The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown (32 page)

Matthew and the Gospel of Peter differ slightly in their descriptions of the sealing of Jesus' tomb. Matthew says simply that the tomb was sealed (Matt 27:66). The Gospel of Peter adds that it was sealed with seven seals (
Gos. Pet.
8:33). The reference to seven seals suggests that the author of the Gospel of Peter embellished Matthew at this point out of apologetic concerns and probably in light of Rev 5:1.
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This suggests that the Gospel of Peter was written after Revelation and that it is likely a second-century work.

The use of the term “Lord's Day” may be particularly significant for dating the Gospel of Peter.
¹¹⁵
The earliest Christian documents to use the expression are Rev 1:10,
Didache
14:1, and Ignatius (
To the Magnesians
9:1). The phrase the “first day of the week” (see the Synoptic Passion narratives; John 20:1,19 ,26; Acts 20:7; 1 Cor 16:2) is the more primitive form of reference to the day of Jesus' resurrection, which was common in the early church in the mid- and late first century. The absence of references to the “Lord's Day” in the early NT documents, coupled with the presence of the term in Revelation and the
Didache
(second half of first or early second century), suggests that the expression became popular in the final decades of the first century (alternatively, John coined the phrase in Rev 1:10). The use of “the Lord's Day,” especially in its abbreviated form, suggests a second-century date for the Cross Gospel.
¹¹⁶

Finally, the rather bizarre description of Jesus' resurrection in the Gospel of Peter is remarkably similar to second-century literature.
Gospel of Peter
9:38 states that at the time of Jesus' resurrection a great sound or voice came from heaven. The heavens opened, and two men surrounded by a brilliant light descended through the gap in the heavens. The two heavenly figures entered the tomb to escort Jesus out. When the three figures emerged from the tomb, the heads of the angelic beings reached to the sky, but the head of Jesus extended even above the heavens (
Gos. Pet.
10:39–40). As the angels and Jesus exited the tomb, a cross, apparently floating in thin air, followed behind them.
¹¹⁷
A heavenly voice asked, “Did you preach to those who are sleeping?” and the cross replied, “Yes” (
Gos. Pet.
10:39–42).

Second-century apocryphal literature was characterized by several of the features noted above. Other second-century texts also speak of independently moving crosses and ascribe a supernatural stature to the resurrected Christ.
¹¹⁸
Consequently, the descriptions of Jesus' stature and of the moving cross in the Gospel of Peter suggest a date of composition in the second century.

The date of the Gospel of Peter and its literary relationship to the canonical Gospels is an issue of great importance that has an enormous impact on one's reconstruction of the events surrounding Jesus' passion and resurrection. The Gospel of Peter is clearly a product of the author's creative literary imagination rather than a serious attempt to preserve eyewitness accounts of actual events. Thus, if the Gospel of Peter is the single source for the accounts of the passion and resurrection in the NT Gospels as Crossan claimed, the canonical Gospels are unreliable revisions of an imaginative tradition. But close examination of the Gospel of Peter indicates that the author was dependent on the canonical Gospels and wrote it in the second century long after the canonical Gospels were penned and the eyewitnesses of Jesus' ministry had passed from the scene.

Secret Mark

In 1958 Morton Smith, assistant professor of history at Columbia University, visited the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem and photographed fragments of texts from the monastery library. In the end papers of an edition of the letters of Ignatius printed in 1646, Smith found a handwritten letter ascribed to Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) in a Greek script resembling that common in the eighteenth century. In the letter, Clement claimed to have known three versions of Mark's Gospel: the canonical version used in public worship, a later version in which Mark added secret traditions to his earlier text for use in secret rituals of initiates, and an even later version containing additions by a gnostic group.

Clement quoted two additions from the second version that Smith identified as Secret Mark. The most extensive quotation described the resurrection of an unnamed figure that later came to Jesus wearing only a linen cloth. The man spent the night with Jesus, and Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. The account appears to be modeled on John's account of the resurrection of Lazarus expressed in Markan terminology.
¹¹⁹

Within two years of Smith's publication of his find, scholars began to challenge the authenticity of the text. Q. Quesnell suggested that the text was a forgery.
¹²⁰
Suspicion surrounded the text in part because after being photographed by Smith in 1958 and then a team of scholars in 1972, the text mysteriously disappeared, making it impossible to subject the text to the testing necessary to authenticate it even as an eighteenth-century production.
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The text still has its advocates. H. Koester maintained that the letter attributed to Clement was “probably genuine” and cautiously suggested that the canonical Gospel was dependent on this earlier version of Mark.
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More recently, scholars such as B. Metzger and B. Ehrman have questioned the authenticity of Secret Mark and Smith's role in its discovery.
¹²³
Despite such questions, J. D. Crossan has argued for both the authenticity of Secret Mark and its priority to the canonical Gospel.
¹²⁴
Crossan placed Secret Mark in his first stratum of sources for historical Jesus research.

S. C. Carlson has recently written the most extensive examination of the authenticity of the letter of Clement and has produced compelling evidence supporting the suspicion that
M. Smith created the text as part of a scholarly hoax.
¹²⁵
First, Smith's account of the discovery of Secret Mark has several interesting parallels with an intriguing novel first published in 1940 titled
The Mystery of Mar Saba
. These parallels may be intentional clues showing that Secret Mark is a forgery like the Gospel of Nicodemus that is the focus of the novel. B. Ehrman has pointed out that the page opposite of Secret Mark in the 1646 edition of Ignatius expressed scorn for “impudent fellows” who have “interpolated” passages into ancient texts with “all kinds of nonsense.” The placement of the copy of the Clementine letter in the book may be another clue expressing the true nature of the letter.

Second, certain characteristics of the script of the Clementine letter suggest that it is a twentieth-century forgery. (1) The script bears signs of unnatural hesitations in the pen strokes that are consistent with the forger's tremor as well as pen lifts and signs of retouching that suggest that the characters were drawn rather than written. The characters also are inconsistently formed. (2) The script is dissimilar in several ways from that of other eighteenth-century manuscripts produced at Mar Saba. The script is more similar to scripts appearing in Western than Eastern Greek manuscripts of the period. The Western script is odd if the manuscript were produced at Mar Saba. Due to his previous research, Smith was far more familiar with the Western script. (3) The script is identical to that of another Mar Saba manuscript, manuscript 22, which Smith himself claimed was produced by a twentieth-century person whom he identified as M. Madiotes. Although the Greek suffix gives the name the appearance of being Greek, it is not a Greek proper name but a pseudonym meaning “baldy” and with a secondary figurative meaning “swindler.” The abbreviation “M.” may well stand for “Morton.” Moreover, Smith concluded from the manuscript that the scribe of the Clementine letter was an experienced writer and scholar with an interest in patristics and Western critical scholarship, conclusions that are completely unsupported by the evidence of the find unless the scribe was Smith himself and his description is autobiographical.

Third, the 1910 catalogue of books from the Mar Saba library contains no mention of this copy of Ignatius's works. This allows the possibility that the book was smuggled into the library after the forgery had already been penned. Smith's own survey of the library's contents demonstrates that of the 10 printed books in the collection, all were produced in Venice except for the Voss edition of Ignatius that was printed in Amsterdam. Moreover, the Voss edition is the only text containing Latin as well as Greek in the library.

Fourth, it seems rather suspicious that Smith's discovery corroborated claims of Smith's earlier scholarly work. In his dissertation,
Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels
, Smith associated Mark 4:11 with secrecy over forbidden sexual relationships.
¹²⁶
Secret Mark hints at
a forbidden sexual relationship between Jesus and the young man in the linen cloth. The find also confirmed his insistence that a source with Johannine traits lay behind miracle accounts in the Gospel of Mark.
¹²⁷

Fifth, as is often true of scholarly hoaxes, Smith seems to have left clues identifying himself as the true author of the Clementine letter. The preface to
Secret Gospel
stated, “No doubt if the past, like a motion picture, could be replayed, I should also be shocked to find how much of the story I have already invented.”
¹²⁸
The conclusion stated, “Truth is necessarily stranger than history.”
¹²⁹
Most intriguing is Smith's dedication of his book
Secret Gospel
“to the one who knows” that appears to match the dedication of the scholarly version
Clement
to A. D. Nock, one of the scholars asked by Smith to examine the manuscript, who was skeptical about the text from the beginning. The dedications seem to suggest that Nock's suspicions about Secret Mark were correct.

Consequently, Secret Mark, which is important in the understanding of the historical Jesus and in reconstructing Gospel origins in the theories of prominent scholars such as Koester and Crossan, is probably a forgery. The evidence amassed by Carlson has been described by M. Goodacre of Duke University as “compelling, and utterly convincing,”
¹³⁰
and by L. Hurtado as “persuasive, decisive, practically unanswerable.”
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Obviously, twentieth-century forgeries have nothing to contribute to serious discussions on the life and teachings of Jesus.

Conclusion

Our quick tour of some of the Gospels on which some scholars heavily depend in historical Jesus research raises some disturbing questions about the reliability of these “lost Gospels.” Evidence suggests that these Gospels generally date up to one hundred years, and sometimes significantly more, after the death of Jesus. Although these Gospels may be useful for understanding divergent religious movements of the second and third centuries, they are of little value for understanding who Jesus actually was or what he said and did. The four canonical Gospels remain the most helpful sources for historical Jesus research not merely because they are canonical but because they are the most ancient sources and were written during the first century when eyewitness testimonies about Jesus were still available.
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CHRONOLOGY OF JESUS' MINISTRY

Introduction

Westerners in the twenty-first century tend to be concerned with times and dates. They frequently glance at their watches and set appointments weeks, months, and sometimes even years in advance. Not surprisingly they may be disappointed to find few references to precise dates in the NT. They may be shocked to discover that Jesus was not born on December 25, AD 1, and that modern scholars are not certain of the day, month, or even year of his birth. However, the lack of concern for precise chronology or frequent references to times and dates are to be expected from people from first-century agrarian societies. To expect a detailed chronology of Jesus' life to unfold in the Gospels is to impose modern Western concerns on the ancient text. In general, early Christians were far more concerned with the events of Jesus' life and their theological Significance than issues of chronology. Modern believers could learn from the priorities of the early Christians.

Nevertheless, developing a chronology of Jesus' life is a worthy exercise and an important step in the historical study of the Gospels. Yet constructing a precise chronology of Jesus' life is difficult for several reasons. First, the four evangelists provided few explicit references that enable scholars to relate the events of Jesus' life to the dates of important government officials, the normal way of establishing dates during this era. The only precise date explicitly mentioned in the Gospels is the date of the beginning of the ministry of John the Baptist, and even this reference appears in only one of the Gospels (Luke 3:1–3). Second, the Gospel writers mixed a basic chronological framework with some degree of topical arrangement, which makes it difficult to establish the precise order of key events in Jesus' ministry. Nevertheless, sufficient data exists for establishing an approximate chronology of Jesus' life and ministry. This section proposes approximate dates for Jesus' birth, baptism, ministry, and Crucifixion.

The Birth of Jesus

Beginning students may assume that Jesus was born in AD 1. Yet, as will shortly be evident, matters are not quite so straightforward. Matthew 2:1 and Luke 1:5 indicate that Jesus was born in the later years of the reign of Herod the Great. Josephus stated that an eclipse occurred shortly before Herod's death.
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This eclipse may be dated from astronomical data to precisely March 12/13 in 4 BC.
¹³⁴
Moreover, Herod died before Passover that same year. The Passover celebration in 4 BC began on April 11. Herod thus died between March 12 and April 11 in the year 4 BC. The date of Herod's death establishes the latest possible date
(terminus ad quem)
for Jesus' birth.