On the Abuse of the "One Who Knows" Dedication

 Morton Smith’s dedication “To the One Who Knows” has turned into a kind of Rorschach test for people who already decided he must have forged the Letter to Theodore. If you want it to be a clue in a hoax, you can always twist it that way. But the moment you stop treating Smith like a character in a thriller and remember he was a human being, one name keeps coming back as the only serious starting point for understanding that line: Levon Avdoyan.

Avdoyan wasn’t a random commenter, or a later polemicist, or some outraged churchman. He was a historian, he was gay, he was one of the very few people we can clearly see as close to Smith in the surviving evidence, and he is the person through whom we get one of the only candid glimpses of Smith thinking about his sexuality and his public persona. When Ariel Sabar reconstructs Smith’s late “coming-out” moment, who is the one named recipient of the draft? Lee Avdoyan. On the copy of the letter protesting a homophobic article, Smith writes to him, “Herewith my ‘coming-out’ article. I never expected to write one, but I’m getting old and irritable, and [the dean’s article] was just too much.” The journal never published it, but the point is clear enough: Smith saw Avdoyan as the person who would understand what that text meant in every sense – intellectually, politically, personally.

Now put that next to the way Avdoyan himself uses “To the One Who Knows.” In his review of a book on Armenian heretical movements, he ends with a reflection that a lot of things must remain doubtful, that competing interpretations of Paulician and Tondrakian history will always coexist, and that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is in that context that he invokes Smith’s dedication to The Secret Gospel: “To the One Who Knows.” For Avdoyan, the line points to the reality that in the middle of contradictory evidence and conflicting reconstructions there is, above it all, a “One who knows” – the ultimate knower, the one before whom our confident narratives and scholarly ego trips all look pretty ridiculous.

In other words, when Avdoyan reaches for Smith’s phrase, he treats it as a gesture of humility at the edge of knowledge, not as a coy little confession of forgery. It sits exactly where you’d expect it to sit if you take seriously that Smith was, at one and the same time, a brilliant historian of early Christianity and a closeted gay man in a mid-20th-century academic world that made both of those identities fraught. There is the “One who knows” in the theological sense – God, or whatever word you want to put there – and there is also the one who knows in the personal sense: the friend, the confidant, the person who really understands who you are beneath the professional mask and the defensive irony.

This is where the priorities of the hoax crowd go completely upside down. On one side you have a gay colleague and close friend who reuses the dedication in his own scholarly prose, in a way that clearly reflects how he heard and felt it. On the other side you have Quentin Quesnell and the whole cottage industry that followed him, treating that same line as if it were a Dan Brown code announcing, “hey, I faked this.” Quesnell spun out the story that Smith hid clues in the dedications, like some bored undergrad playing games with the syllabus. That story has been repeated so often that people forget to ask the basic sanity check: is this really the most plausible reading, given what we actually know about the man and the relationships he had?

Because if Morton Smith was gay – and at this point, between Sabar and the “coming-out” letter to Avdoyan, that’s not exactly controversial – then it does matter whom he trusted, whom he wrote to, and who later felt confident enough to echo his private language in print. You don’t have to claim that Smith had literally no other friends on earth to see the weight of the evidence. What we can actually see on paper is Smith choosing Avdoyan as the person to send that vulnerable “I never expected to write one” letter to. We can see Avdoyan responding, years later, by invoking Smith’s dedication as a kind of intellectual and spiritual motto for doing history under conditions of permanent uncertainty. If you care at all about reconstructing what “To the One Who Knows” meant to Smith himself, you start there.

Instead, the hoax literature behaves as if this line from Avdoyan didn’t exist. The fact that he was gay, that he was close to Smith, that he was the one who held and agonized over whether to hand Sabar the letter – all of that evaporates. Suddenly the best evidence for what the dedication meant is not the testimony of the friend who actually lived with the fallout, but the fantasies of a defrocked priest who needed the whole story to end with a clever fraud. Smith’s sexuality is decisive when it can be used to spice up a hoax narrative or a psychoanalytic profile. As soon as it points in a direction that undercuts the conspiracy theory – toward a quiet, coded acknowledgement of being known, judged, and loved by “the One who knows” – suddenly it’s “unclear” or “irrelevant.”

That’s why the defensive move in the forum thread – “Discernable to whom?” – totally misses the point. Sure, we can be pedantic and say that no one has mapped Smith’s entire social life down to the coffee break. But the question here isn’t whether some other colleague or student also cared about him. The question is: which relationships are documented in a way that actually bears on how we read that one small, loaded line in the dedication of The Secret Gospel? And the answer, like it or not, is that the Avdoyan line is the only one that really intersects both with Smith’s sexuality and with his own self-presentation as a scholar who knew he trafficked in contested, explosive material.

Once you put Avdoyan back at the center, “To the One Who Knows” starts to look like exactly the kind of double-layered phrase a closeted, religiously serious, argumentative Columbia professor might choose. On the surface, it is a nod toward the divine knower above the squabbling interpreters – the One who actually knows what happened in first-century Palestine, what the Mar Saba manuscript is, who Mark was, what Clement wrote, and so on. At a more intimate level, it also marks the existence of that one human “who knows” the author himself beyond the professional mask. Avdoyan’s way of mobilizing the line in his review – urging historians to be mindful of it when navigating conflicting accounts of Armenian “heresies” – fits both levels. He takes it seriously as theology and as method, and he uses it with the ease of someone for whom it isn’t a riddle, but a shared understanding.

Compare that with the hoax reinterpretation. In order to make “To the One Who Knows” into a confession, you have to assume that Smith thought of himself primarily as a prankster and only secondarily as a historian; that he wanted to be caught, or at least wanted the clever reader to catch him; and that he considered the dedication page a good place to plant a little kiss-off to future prosecutors. You also have to assume that none of his actual friends ever reflected on the dedication in print in a way that contradicts this reading – or, if they did, that their testimony should be ignored. It’s not just a stretch; it is a completely inverted epistemology. You discard the recollection of the one gay friend and hang everything on the imagination of people who needed a clue to solve their self-invented puzzle.

At some point you have to decide whether you’re doing history or fan-fiction. History starts with the best, most proximate evidence: the actual people who knew the subject, the documented relationships, the ways they used language with each other. Fan-fiction starts with the story you want to tell and then raids the evidence for props. On “To the One Who Knows,” the difference is glaring. The best answer to what Smith meant is Avdoyan’s. The worst answer is Quesnell’s, and every later conspiracy theory that treats the dedication as a self-incriminating nod.

None of this settles the authenticity of the Letter to Theodore. You can still argue about ink, hands, paleography, library histories, and so on. But if you want to claim that the dedication is a smoking gun for forgery, you have to be willing to look Levon Avdoyan in the face, so to speak, and say: “Sure, you knew him, he trusted you, you’ve reflected thoughtfully on that exact phrase – but we’re going to throw all that away in favor of a hoax narrative that needs the line to mean something else.” And if that’s your move, then let’s stop pretending this is about “the best explanation” and just admit it: the conspiracy theory comes first, the reading of the dedication second.

If, instead, you start from Avdoyan – from the gay friend, the “coming-out” letter, and the way he uses “To the One Who Knows” as a watchword for humility in the face of incomplete knowledge – then the dedication stops being a coded confession and becomes something far more human. It’s the line of a man who knew he was working at the edge of what can be known, who knew his own life was only partially visible to his colleagues, and who still, stubbornly, wrote for the One who knows.