FM:
-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
 BE> Not quite speculation; there is more to it than that.
>   Bob, I don't dispute any of what you offer regarding the
>douments found by Morton Smith OR their quite probably
>authenticity but I am VERY curious about your rigging of this
>response to me.
>
>   First of all, you were careful NOT to quote the statement set
>forth by Rice as a TRUTH (not a speculation) and THAT is what I
>challenged and still challenge.  If an historian wishes to
>introduce evidence that might indicate the Jesus band as a
>homosexual group, I have no objection to that as long as it is not
>set forth as PROVEN which Rice's statements declared as though it
>were proven fact.  At the moment I could go back and quote it if
>necessary but both he and you know that he offered no
>qualification at all of what he stated flatly as the truth.
Here's the original exchange:
FR:
-Some clues are in the Mithra rituals paralleled in the Christian
-bible.  The "rebirth" of Lazarus -- Jesus's homosexual lover --
-could very well be the Mithratic ritual of "rebirthing" a man by
-placing him into the belly of an animal and "rebirthing" him.
FM:
-   Another of the many, specialized Frederic Rice speculations not
-related to scientific fact but stated as if it were.  It comes
-from the studies of Morton 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 integrity with regard to what is
-KNOWN and what is merely speculation in ancient literature.
This exchange does not show Rice (passage identified as "FR")
using either the words "truth" or "proof".  As a matter of fact,
it does not even make any reference to the Secret Gospel of Mark.
The first person in this forum to refer to the Secret Gospel of
Mark is YOU, not Fredric Rice.  And you are the one, not Rice,
who claimed that Morton's work was "speculation".  Okay?
And that is the claim which I challenged by reporting the facts
on the issue, as found in The Complete Gospels.
>   I have also read Thiering's study of the possibility that the
>scene of the Jesus story is not Jerusalem but Qumran but simply
>because she has put a lot scholarship into it does not make it a
>proven fact - not yet, anyway.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "proven fact".
>   You also did not mention something that Morton Smith gave a LOT
>of emphasis and that is the betrayal scene where the young man
>(Mark??) was wearing a linen cloth and when it was seized he "ran
>away naked."
I didn't quote Morton Smith.  I quoted The Complete Gospels (the
full citation is Robert J. Miller, ed., The Complete Gospels,
New York: HarperCollins, 1994, p.411), and only verses 8-9 of
chapter 1.
You want the linen cloth lines?  Here they are:
  Six days later Jesus gave him an order; and when evening had
  come, the young man went to him, dressed only in a linen cloth.
  [Secret Mk 1.10-11, in The Complete Gospels, 411]
>Smith placed a great deal of emphasis on this in his
>homosexual speculations.
Frankly, I would have thought SMk 1.8-9 and 2.1 (which I
previously quoted) are more decisive on the homosexual issue than
SMk 1.10-11.
Why would Smith have thought the 'linen-cloth' lines to be more
decisive?
>But it is still ONLY something in study
>and by NO MEANS PROVEN.  It does NOT give Frederic Rice or anybody
>else the right to state it as fact that Jesus was part of a
>homosexual band.  I'm not defending either Jesus OR Christianity
>here - I'm defending the integrity of history.
Now waitasec here.  Nobody has any way, strictly speaking, of
"proving" facts about texts.  Such facts are always empirical.
They or their negations are established by examining evidence.
The result is a judgment.  This judgment is empirical and
synthetic.  Empirical judgments can never be known with
certainty.  They are only more or less probable.
The only facts which can be proven are facts about our
determination to use language in a certain fashion, such as in
purely mathematical statements like '2 + 2 = 4' and logical
tautologies like 'p v -p'.  Only these kinds of facts can be
known with certainty.
The kinds of facts we're talking about here don't fall into
these categories, because they are EMPIRICAL facts.  They are
not analytic.  It is a mistake to apply the notion of proof to
them.
BE:
-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.).
>   It was along about then that Smith was invited to our campus to
>speak on this topic and his book and the burden of much of his
>lecture was simply the asking of questions like "what was they
>doing under those sheets, etc."
Sounds like he was trying to appeal to the prurient proclivities
of college students (many scholars, when speaking to students,
assume that they are more interested in sex than would be an
audience of professors).
But this is only commentary on Smith's style when speaking to
students.  It doesn't go to the substance of his findings.
>That is when I first became
>acquainted with his work.  I still have a review of his book
>published at that time.
Well, you might check out some more recent evidence on the issue,
such as the text and commentary found in The Complete Gospels,
cited above (You can buy a copy in any good bookstore today),
and published a generation AFTER Smith's original paper.
When Smith's findings were originally published they were indeed
regarded as speculative.  After Clement scholars had a chance to
review his evidence, however, nearly all of them came to the
conclusion that Smith's findings were not speculative at all but
were genuine evidence of a letter written by Clement of Alexandria
some 1800 years ago.
The Secret Gospel of Mark therefore really did exist.  And it
really did contain sentences about Jesus which suggest that the
author of Mark thought that Jesus was a homosexual.
Bob
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