Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Peter Jeffery Unveiled

Today I received my copy of Peter Jeffery's The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery and began reading it over lunch. It looks like it's going to be every bit as much fun as Stephen Carlson's Gospel Hoax, though it's too early for me to tell how sound its arguments are. So far Jeffery is accusing Smith of amnesia (p 10):
"When Constantin von Tischendorf...discovered the Codex Sinaiticus...he stayed up all night studying it, for 'it really seemed a sacrilege to sleep'. When Smith discovered the letter of Clement, he got up and went to Vespers instead of staying to investigate his discovery, even though his time at the monastery was almost over -- or so he says. Smith seems to have forgotten what he told us [two pages] earlier [Secret Gospel, p 10] -- that he had stopped attending the religious services because he no longer 'responded' to them."
So there's a teaser. A full review will follow when I finish the book.

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