Chapter Nine The Absurdity of the Hoax Hypothesis As the reader can see, I am fairly confident that the handwriting is “authentic” in the sense that it was the way the scribe authentically expressed himself. It was not a “made up” script. It was especially not something that Morton Smith culled from four different manuscripts that he saw on an earlier trip. Just think of the absurdity of the situation being argued here. Morton Smith is in a relationship with the mother of one of his students, the latest in a string of Jewish women that continues forward to Lotte Gaster in the 1970s. Despite these heterosexual relationships, Smith is supposedly “angry” — angry at the world for being gay. Despite getting a fantastic job at Columbia doing the very thing he apparently felt he was put on earth to do, namely the study of religion, he conceives a plot to destroy Christianity. And how exactly is this plot supposed to work? He is going to invent the existence of a Gospel of Mark from Alex...