"...relax and enjoy it" and manuscript forgery

[Stephen Goranson]

A fine new scholarly book by Peter Jeffery has occasion to assert that
the late Prof. Morton Smith (Columbia), in presenting to the public a purported
ancient Christian text, included a vulgar joke. Prof. Jeffery (Princeton)
argues. in my view this is the second book to do so persuasively, that Smith
fabricated the supposedly-ancient text and offers that the vulgar saying was
widespread by the time Smith wrote his book. I mention this here in case it's
of interest.

Smith claimed he found in 1958 in Mar Saba monastery an eighteenth-century copy
of a letter of Clement of Alexandria that quoted from a Secret Gospel of Mark.
Jeffery's book is The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex,
Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (Yale U. P, Nov. 2006); book synopsis
and reviews are available at amazon.com. Smith vistited the monastery in the
Judaean wilderness twice. The first time, he was religious (he became an
Episcopal priest); the second time, he was an atheist, and anti-religious. The
first time he appreciated the chanting. the second time he described (in his
1973 book The Secret Gospel p.6) the chanting as disorienting and hypnotic:
"I knew what was happening, but I relaxed and enjoyed it." Jeffery, an expert
in history of music and liturgy identified this as a vulgar joke, a reference to
the line, "if you're getting raped, relax and enjoy it." Jeffery (128f and
endnotes) duly mentions coach Bobby Knoght (1988) and a Texas politician
(1990), though they are too late. He located a 1954 courst case:
http://www.lawskills.com/case/ga/id/18745
"Q. Do you remember when the deputy sheriff made the statement to you
that--Confucius say, "The rape being unavoidable to relax and enjoy it"?'[....]

And a 1970 rock album title.
But there are other written traces, e.g. (g-bks) The Long Voyage (1959), by
Adrian Hayter p.97, "...the Chinese proverb...."

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson


Jeffery wrote that such words are mostly passed along orally, but found

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