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The conclusion of my deep dive into the Mar Saba letter controversy. Link to academic email thread referenced in the episode: https://de-de.facebook.com/468328229927087/posts/addendum-hobbs-critique-and-morediscussion-on-crosstalk-1996addendum-on-secret-m/709721079121133/ A summary of my reasoning, as laid out on a friend's Facebook page: "For me, the main interest of the Mar Saba letter lies in the surreal fact of its acceptance by a majority of scholars in the relevant fields. The Mar Saba letter seems especially incredible when you think about the chances that a so-called secret gospel, itself unattested anywhere, should turn up in a a fragment of a letter that gives us every bit of information we would need to contextualize and make proper sense of its 'discovery,' almost as if the letter's author knew the exact sorts of questions that skeptical scholars would ask. For example: 'How do we know what the secret gospel actually said?' The gospel is quoted at length in the letter. 'How do we know that its statements can be connected to Jesus with any plausibility?' The letter says it's by Mark. 'How do we know it's actually by Mark and not some gnostic pretender?' The letter says it's by Clement, a known foe of the gnostics. 'How do we know the letter is by Clement?' From the fact that the letter is really keen to point out its own authorship in the small fragment that we possess from it! 'But if there was a longer gospel by Mark how come we never heard of it?' Also explained in the letter! Does this seriously fail to arouse suspicion? What other gospel fragment have we found in this way, where it's attested by only one find, but that one discovery, as if to make up for the dearth of information available elsewhere, happens to be a scholarly mother lode all by itself?"