Chapter Twelve The Survivor And so here we are: with a letter of Clement of Alexandria written into the blank pages of a 1646 Vossius edition of Ignatius, likely by someone moving through Jerusalem in search of manuscripts of that same Church Father. That is the stubborn physical fact at the end of all this noise. There is no alternative account of the original of the Letter to Theodore except the lazy one: it was “just there” at Mar Saba. The monks may have copied it there. They may have copied it elsewhere within the orbit of the Jerusalem Patriarchate. A printed book with handwritten pages could have migrated from one patriarchal library to another, from Jerusalem to Mar Saba, from Mar Saba back to Jerusalem, or through any number of monastic hands before Morton Smith ever saw it. What cannot be responsibly maintained is that the book floated outside history until 1958 and then suddenly became interesting because Morton Smith had the bad luck to find it. There were, of course, promi...