Mark Eaton Quotes

I have a scar - a faint gouge in my knee from when I fell down on the sidewalk as a child. It's always seemed stupid to me that none of the pain I've experienced has left a visible mark; sometimes, without a way to prove it to myself, I began to doubt that I had lived through it at all, with the memories becoming hazy over time. I want to have some kind of reminder that while wounds heal, they don't disappear forever - I carry them everywhere, always, and that is the way of things, the way of scars.

The Coptic Church was founded on the teachings of the Apostle Mark, who introduced Christianity to Egypt in the first century during the Roman emperor Nero’s reign. Alex wondered how Father Boutros would view his quest to track down an alternative, and possibly blasphemous, version of the venerated saint’s sacred writings. Christianity spread rapidly throughout Egypt within fifty years of Mark’s arrival in Alexandria in about AD 68. A fragment of the Gospel of John, written using the Coptic language, was found in Upper Egypt and dated to the early second century. The Coptic Church was now more than nineteen centuries old. Copts liked to point out that their Church was the subject of prophecy in the Old Testament. The Prophet Isaiah foretold that “in that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt.

The story borrows from the real-life discovery of the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark at Mar Saba in Israel by the renowned American scholar Dr. Morton Smith in 1958. It was a find that sparked a furious debate in the popular press and among scholars over the manuscript’s authenticity, with some suggesting Smith was the perpetrator of one of history’s most brilliantly executed hoaxes. That debate continues today. Since Smith’s death in 1991, the speculation has only increased.

the scholarly writings of Bart D. Ehrman, particularly his book Lost Christianities, published in 2003 by the Oxford University Press. For anyone wanting a good summary of scholarship on the Secret Gospel, it would be hard to go past “The Strange Case of the Secret Gospel According to Mark,” an article by Shawn Eyer originally published in 1995 in Alexandria: The Journal for the Western Cosmological Traditions, volume 3.

Nobody stood in the pulpit and told the congregation that none of the original copies of any of the books of the New Testament survived, nor any of the first copies, or the copies of those copies. At university, he learned the versions of the four Gospels he’d been taught to revere, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were hand copied over a period of many hundreds of years, accumulating all the scribal errors, additions, and omissions inherent in that very human process.

Not only does the messenger who is also a slave subordinate his own will to that of his Lord; there is nothing in his mind or in his memory that could obstruct the free passage of the revelation. Muhammad is 'abd and rasul; he is also nabi al-ummi, the unlettered Prophet; a blank page set before the divine pen. On this page there is no mark made by any other pen, no trace of profane or indirect knowledge. A prophet does not borrow knowledge from the human store, nor is he a man who learns in the slow human way and then transmits his learning. His knowledge derives from a direct intervention of the Divine in the human order, a tajalli, or pouring out of the truth upon a being providentially disposed to receive it and strong enough to transmit it.