The reason I have spent so much time analyzing what amounts to the worst possible proof of “inauthenticity” is not that I want to ridicule the hoax side. That would hardly be necessary, given the quality of some of the arguments that have been made on that side. The point is rather that even in the most feverish version of the theory — the suggestion that two homosexual men in the 1960s, one older, established, and approaching the end of his career, the other younger, ambitious, and perhaps still uncertain about himself, somehow conspired to shape the meaning of the Letter to Theodore — there is a real insight buried under the madness. For once one gets past the insinuations, the gossip, and the sheer melodrama, one is left with a genuine question. Why did Morton Smith translate a phrase which every Greek philologist I have consulted reads as “nakeds with the Naked One” as “naked man with naked man”? This is not a small matter. It is one of the places where the entire modern mytho...