Quesnell’s Experiment, Venetia’s Analysis, and the Handwriting of the Mar Saba Letter
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The debate over the Mar Saba manuscript of Clement’s letter to Theodore almost always circles back to one big question:
could Morton Smith really have forged something that looks this “right”?
The more seriously you look at the handwriting evidence, the stranger that question becomes. The script itself doesn’t behave like a clumsy modern fake. And the one person who actually tried to imitate it for several pages, Quentin Quesnell, ended up proving how hard the job really is.
What follows isn’t an argument that the letter must be genuine Clement. It’s about something narrower and more awkward for the “Smith forged it” camp: the fact that the document, as writing, does not supply the classic forensic tells that normally drive forgery verdicts in the humanities.
Instead, most of the forgery case has had to be built around biography, motive, and speculation about a private practical joke—a very unusual pattern by historical standards.
1. Quesnell in Jerusalem: “Less Difficult for the Forger”?
In 1975, Quentin Quesnell published his famous Catholic Biblical Quarterly article challenging the authenticity of the Mar Saba Clementine. In a later reflection on his own handwriting experiment, he remarked:
“I wrote this page in Jerusalem after two or three days’ study of the original.”
He stressed that he had no real prior practice in modern Greek handwriting and suggested that the writing would, in a sense, have been easier for a forger, since the forger wouldn’t be constrained by an original to copy.
On its face that sounds plausible: if you’re inventing a script, you don’t have to match anything; you just write. But as soon as you put Quesnell’s own practice pages next to the Mar Saba photographs, that comforting idea starts to wobble.
2. What Quesnell’s Pages Actually Show
By the late 1970s / early 1980s Quesnell had:
• Smith’s edition and photographs of the letter
• blow-ups of the pages
• charts of ligatures and letterforms
• roughly a decade of intense interest in the text
On that basis he produced several sheets on lined paper, copying the first page of the letter.
They are honest, valuable documents, because they show what happens when a very bright, motivated scholar tries to inhabit that 18th-century monastic hand for more than a few words.
Three things stand out.
First, the slant wanders.
In the Mar Saba manuscript, the “uprights” lean at a remarkably consistent angle from the top of page one to the bottom of page three. In Quesnell’s copies, some lines are almost upright, others lean more steeply to the right, and individual letters within a single word can tilt differently. You can literally watch his hand drift back toward his habitual modern slant as the line goes on.
Second, the rhythm reverts.
When he is concentrating hard—often at the start of a line—his script mimics the exemplar reasonably well. As he relaxes, the strokes loosen, joins start to look more like modern cursive, and the whole line acquires a “running” feel very reminiscent of his natural English hand. That is exactly the “reversion to the mean” pattern forensic handwriting people talk about: under fatigue, the old motor program reasserts itself.
Third, the letterforms are half-learned.
He clearly knows what epsilon, rho, and the standard ου / ει ligatures are supposed to look like. But you can sense him “drawing” them rather than tossing them off. Heights and curves fluctuate more than in the model; some strokes are over-tall and “whippy” in a way that looks very much like his everyday ascenders.
In other words, Quesnell’s pages behave exactly like a serious but still outsider attempt to put on someone else’s graphic “accent” for a long speech. The accent works for a phrase or two, then the native sounds creep back in.
That’s what makes the contrast with the Mar Saba pages so awkward for the forgery-as-easy-hoax scenario.
3. The Mar Saba Hand: Consistent, Fluent, and… Boringly Normal
Take the three pages of the letter as we have them (in Smith’s plates, subsequent reproductions, etc.) and ask the same questions you ask of Quesnell’s exercises.
Slant.
The right-lean is steady within a narrow band from the first line to the last. There is normal micro-variation, but no clear trend where early lines are straighter and later lines collapse into some different, modern angle.
Ductus and letterforms.
The same repertoire of letter-shapes and ligatures reappears throughout: epsilon, rho, kappa, ου, ει, and so on, all made in recognizably the same way. There are no patches where, suddenly, epsilon becomes a modern looped ε for ten lines, or rho takes on a new shape. There is variety, but not schizophrenia.
Rhythm and spacing.
The density of text, word-spacing, and the slightly loose “monastic note” feel are consistent. You don’t see a big shift from labored drawing to relaxed scrawl, as in many imitations. It looks like the same person, in the same style, working at roughly the same pace throughout.
Line quality.
Strokes are confident and continuous. Curves aren’t full of micro-tremor; pressure varies in a natural way within letters. You don’t see the jerky stop-start behavior that shows up when someone is scared of making a mistake with each stroke.
None of this proves the writer wasn’t trying to deceive. A skilled forger can, in principle, train themselves into a convincingly “natural” historic hand. But if you look only at the visible handwriting traits, the Mar Saba pages behave much more like a lived-in monastic hand than like an improvised modern pastiche.
4. Venetia’s Forensic Criteria and Where the Letter Lands
When forensic document examiner Venetia Anastasopoulou was asked to evaluate the letter, she applied a standard battery of handwriting criteria: looking for drawn letters, tremor, lack of variation, mechanical copying, and so on. Her conclusion was that the writing on the Theodore pages has the features of “natural, spontaneous” script rather than of obvious imitation or disguise.
In plainer language: evaluated as handwriting, the pages look like someone writing in their normal style, not like someone slowly tracing or constantly suppressing their own habits.
Again, that doesn’t magic away the possibility of forgery. But it does push the hypothetical forger into a specific corner: if this was faked, it was not a quick, naïve job. It would have to be the work of a very capable imitator who had thoroughly internalized an 18th-century monastic hand before ever touching the flyleaf of Voss’s book.
5. So What Kind of Forger Are We Imagining?
Once you take Quesnell’s experiment and Venetia’s criteria seriously, the usual “bored professor in 1958 dashes off a prank” story starts to look thin.
If the letter is a modern forgery, the forger had to:
• build up a detailed stock of 17th–18th c. Greek monastic letterforms and ligatures,
• train their motor system so those forms came out fluently at natural speed, with normal variation,
• maintain a remarkably stable slant, rhythm, and spacing across three dense pages,
• do this on unruled paper in the back of a printed book, without leaving obvious training scars—guidelines, tremor, reversion to a modern hand.
That is not impossible. There are documented cases in modern forensic work of extremely disciplined imitators who can sustain a foreign script for pages. But it is not trivial either. It is not something “any competent classicist could knock out over a weekend.”
And this is where the discussion about Morton Smith himself quietly changes register. Biographically, Smith was a gifted historian of religion and a superb reader of Greek. He was not a known calligrapher, not a documented producer of forged manuscripts, not someone with a visible history of practicing historical hands. To make him into the forger you now require, you have to add a whole, undocumented side-career: secret paleographic drill, private rehearsals in 18th-century minuscule, perhaps practice runs in other books.
That may be possible in theory. But it is no longer the straightforward “of course he could do it” assumption that some critics seem to rely on.
6. How Forgeries Usually Get Caught (and Why This Case Is Odd)
Step back and look at the big, famous forgery cases in the humanities.
The Donation of Constantine stayed accepted for centuries until Lorenzo Valla systematically showed that its Latin language and legal concepts were anachronistic for the fourth century; the text betrayed its own fraudulence.
The Hitler Diaries fooled some people for a moment, but the case really collapsed when forensic analysis of the paper and ink showed they used modern materials that simply didn’t exist in Hitler’s time.
In case after case, what convinces scholars in the long run is not a psychological reconstruction of the supposed forger, but hard internal or material contradictions in the document itself: later vocabulary, historical impossibilities, physical components that don’t belong to the claimed period, or blatant plagiarism from known later sources.
With the Mar Saba letter, things look different.
On the handwriting and material side:
• the script sits comfortably within 17th–18th c. Greek monastic practice,
• the pages show natural variation but no obvious modern slips,
• expert opinion is divided on date and exact provenance, but nobody has produced a physical impossibility on the level of “ballpoint pen” or “20th-century paper.”
As a result, the forgery case has been forced to do most of its work elsewhere:
• in readings of the theology and how much it matches Smith’s interests,
• in arguments about Clementine style and vocabulary,
• in suspicions surrounding the disappearance of the codex,
• and above all in biographical reconstructions of Smith’s personality and supposed taste for elaborate private jokes.
That doesn’t automatically make those arguments wrong. But it does make this a very unusual forgery debate. We are being asked to accept a major hoax primarily on the basis of a psychological portrait of the discoverer, despite the fact that the document in front of us stubbornly refuses to misbehave in the usual forensic ways.
7. Where That Leaves the Question
None of this settles the question of whether Clement actually wrote the letter, or whether the text preserves an ancient “mystic gospel” of Mark. Those are separate and complicated issues, involving Clementine sources, gospel harmonization, patristic reception, and much else.
The narrower point is this:
On the level of handwriting and basic codicology, the Mar Saba letter does not look like an obvious modern fake. It looks like a plausible piece of 17th–18th century monastic writing, in a steady, practiced hand.
That does not logically exclude forgery. But it means that any forgery hypothesis worthy of the name has to postulate an unusually skilled and unusually disciplined imitator, for whom we currently have no independent evidence, rather than a casual prankster.
And it means that a great deal of the case against the manuscript is doing something quite rare in our field: trying to convict a document largely on circumstantial reconstructions of a modern scholar’s character, instead of on clear internal or physical contradictions in the document itself.
Whether one finds that intellectually satisfying is, at this point, a very live question.
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