The ancients recognized the power of giving something a name. The Bible begins with God granting Adam the authority to “give names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field.” Among Jews and Christians, a name was not merely the arbitrary assignment of letters and sounds to a thing. It could represent an attunement to the very essence of the thing itself. In this sense, the decision, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to name Morton Smith’s discovery—a lost letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria and addressed to a certain Theodore—a “modern forgery,” almost certainly perpetrated by its discoverer, marked, I will argue, a dangerous turning point in the study of early Christianity.  Morton Smith was a towering figure in the historical study of the Bible in the late twentieth century. He also made many enemies. Yet there is, and always has been, no decisive evidence that the Letter to Theodore was forged by Smith or by anyone else. T...