Kata Markon

["Professor L.W. Hurtado" <hurtadol AT div.ed.ac.uk>]

"Secret Mark" is a great romantic notion, and like all such 
promises more than it can actually deliver in the cold light of day!
Let's play "What do we know?". 
--We have photographs supplied by Morton Smith of a text written 
(allegedly) in the flyleaf of a book from some 1,400 years after the 
alleged date of the composition of the text.  
--We have no confirmatory witness from any other scholar as to (a) 
the existence of the book and the validity of the photographs, (b) 
the story of the discovery of the book/text.
--We do not have any of what is today standard-procedure 
analysis:  no palaeographic dating of the Greek of the writing in the 
alleged book, no analysis of the date of the book in which the text 
allegedly appears, etc.
--This is the sort of evidential basis that one today would tolerate 
only for an immediate period during which an archaeologist is 
preparing a report for publication or a critical edition of a new text, 
after which the original artefact would be available for qualified 
scholars to make independent studies of it.  This is an intolerable 
situation to be in some 30 yrs after the alleged discovery of the 
item, and over 25 years after Smith published his analysis.
--It is certainly a perilous basis for anything other than mooting 
various hypotheses, the only value of which is the subsequent 
ability to *test* them.  What we have, however, instead nowadays 
are a string of hypotheses, each one dependent on the other, and 
treated as anything more than something to test and disprove 
*solely* because of the personal status of some scholars who have 
mooted them:  esp. Smith and Koester.
--Possibilities:  (1) Possible that Clement wrote this or something 
like it, though some 1400 yrs of textual history separates our ms 
from Clement, if he did, so how secure can we be about the 
correspondence twixt the ms and whatever Clement might have 
written?  [The confidence with which Koester treats the ms basis 
for Secret Mark is very puzzling, given his reluctance to grant much 
textual basis for the original texts of the NT writings because our 
earliest mss are ca. 100 yrs later than composition!].   (2) Possibly 
a Secret Mark circulated in Alexandria, among one or more groups 
of Christians whom Clement regarded with suspicion.  In which 
case, this *could* be a useful document for understanding more 
about Clement and such groups [with the caveat mentioned in #1 
above].  (3) As to Secret Mark being the predecessor of canonical 
Mark, this is highly unlikely, for all the usual reasons that historical 
scholars will recognize [e.g., no confirmatory evidence of such 
groups in the early lst cent.; no indication of why then it "re-
appears" only with Clement in Alexandria in the late 2nd Cent; no 
explanation of why canonical Mark so quickly became predominant 
and the major Synoptic pattern/source for other gospels, etc.]
--*Crucially* until we have the normal procedure fulfilled of 
independent scholarly analyses of the actual artefact, virtually 
nothing of any confidence can be said about "Secret Mark".

L. W. Hurtado
University of Edinburgh,
New College
Mound Place 
Edinburgh, Scotland EH1 2LX
Phone: 0131-650-8920
Fax: 0131-650-6579
E-mail:  L.Hurtado AT ed.ac.uk