Rediscovering the Legacy of Quentin Quesnell: The Letter to Theodore Controversy

On November 29, 2012, Quentin Quesnell, the Roe/Straut Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at Smith College, passed away. Smith College commemorated his legacy, particularly his work in questioning the authenticity of the Letter to Theodore, purportedly authored by Clement of Alexandria. This controversial document, discovered by Morton Smith in the Mar Saba monastery near Bethlehem, quickly became a focal point of scholarly debate.

The Suspicion and the Investigation

According to a Smith College press release, Quesnell found the document suspicious and published his doubts in 1975, suspecting that Smith had the skills to forge it. However, the press release did not mention that Smith College had funded an important trip to Jerusalem for Quesnell from June 1-20, 1983, where he promised to settle the issue of the manuscript’s authenticity once and for all. Quesnell examined the manuscript, arranged for new photographs, and ultimately developed scholarly aids for the examination of the handwriting, which were not shared with the rest of the academic community.

Uncovering the Details

In the year before his passing, I corresponded regularly with Quesnell, discussing his 1983 Jerusalem trip. Following his death, knowing he had no immediate family and suspecting there were “things of value” in his home office relating to the document, I aimed to secure the papers and photographs he had mentioned in our conversations. With David Trobisch's assistance, these documents were transferred to the Smith College archives. Among these were nine photographic slides taken under Quesnell’s specific instructions to Kallistos Dourvas, chief librarian of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchal library in Jerusalem.

The Photographs and Further Research

A June 20, 1983, letter from Quesnell, preserved in the Smith College Archives, details his instructions to Dourvas:

"Thank you for letting me work with the Mar Saba material these last three weeks, especially the 'letter to Clement'. Here is a list of photos I still need, according to our discussions and the arrangement made with Garo: 1. Photo of each of the three pages of the Clement manuscript—whole-page. 3 close-up photos of each of the three pages. These should be in the form recommended by Garo for detailed examination of individual letters later by means of blow-ups."

The letter also references specific manuscripts shown by Dourvas to Quesnell, aimed at demonstrating the antiquity of the discovered manuscript. Quesnell requested additional photographs, impressed by the similarities among these documents.

A note dated September 5, 1983, from Kallistos Dourvas confirms the dispatch of the negatives, apologizing for the delay. Quesnell clearly planned to continue his examination from Massachusetts using these photographs. In 1987, Quesnell sought further funding from Smith College to study the manuscript using the 1983 slides and negatives. His December 1987 funding request, titled "EXPLANATION OF PROJECT FOR DEVELOPMENT OFFICE Quentin Quesnell Department of Religion and Biblical Literature," recounts his 1983 trip and the professionally taken photographs.

The Blow-Up Photographs

Quesnell acknowledged his intent to use the slides and negatives for a thorough examination of the manuscript, involving paleographic experts in 18th-century Greek to analyze the photographs. He also planned to publish his extensive notes from his 1983 study. A January 8, 1988 letter confirms that Quesnell's funding request received recommendations for external funding sources. The original draft of the proposal, replete with type-overs and crossed-out words, reveals Quesnell’s intent to challenge the manuscript's authenticity through photographic analysis. Smith College archives list "(9) 35mm slides of a manuscript, unordered; Quentin Quesnell papers," indicating Garo Nalbandian’s fulfillment of Quesnell’s request for detailed photos.

These new photos showed the manuscript had been removed from the 1646 printed Voss edition, likely deteriorating once exposed to the elements. A note from Smith College states the photographs were “developed by Dick Fish at Smith College per request of Quentin Quesnell.” Matthew Richard Fish, an active member of the Smith College Imaging Center since 1959, was familiar with developing enlargement photos, emphasizing the value of film enlargements.

Quesnell's funding request methodology, explained to Dourvas as "the form recommended by Garo for detailed examination of individual letters later by means of blow-ups," was executed by Nalbandian between June 20 and September 5, 1983. Magnified images suitable for detailed paleographic observation were developed through film enlargement by “Dick” Fish. Quesnell expressed satisfaction with the results, noting the quality of the photographic reproductions.

My Connection with Quesnell

My connection with Quesnell began through Timo Paananen, a Finnish doctoral candidate, whom I helped connect with Quesnell via a three-way call. Notes from these conversations, found in the Smith College archives, contain references to the blow-up photographs. Quesnell was uncertain if the three-color photographs given by Kallistos Dourvas to Nikolaos Olympiou and Charles Hedrick, later published in The Fourth R in 2000, were the same as his.

Quesnell did not intend for the page-size color images circulating on the internet to serve as the basis for paleographic research. He planned to use the nine enlargements produced by Richard Fish as superior resources for such investigations. Rumors that Morton Smith had "burned" his personal notes may have shifted focus from the black-and-white photographs taken by Smith in 1958, publicly available since 2006.

Discovering the Blow-Up Photographs

I became aware of the "blow-ups" of the Letter to Theodore on March 5, 2015, when I received low-resolution scans of Quesnell’s academic library contents. Viewing these images and reading the funding request for "enlarged photocopies of some of my slides and negatives," I recognized their superiority for detailed paleographic examination. Excited by these valuable tools, I focused on a study commissioned by the Biblical Archaeological Review, involving Agamemnon Tselikas, a leading authority on post-Byzantine Greek documents. The black-and-white images from the manuscript appeared far clearer to my naked eye than Hedrick’s color scans.

Conclusion

Despite Smith College's funding of Quesnell’s efforts to expose Morton Smith as a forger, these efforts did not yield concrete evidence of forgery, and Quesnell did not publish findings on the Letter to Theodore post-1983. However, his work, including the detailed blow-up photographs and the meticulous notes preserved in the Smith College archives, remains a valuable resource for ongoing scholarly investigation into the authenticity of the Letter to Theodore.