospel, and in II.6 and II.12 he has μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον, a mystic Gospel. According to Clement, this Gospel was written by Mark, who composed it based on his former book that had been written "during Peter's stay in Rome", as per the tradition regarding the writing of the canonical Gospel of Mark. (Theod. I.15-16) At face value, the more spiritual Gospel looks to be an expanded version of the book Mark had written earlier. (cf. Theod. I.18-25)

FACT 2: Morton Smith, in his 1973 monograph Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark that included the text of the letter and Smith's translation, names the extracts Clement cites as "The Secret Gospel of Mark", translating the Greek μυστικόν consistently as "secret". This is the name that is without doubt the most well-known designator for the two Gospel extracts, abbreviated respectively as SGM 1 and SGM 2 (or SM 1 and SM 2).

FACT 3: Smith had an alternative name: "The Longer Gospel of Mark". The other essential monograph on the letter, Scott G. Brown's Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery (2005) adopts this designator, and uses it with consistency. Brown disapproves of the use of the word "secret", as one of the central tenets of his thesis is the understanding that a μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον is "not a concealed gospel but a gospel that contains concealed meanings". (Brown 2005, xi.) Apart from Brown this name and its abbreviations LGM 1 and LGM 2 has seen little use.

FACT 4: I am tired of circling around with various names, including the ever-so-clever "The So-called Secret Gospel of Mark", that I am not even trying to abbreviate. As I have written before:

The problem with Smith's "Secret Gospel" is, as I have come to see it after reading Brown's monograph "Mark's Other Gospel", that if there was a secret somewhere, it is not the text itself, but the correct interpretation of the text (that was not written down, cf. Theod. I.22-27) - thus Smith's title, though exciting, is too mystifying for my tastes. "The Longer Gospel of Mark" could be problematic because it is construed on the basis of Clement's information, that e.g. "to the stories already written" (ταῖς προγεγραμμέναις πράξεσιν; Theod. I.24) Mark "added yet others", but we do not really know what the relationship between "The (canonical) Gospel of Mark" and ταῖς προγεγραμμέναις πράξεσιν is - "The Longer Gospel of Mark" as a name seems to me to give another imperfect twist to the complex matter of Markan tradition history combining the canonical Gospel to the variant(?) Clement knew predated the Alexandrian "Secret Edition".

Recently I learned that Heikki Räisänen's long-awaited Rise of Christian Beliefs: The Thought World of Early Christians has finally been published by Fortress Press. Continuing from his earlier works, most notably from Beyond New Testament Theology: A Story and a Programme (1990), this latest installment discards the canon and its arbitrary boundaries completely. Early Christians are not divided into "those with right beliefs" and "those with wrong beliefs", into "orthodox" and "heretical" Christians. Furthermore, the differences of opinion between early Christians - even inside the New Testament - are not smoothed over. Since I have not actually hold a copy in my hands, I cannot guarantee it, but personally I would like to draw some interesting conclusions from these premises, e.g. that there is no sense of seeing early Christians as monotheists, since many of them, like followers of Marcion and Basilides/Valentinus, certainly were not (at least, by modern dictionary meaning of the word).

Likewise, I see no reason to prop up the boundaries of the New Testament canon in critical historical study of Christian origins. For one thing, the process is canonization of the New Testament did not follow any clear line of reasoning, but was filled with ambiguities, power plays, and randomness. For another thing, canonization took centuries to make, and has actually never been completed - for protestant, catholic and orthodox Christians have different New Testament canons in use even this day! Despite all this, I believe there to be a largely unconscious division between canonical and non-canonical early Christian works affecting the scholarly study of them. As social constructionists have been claiming for forty years, it does matter what kind of language one chooses to use in interacting with the world. A recent demonstration of this idea has been performed by psychologist Lera Boridski, whose article How does our language shape the way we think? can be read online here (thanks to Judy Redman for notifying me of the article).

What has this to do with the two Gospel extracts Clement cites? First, it seems to me to be important to make an informed choice of the way I keep referring to them, as the language used will have an effect on mine own thinking and the thinking of my readers. Second, I feel that calling the Gospel extracts either "Secret Gospel of Mark" or "Longer Gospel of Mark" does promote the current division of canonical (New Testament) and non-canonical early Christian works, by underlining that there is a "canonical Gospel of Mark" that is in its essence different from the "Secret Gospel of Mark" AND supporting the idea that there is some intrinsic difference of quality in favour of the first. This, of course, if one accepts my reasoning above, is something we should not be saying, as we do not know what it was that Mark composed "during Peter's stay in Rome", and what is the relation of the canonical Mark I have in my Bible today to this first composition of Mark, and we do not want to support the arbitrary division of early Christian works into canonical and non-canonical, either.

There is something fishy regarding the Gospel of Mark and its tradition history that is not to be found with other early Christians books. Something I cannot quite pinpoint. For the time being, before the ultimate theory of the composition of Markan Gospel I will eventually publish, I will simply call Clement's Gospel extracts "The Gospel of Mark", and "The Gospel According to Mark" for a nice variation, when there is no real danger of mixing things up. For a specific designator, the neutral Theod. II.23-III.11 for the former SGM 1 / LGM 1, and Theod. III.14-18 for the former SGM 2 / LGM 2 will have to do.

Can you come up with a better way to designate, or do you think I'm beginning to resemble too much the conspiracy theorists I'm secretly in love with? Feel free to post your comments and criticisms below.