Vindicating Morton Smith
Thursday, October 29th, 2009I want to commend Biblical Archaeology Review and editor Hershel Shanks for the sequence of articles on Morton Smith and “Secret Mark” in the current issue of BAR (November/December, 2009) which I just received this week. In my view the treatment was factual, fair, and quite comprehensive and I agree wholly and without equivocation with Koester and Shanks that Morton Smith did not forge the letter of Clement of Alexandria that contains the quotations to so-called “Secret” version of Mark. What one then makes of these passages is another subject but they surely go back authentically to Clement in the 3rd century CE, not to Morton Smith in the 20th. Here I have to respectfully disagree with my colleagues Bart Ehrman and Birger Pearson.
I knew Prof. Smith quite well as he so graciously helped me with my Ph.D. dissertation on Paul (Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise 1989) at Chicago back in the 1970s, just when all the controversies broke over first his Harvard volume, and the popular Harper volume Jesus the Magician to follow. His devotion to my project gained him nothing, and he was at Columbia, and had nothing officially to do with Chicago or my committee (I wrote under Jonathan Z. Smith), but he loved ideas and recognized in my fledgling attempts to enter the field of “Jewish magic,” a beginning scholar who wanted to produce something of quality. He spent hours heavily annotating my dissertation chapters and wrote me these wonderful handwritten notes with citations and suggestions that I treasure to this day. I will never forget when a photo-copy of the manuscript of Sefer HaRazim arrived in the mail, prior to it being available in print, compliments of Prof. Smith. He would not even let me pay him for the copy costs or postage. Over the next twenty years we often spent time together at the annual meetings and on other occasions and he came to visit us when I was teaching at William and Mary. He was a regular participant and contributor to our SBL seminar over the years dealing with Greco-Roman idea of the “Divine and the Human.” I think I can say I knew him fairly well, both professionally and personally. Those of us who did know him find these charges of mendacious duplicity and forgery inconceivable and insulting to the kind of scholar and human being that Smith was.
In terms of the arguments themselves, the BAR articles cover things well but the Scholem correspondence, in my view, settles things once for all for anyone who takes the time to read it. I covered this recent turn in the story and controversy in a previous post on this blog: http://jamestabor.com/2009/02/02/latest-on-the-secret-gospel-of-mark/
