Masingill to Rice, 4-12-98:
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>Smith, the historian who I heard and read and it IS speculation
>based on his "beliefs" and his discovery of _The Secret Gospel of
>Mark_.  You can wow others here with it but not me.  I retain my
Not quite speculation; there is more to it than that.
The fragment (one page) consists of two passages quoted in a
fragment of a letter by Clement of Alexandria, appearing in the
back of a 1646 copy of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, found
at the Mar Saba Monastery near Jerusalem in 1958.  At first, when
Morton Smith published this stuff in 1973, the received view was
that it was fraudulent.  More recently, however, nearly all
Clement scholars believe that the fragment is authentic; that is,
that it really did appear in letters written by Clement of
Alexandria (ca.150-215 A.D.).
The big content problem with this fragment is the treatment of
the "young man" found in the portions which Clement quoted,
especially the lines,
  ...  The young man looked at Jesus, loved him, and began to beg
  him to be with him.  Then they left the tomb and went into the
  young man's house.  ...
  The sister of the young man whom Jesus loved was there, along
  with his mother and Salome, but Jesus refused to see them.
  [Secret Mk 1.8-9, 2.1, in The Complete Gospels, p.411]
Clement indicated in the letter that the first passage occurred in
Secret Mark between our Mark 10.34 and 10.35, while the second
passage (all of which is quoted here after the second ellipsis)
was found between Mark 10.46a and 10.46b.
The Secret Mark thus implied that the young man was a homosexual
lover of Jesus, and consequently that Jesus was a homosexual.
This may explain why Mark did not have the women receive the young
man's words at the tomb very well at Mark 16.6-8.  That is, in
other lost parts of Mark's story it may have been plain that the
young man at the tomb of Jesus was the same as the young man in
these passages quoted by Clement, from which it would follow that
the women recoiled from his words about Jesus having been raised,
not because he was an angel of the Lord, but because he had
performed the same act, as Jesus' lover, there which Jesus had
performed on him earlier in the Gospel.
Thus, the entire Resurrection myth may well have been merely a
literary transformation of an ancient homosexual rite.
 FR> missed:  He worshipped a lying god.
>This is a perfect example of the Goebbels method of including the
>big lie in a perfect system of truths.  Since Columbus was not
>perfect in his geography and he WAS a devout Christian as were
>most of the scientists far beyond the period of his voyages, ergo,
>he was a kind of fool. ...
I think you're missing an important point here:  Rice's
statement "He worshipped a lying god" directly implies that this
god exists.
Rice in fact does believe that god exists.
Bob
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