What is Left of the Argument that to Theodore is a Forgery?

Topic	Forgery argument	Timo Paananen’s rebuttal
Literary dependence on James H. Hunter’s novel The Mystery of Mar Saba	Stephen Carlson, Peter Jeffery, Francis Watson and others claim that Smith modelled the whole discovery on Hunter’s thriller: a suspicious visiting scholar, a forgotten codex in Mar Saba, a text that “exposes” liberal theology, etc. They treat verbal and thematic overlaps as signs that Smith consciously used Hunter as a template for his hoax.	Paananen shows that the alleged parallels are (a) extremely general “monastery-mystery” tropes found in many works, not specific enough to demonstrate direct dependence; (b) often misquoted or exaggerated; and (c) selected with hindsight. He then compares this pattern with other modern “forgery hunts” where critics likewise claim that a suspect text is derived from some prior novel, and shows the same kind of loose, selective parallel-hunting at work. The Hunter–Smith link therefore provides no independent evidence of forgery.
Parallels with other modern literature (Oscar Wilde, modern homoerotic stories, etc.)	Some critics argue that the “naked young man with Jesus by night” reflects 19th–20th-century homoerotic literature (e.g., Wilde) and therefore betrays a modern author with modern sexual interests.	Paananen notes that the parallels are again vague and thematic, not demonstrable lines of dependence. Similar “nighttime instruction” or intimate disciple scenes occur in ancient texts as well. He stresses that the reading of the passage as explicit homosexual fantasy is already an interpretive decision made by modern scholars; it is that modern interpretation, not the ancient wording, that resembles modern literature. On his analysis, this is not a criterion for forgery but an example of readers projecting contemporary concerns into the text.
“Concealed indicators of authority” or “authorial signatures”	Carlson, Jeffery and others claim that Smith left playful signatures (puns, numerological hints, echoes of his own publications, “private jokes” about sex and magic) in the letter so that clever readers would eventually discover that he was the forger. These “winks” are taken as evidence of a hoaxer’s psychology.	Paananen devotes substantial analysis to this pattern. Drawing on hoax-studies and other “forgery hunts,” he shows that critics routinely infer such “authorial indicators” from texts they distrust, but that the indicators appear only because readers go looking for them with that expectation. When applied to control cases (texts universally regarded as genuine), the same method also “finds” secret signatures and jokes. In other words, the mechanism is apophenic pattern-spotting, not a reliable criterion. Paananen concludes that these alleged hidden clues tell us more about the interpreters than about Smith.
The “hoax narrative” as such	The overall story seems too convenient: an eccentric scholar interested in magic and sexuality discovers, in a remote monastery, a letter about a secret, more spiritual gospel involving a mysterious naked youth. This narrative, critics say, is exactly the sort of thing a witty hoaxer would fabricate.	Paananen reconstructs what he calls the “Alternative Narrative” (Smith-as-forger story) and shows that it is itself a crafted literary construction, retrofitting biographical and textual details into a satisfying plot. He contrasts it with the “Standard Narrative” (ordinary scholarly discovery and publication) and points out that the same facts are arranged quite differently. The persuasiveness of the forgery story depends on narrative coherence, not on independent evidence. Treating “this would make a good story” as evidence of forgery is methodologically circular.
Suspicious biography and motives	Because Smith wrote on magic, heterodox religion, and sexuality, and had a reputation as a sharp critic of traditional Christianity, critics argue that he had both motive and temperament to perpetrate an anti-church hoax and to enjoy fooling colleagues.	Paananen labels this an ad hominem style of reasoning. He notes that in other cases of alleged forgery, critics likewise construct psychological portraits of the supposed forger that conveniently fit the accusation. But such character sketches are underdetermined by evidence and highly malleable. More importantly, genuine discoveries are also made by strong personalities with controversial ideas. Biographical suspicion cannot substitute for textual or material proof, and Paananen argues that using “motive” in this way is not a defensible criterion for forgery.
The “too good to be true” coincidence	The find allegedly fits Smith’s scholarly preoccupitations too neatly: Jesus, secrecy, Alexandrian mystagogy, and homoerotic overtones. Critics say this coincidence makes forgery more likely.	Paananen shows that this kind of reasoning appears in many forgery accusations: whenever a text supports a scholar’s thesis, detractors say it’s “too convenient.” Yet historical discoveries frequently confirm someone’s prior hunches; that is precisely how research progresses. He stresses that probability judgments based on “too good to be true” are subjective and symmetric: the same coincidence that looks incriminating under the Alternative Narrative appears unsurprising under the Standard Narrative (a specialist in early Christian secrecy paying attention to a monastic library). Thus it cannot function as an independent argument for forgery.
Alleged anachronistic or un-Clementine vocabulary and style	Some have argued that particular words, phrases, or stylistic turns in the letter are uncharacteristic of Clement or anachronistic for the late second century, suggesting a modern author imitating Clement imperfectly.	Paananen reviews the linguistic work and points out that claims of “non-Clementine” vocabulary are highly selective and often rely on incomplete databases of Clement’s writings. When the letter is compared more systematically, its vocabulary and style fall well within the range of Clement’s authentic works. He also emphasizes that with such a short text, statistical stylometry has limited power; picking out a handful of odd words while ignoring the mass of ordinary Clementine diction is not a valid method. On his reading, the stylistic arguments do not meet any reasonable standard for demonstrating forgery.
The theological/content argument	Critics claim that the combination of a “secret Mark,” mystical teaching, and a nearly naked youth spending the night with Jesus reflects modern preoccupations (particularly around sexuality and esotericism) rather than second-century Alexandrian theology; hence a modern hoax.	Paananen notes that Clement himself in the undisputed works speaks of graded instruction, secrecy, and more advanced “gnostic” teaching; the conceptual framework is thoroughly Clementine. As for the youth, Paananen stresses that our modern sense of scandal at the scene should not be projected back onto ancient readers. The Alternative Narrative treats modern embarrassment as a criterion for modern authorship, but that is just another form of argument from plausibility, not a robust test. In his view, the content is unusual, but unusual content is not evidence of forgery.
Paleographic arguments	Carlson famously argued that the hand in the photographs shows “forger’s tremor,” pen-lifts, and other signs of a modern imitator of old Greek script. On this basis, he dates the writing to the 20th century and attributes it to Smith or an accomplice.	While the dissertation focuses more on literary criteria, Paananen summarizes the later paleographic work: professional paleographers who examined high-quality images (and in some cases the physical book) date the hand to the 18th century and find no symptoms of modern imitation. He points out that Carlson’s analysis relied on poor photocopies and JPEGs and that several of his “forger’s tremor” examples are simply artifacts of reproduction or normal scribal variation. Thus the paleographic case for a modern forgery collapses once better evidence and expert analysis are taken into account.
The missing manuscript	The pages with the letter eventually disappeared from the Mar Saba volume; critics suggest that this is exactly what would happen if the discoverer (or co-conspirators) removed incriminating evidence of a hoax. The lack of ongoing access is treated as suspicious.	Paananen notes that loss, theft, and mutilation of manuscripts in monastic and patriarchal libraries are sadly common, especially in the 20th century. He emphasizes that we have no positive evidence tying Smith to the later disappearance; alternative explanations (internal politics, later theft, careless handling) are equally if not more plausible. Turning “the manuscript is now missing” into an argument for forgery again depends entirely on the prior acceptance of the Alternative Narrative; it does not independently support it.
Lack of strong external attestation or early citation	No patristic writer mentions Clement’s letter to Theodore or the longer Markan passages. Critics take this silence as evidence that the text never existed until Smith’s time.	Paananen points out that arguments from silence are weak, especially for a single letter preserved only in a late copy. Many genuine texts survive in just one manuscript and receive little or no explicit citation. Moreover, if the letter and the “secret” material were genuinely esoteric, we would not expect much public citation. The lack of early external corroboration may be disappointing, but it is entirely normal in manuscript studies and cannot be turned into a positive indicator of modern forgery.
The accumulation argument	Defenders of the Alternative Narrative often concede that any single clue might be ambiguous but claim that when all the literary parallels, jokes, biographical hints, paleographic suspicions, and circumstantial oddities are added together, the cumulative case for forgery becomes overwhelming.	A central thesis of Paananen’s dissertation is that this “cumulative case” is built from criteria that, when examined individually, lack reliability. Adding many weak, non-diagnostic indicators does not magically produce a strong case; it simply multiplies noise. He demonstrates this by comparing the Clementine debate with other modern forgery accusations where similar constellations of “clues” were assembled against texts now widely regarded as genuine. The Alternative Narrative’s strength is rhetorical, not evidential: it feels persuasive because of story-telling and confirmation bias, not because its components are methodologically sound.
Tselikas’s 1923 list and Smith’s “genizah” remark	Later critics sometimes imply that a modern hoax would stand out against a static monastic collection or that there was no natural pathway for “new” codices to enter the Mar Saba tower library in the 20th century.	Paananen stresses the long-term movement of books between Mar Saba and the Jerusalem Patriarchate and the ongoing reorganization of collections. A 1923 survey by Agamemnon Tselikas, listing the Mar Saba books on behalf of the Patriarchate, shows that the tower library was already being used as a depository for volumes coming from elsewhere. Smith’s own 1960 remark that the tower library had grown from c. 191 volumes (listed in 1910) to “four or five hundred volumes” by his visit, and that it functioned as a kind of genizah for books no longer in active liturgical use, fits this pattern. This dynamic, “genizah-like” history makes it entirely plausible that a late-18th-century hand could be present in a volume that only reached the tower library relatively late; it undercuts the intuition that anything “new” in that space must be a modern plant.

Criddle vs. Tuccinardi stylometry: html Copy code

Category	Forgery argument	Smith & Landau’s response
a. General modern-forgery claim	The Mar Saba letter and Secret Gospel never existed in antiquity; the manuscript Smith “found” is a twentieth-century fake, probably written by Smith himself. The grounds listed are that the text surfaced in an “unexpected place” (the endpages of a 17th-century printed Ignatius volume) and, for decades, the only evidence for it was Smith’s own photographs, which made it easy to suspect that he had concocted the whole thing.	They present this “conventional wisdom” as a bundle of suspicions rather than a demonstrated case. They stress that printed books in monasteries often received handwritten texts on their blank endpapers, and that Smith, during his cataloguing work, repeatedly found manuscript material copied into such printed volumes. They frame the Mar Saba find as one more example of this general pattern, not as a uniquely suspicious circumstance. More broadly, they state that the widespread assumption of a modern forgery is likely wrong and announce their project as a systematic re-evaluation of the evidence that will place the text somewhere between “first-century proto-Mark” and “twentieth-century hoax.”
b. Handwriting-based suspicions	Some scholars claimed that the 18th-century Greek cursive hand itself betrays forgery—either because it does not look like a natural monastic hand, or because a modern forger could more easily imitate an 18th-century script than ancient uncials, so an 18th-century “hand” is inherently suspicious.	In the “Vetting” chapter they show that Smith did exactly what a bona fide discoverer should do: he took the photos to multiple paleographers in Greece and elsewhere, including the National Foundation, the Dept. of Education, the Academy of Athens, and American specialists. Independently, they all dated the script to the late 17th–early 19th century, most preferring the 18th century, and one even linked it to a style taught at the patriarchal court in Constantinople. Smith & Landau emphasise this broad expert consensus to undercut the idea that the hand is “odd” or obviously fake, and to normalise the scenario of an 18th-century monk copying an older text into a printed book.
c. Literary-style argument (Smith as author)	Some opponents argue that “subtle clues” in the Greek text itself betray a modern author, specifically Smith—turns of phrase, thematic emphases, and the sexually charged scene of Jesus and the young man supposedly mirror Smith’s own interests and scholarly preoccupations, so the letter must be his composition in antiquising Greek.	Smith & Landau respond by foregrounding how Smith attacked the problem: he spent two years doing an exhaustive, word-by-word comparison between the letter and Clement’s undisputed works, using the available concordance. They stress that he found a dense web of Clementine vocabulary, idiom, citation habits, and theological themes, enough that he concluded the text is either genuinely Clement’s or a very careful ancient/medieval pseudepigraph, not a modern pastiche. They note that even A. D. Nock, initially skeptical of the Secret Gospel excerpt, immediately recognized the letter’s language as “just what Clement would say,” which they treat as strong evidence against the idea that the letter is really written in a twentieth-century “Smith-Greek.”
d. Motive-from-sexuality argument	Critics claim Smith was (or is assumed to have been) a gay man, and so he forged a text in which Jesus has an intimate, perhaps sexual, relationship with a young man in order to validate or dignify his own sexuality by projecting it back onto Jesus.	They present this as gossip-driven psychologizing rather than an evidence-based argument. They underline that most of what is known about Smith’s private life is speculative because he deliberately arranged for his personal correspondence to be destroyed, and that the surviving gossip has “furnished grist for the rumor mill.” They also highlight how the Secret Gospel debate has been dominated by “white heteronormative males from elite private institutions,” and explicitly say that part of their task is to expose how the field’s preoccupations, politics, and rivalries have shaped the forgery narrative. In other words, they reframe the “gay motive” claim as a reflection of others’ anxieties and biases more than as a serious argument about the manuscript, and they set out to bracket such motive-hunting in favour of sober textual and historical analysis.
e. Opportunity via 1944 visit	Once they uncover Morton Smith’s sketchbook showing dated drawings of the tower and monastery from February 20, 1944, a forgery-theorist can now propose that Smith either (a) forged the text between 1942 and 1944 and planted it in the book during this second, previously unknown visit, or (b) stole the Ignatius volume in 1944, took it away to inscribe the Clement letter at leisure, and later smuggled it back to Mar Saba to “discover” it officially in 1958.	They raise these scenarios explicitly and then deflate them. They point out that there is no evidence that Smith was interested in manuscripts at all during his wartime years; his serious engagement with manuscript work begins later. They show that the 1944 trip has a very ordinary explanation (a brief rest after finishing his Hebrew-University dissertation) and that Mar Saba was for him an ideal retreat. They note that Smith never “denied” a second visit; he simply didn’t narrate it in published reminiscences, which is not surprising given how marginal a few days of sketching would have seemed at the time. They conclude that the 1944 visit is much more plausibly a post-dissertation breather than a covert forgery operation, and that to treat it as the latter is pure conjecture without supporting evidence.
f. Control of access and copyright	In 1960 he warned the SBL audience that the text was copyrighted and “not to be quoted,” allowing only summaries and short phrases. Critics have read this as the behaviour of someone who wants to keep tight control over a fabricated text and prevent others from examining it too closely.	They present this move in the context of his fear of “unauthorized, premature, and perhaps misrepresentative publication.” Before circulating copies to colleagues, he actually filed his transcription and translation with the U.S. Patent Office to fix his priority and prevent others from scooping or distorting his edition. They treat the copyright warning as consistent with that defensive, priority-protecting strategy—common among scholars announcing a major find—rather than as a sign of fraud. In their narrative, this is part of a careful vetting and publication plan, not an attempt to hide or restrict evidence.
g. Scholarly instinct against authenticity	A. D. Nock and others, upon reading the text, felt that the Clementine attribution could not be right and that the gospel excerpt “can’t be genuine”; Nock in particular suggested it was likely a fourth- or fifth-century apocryphon masquerading as Clement and Mark, not what it purports to be.	Smith & Landau treat Nock’s reaction as important but limited. They underline that even Nock, reading the photographs cold, immediately recognized the letter’s language and theology as quintessentially Clementine and “excellent” on Mark, only balking when the Secret Gospel excerpt appeared. They present his “instinct” that it must be later as exactly that—instinct, not an argument supported by detailed linguistic or historical analysis—while the cumulative linguistic and stylistic evidence points strongly to Clementine authorship. In their framing, Nock’s unease shows how startling the new material is for existing models of early Christianity, but it does not supply a concrete case for either an ancient pseudepigraphon or a modern hoax.
h. Meta “too good to be true” suspicion	Because the discovery has the power to “rewrite the history of early Christianity” and to present a possibly “gay Jesus,” and because the manuscript is now lost, many scholars feel that such a sensational find is “too good to be true” and so must be fraudulent in some way.	They acknowledge that even Smith himself went through a “dark night of the soul,” repeatedly wondering if the text might be “a fake of some sort.” They then show how, instead of exploiting the sensational aspects, he spent years doing slow, technical vetting: consulting paleographers, comparing vocabulary with Clement, soliciting critique from senior scholars, and delaying publication until he had worked through the boring philological details. They contrast this labour-intensive, low-drama process with the image of a showman-forger spinning a quick hoax. More broadly, they argue that the long-standing stalemate—some calling it first-century proto-Mark, others a 20th-century forgery—shows how much of the debate has been shaped by the “preoccupations, politics, and rivalries” of scholars, and that real progress requires breaking free of those reflex suspicions and re-examining the evidence on its own terms.

Smith & Landau’s book: main themes (a–h): html Copy code

Suspicion / argument	Smith–Landau–Paananen rebuttal
The manuscript “disappeared” after Smith; its absence today is treated as proof that it never really existed or was quietly removed once doubts arose.	They reconstruct a detailed chain of custody after Smith: Stroumsa/Flusser/Pines & Meliton see it at Mar Saba in 1976 and personally carry it to the Patriarchate; Talley is told in 1980 that it is there “being repaired”; Quesnell sees and handles it repeatedly in 1983 and orders color photographs. A signed 1976 receipt by librarian K. Dourvas describing it as an “unpublished” Clement letter “without any doubts about its authenticity” is now known. The pattern, they argue, is not “no manuscript,” but a real book gradually locked down by a conservative librarian and then misplaced or hidden, not unlike many other Near-Eastern holdings.
Smith’s leaving the volume in a dusty tower, rather than extracting it, is presented as suspicious behavior.	They stress that by monastic/library norms in 1958 the book was not his to remove. Smith followed standard practice: he photographed the text (“three times for good measure”), then re-shelved the volume. When Stroumsa’s group re-found it in 1976, the Voss book still bore “Smith 65” and the three-page text “exactly as described by Smith,” strongly suggesting he had not altered or replanted anything and that his account of photographing and reshelving is accurate.
The shift from Mar Saba to the Patriarchate plus the failure to get ink/paper tests is treated as classic “forger’s behavior.”	They show that the move was initiated by Stroumsa/Flusser and a young monk because books were routinely being stolen from the tower; the goal was conservation, not concealment. Ink analysis was blocked not by Smith but by Father Meliton, who refused to hand a prized Greek Orthodox manuscript to the Israeli police lab. Later, when Quesnell asks for tests in 1983, the same institutional reluctance holds. The pattern they reconstruct is of a protective, somewhat xenophobic ecclesiastical bureaucracy, not of a modern forger dodging labs.
Quesnell’s silence after seeing the manuscript in 1983 is used to insinuate something “off” in the story.	Using his letters and notes, they show that Quesnell did see it, handled two loose sheets kept in a plastic binder, and spent “many hours” examining the hand under magnification. His own notes record Dourvas’s view that the hand is 18th-c and not by Clement, and that it was composed against heretics at Mar Saba. He ordered and received color photographs. His relative public silence, they suggest, says more about academic politics and his own ambivalence than about the manuscript’s reality; but the net effect of his visit is actually to strengthen, not weaken, the case that a genuine late-Greek manuscript existed in the Patriarchate in 1983.
Dourvas’s secrecy is taken as proof that the Church knew something was wrong and wanted to bury it.	They argue that, on the contrary, Dourvas regarded the text as a pious, locally produced anti-heretical work. The 1976 receipt explicitly calls it “unpublished” and “without any doubts about its authenticity.” He separated the MS from the printed Voss volume only as part of a plan to shelve manuscripts and printed books in different series, and he himself photographed the leaves. His reluctance to allow further visits or police testing is framed as an attempt to shield what he saw as a fragile monastic relic from Western academic “circus,” not as admission of forgery.
Earlier skeptics used Smith’s poor black-and-white photos to argue “forger’s tremor” and other pen anomalies.	They lean heavily on the far better 1983 color photographs obtained by Quesnell. These show continuous, confident pen-strokes typical of a practiced 18th-century private hand; many “tremors” in the old halftone plates turn out to be dust, glare, or photographic artifacts. They argue that any paleographic judgment now has to be based on the Quesnell set, not on Smith’s cropped and imperfect plates that fueled earlier “tremor” theories.
Paleography has been invoked against authenticity; Tselikas calls the script a likely forgery.	They commission three additional experts (Agapitos, Lamberz, Melissakis) and summarize Tselikas. All four independently place the hand in the later 18th century (with Melissakis allowing early 19th-c imitation as a theoretical possibility). Crucially, all explicitly rule out a 20th-century forger: the script is too complex, fluid, and internally consistent to have been produced by an amateur classicist; any “forgery” would need to be an 18th/early-19th-century Greek imitator of slightly earlier hands. Combined with the earlier experts Smith consulted in the 1960s, the cumulative paleographic consensus is “late-18th-century private Greek hand,” not modern hoax.
Tselikas’s linguistic point about ἀπόγραφον as a “smoking gun.”	They dismantle this as the one piece of purported “hard evidence” for forgery. They note that apograph- words are already used in antiquity for textual copies, while in modern Greek the bureaucratic semantic shift is narrow and legalistic. If a later scribe were updating vocabulary, a term based on ἀντίτυπον would be more natural; and there is no sign of systematic modernization elsewhere. They conclude that this lexeme is perfectly compatible with an ancient/late-antique style Greek and cannot bear the weight of a modern-forgery verdict.
Because the hand is 18th-century, some critics treat that as nearly decisive for a late text.	They insist on the standard codicological point that the date of a hand is not the date of a text. They then bring in the internal evidence developed in chs. 8–9: dependence on Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, interaction with late-antique Carpocratian lore, and very specific resonances with Palestinian monastic storytelling (e.g., John Moschos). These all point to a composition in Late Antiquity, centuries earlier than the 18th-c binding. So the 18th-c hand simply gives a terminus ante quem for the copying, not for the composition.
The homoerotic atmosphere of the scene is taken as proof of a modern gay fantasy.	They concede what many defenders denied: the scene is genuinely homoerotic. But they argue that same-sex desire and erotic language are thoroughly attested in ancient Mediterranean cultures, and that there is a very specific Christian context where an intimate older-mentor/younger-disciple bond, charged but officially celibate, was valorized: late-antique monastic “brother-making” (adelphopoiesis) and same-sex monastic pairs. They read the scene as mapping Jesus/young man precisely onto that ideal: eros expressed in hand-holding, shared house, night-long teaching, but explicitly policed against intercourse (hence the polemic denial “naked man with naked man” in Carpocratian usage). That profile, they say, fits 5th–7th-c Palestinian monastic ideals far better than a 20th-c New York professor’s fantasy.
The text looks like clever modern bricolage from the NT and Eusebius.	They agree that the author is a sophisticated reader of the four canonical gospels and Eusebius, but insist this is exactly how late-antique Christians rewrote scripture. They catalogue ancient “fixes” to Mark (Longer and Shorter Endings, Freer Logion, etc.) and then show that the Secret Gospel behaves like one more such rewriting: filling in Mark’s narrative gaps, harmonizing with John, and misreading Eusebius’s “they say” in a way typical of late-antique authors who mine his Ecclesiastical History as a sourcebook. It is precisely the sort of creative recombination a 5th–7th-century monastic exegete would produce.
Resurrection + linen-cloth + nudity imagery is “too neat,” a modern construction.	They answer by pointing to very close analogues in John Moschos’s Spiritual Meadow—stories collected partly at Mar Saba itself. Moschos reports grave-robbing episodes where a richly-dressed corpse in a tomb is stripped, left with only (or even without) a linen cloth, then suddenly rises, grabs the thief’s hand, and confronts him about shame, nudity, and the fear of appearing naked before Christ. These narratives show precisely the same bundle of motifs in Palestinian monastic lore centuries before the 18th-c copy. That, they argue, makes a late-antique monastic origin more plausible than a wholly modern literary invention.
The letter is pseudonymous and polemical; some extend “forgery” into the 20th century.	They separate modern hoax vs. ancient pseudepigraphy. On the second, they themselves argue it is almost certainly not by Clement, but by a later writer using Clement’s name—something extremely common in late antiquity and not, in that context, “forgery” in the modern moral sense. On the first, they insist that the combination of an 18th-c Greek hand, dependence on Eusebius, detailed Palestinian monastic resonances, and the absence of any convincing 20th-c Greek co-conspirator means the burden of proof lies squarely on those who still want a modern forgery; the features usually cited as “suspicious” are, in their reading, precisely what you’d expect from a late-antique monastic pseudepigraphon later recopied at Mar Saba.

Smith & Landau / Paananen on Quesnell, Metzger, Ehrman, etc. (pairs of claim vs rebuttal): html Copy code

#	Forgery argument	Rebuttal
1	Quesnell: Smith’s allegedly careless handling and documentation of the find. A responsible discoverer would have done far more to secure and document the manuscript: push the Patriarchate to move it out of the “insecure” tower library, arrange for other scholars to see it, obtain high-quality colour photographs, and leave a clear paper trail. Smith’s failure to do these things is treated as a major “red flag,” suggesting that he did not want the physical artifact examined too closely, as would be the case if it were a modern plant.	Smith replies that he followed local procedures: he reported his find to the library authorities, left the codex where the Patriarchate wanted it, and obtained as good a photographic record as circumstances allowed. Landau and Paananen stress that many genuine discoveries in Eastern libraries are documented in exactly this imperfect way; Quesnell is retrofitting an idealized standard after the fact. They also emphasize that when the book was later inspected, no one found any concrete signs of tampering or modern ink, which undercuts the suspicion built solely on Smith’s supposed “negligence.”
2	Goodspeed’s “rulebook” and the analogy with earlier modern hoaxes (Quesnell). Drawing on Edgar J. Goodspeed’s Strange New Gospels, Quesnell argues that the Mar Saba letter fits a familiar pattern: a sensational text emerges from an out-of-the-way monastery, is poorly documented by a lone discoverer, and conveniently confirms the discoverer’s radical ideas. In Goodspeed’s case studies, such scenarios often involve fraud.	Smith objects that Goodspeed’s cases are very different—mostly printed pseudo-gospels and clumsy fabrications, not a marginal inscription in an 18th-century Greek codex. Landau and Paananen note that Quesnell treats Goodspeed less as a historian than as a cookbook for detecting hoaxes: once he assumes there must be a forgery, he cherry-picks generic similarities (“remote monastery,” “sensational content”) and ignores disanalogies. They argue that this is typological guilt by association, not evidence; the fact that some nineteenth-century sensations were bogus does not turn every poorly documented Eastern manuscript into a forgery.
3	The “controlled experiment” theory of a scholarly forger (Quesnell). Lacking any concrete forger, Quesnell hypothesizes a modern scholar who fabricated the letter as a “controlled experiment” in exegesis—planting a text to test how the guild would react, or to demonstrate that scholars read texts through their prejudices.	Smith dismisses this as an “extraordinary” and baseless fantasy: there is no evidence of such an experiment, no confession, no contemporaneous hint of a plot—only Quesnell’s imagination. Landau and Paananen underline that Quesnell’s scenario functions as a narrative, not as an argument: once he invents a hypothetical forger with precisely the motives needed, every ambiguous detail is made to fit. They point out that by this standard almost any controversial discovery could be redescribed as a hoax “experiment,” which shows how methodologically empty the hypothesis is. It explains everything and therefore explains nothing.
4	The proposed mechanics and dating of a modern forgery (Stählin, 18th-century hand, accomplice scribe). Quesnell speculates that a forger working after the appearance of Stählin’s 1936 concordance could easily assemble “Clementine-sounding” phraseology with modern tools, have a competent Greek scribe imitate an 18th-century monastic hand, and slip the pages into the Voss codex sometime before Smith’s visit.	Smith already noted that if one is allowed to posit anonymous conspirators and perfect mimics at will, any manuscript can be declared a forgery. Landau and Paananen emphasize that Quesnell never identifies a real candidate or shows that such an 18th-century imitation would in fact be “easy”; later professional paleographers date the hand to the 18th century on independent grounds, not as a clever fake. They also stress that Stählin’s concordance is a standard scholarly tool; its existence cannot by itself turn any Clement-like passage into a suspect pastiche. Without positive signs of fabrication in the hand, ink, or language, Quesnell’s elaborate “how it could have been done” remains speculative scaffolding with nothing on it.
5	The choice of the Voss Ignatius volume—“a forgery in a book about forgeries.” Critics from Quesnell to Ehrman treat it as deeply suspicious that the letter appears in the endpapers of a volume containing the spurious longer recension of Ignatius.	Smith treats the choice of volume as accidental: he was systematically checking books in the tower library and found blank pages at the end of this one. Landau and Paananen stress that given the haphazard state of the collection, there is no reason to think a modern hoaxer had a rich menu of blank endpapers from which to compose a literary joke. They regard the “forgery in a forgery-book” motif as a classic example of hindsight pattern-making: once one is convinced there must be a hoax and a joker behind it, ordinary coincidences are woven into a story of intentional irony. Nothing in the physical evidence shows that the choice of binding was anything but contingent.
6	The erotic and Carpocratian flavour of the longer Markan passage. From Metzger on, skeptics have argued that the scene of Jesus spending the night with a nearly naked youth, in a text associated with Carpocratians in Clement’s letter, looks like a modern erotic fantasy masquerading as ancient heresy.	Smith insists that the passage must be interpreted against the backdrop of early Christian initiation and secrecy, not modern pornography; he treats the nocturnal scene as an esoteric baptismal episode, not as a sexual liaison. Landau and Paananen argue that readers who see explicit homoeroticism are importing modern sensibilities about scandal and sex into a sparse ancient text. They also note that Clement authentically connects Carpocratians with libertine practices and speaks elsewhere of graded, secret instruction; nothing in principle prevents a second-century Alexandrian tradition from telling such a story. Unusual content, they argue, is precisely what we expect in fragmentary heresiological material and cannot by itself prove modern forgery.
7	Inadequate or suspicious photographs and lack of early corroboration. Quesnell complains that Smith’s black-and-white, partly cropped photographs are insufficient for serious scrutiny and wonders whether better images were deliberately withheld.	Smith replies that the photography was done under the constraints of 1950s equipment, monastery rules, and tight schedules; all usable images were eventually published. Landau and Paananen emphasize that later photographs and microfilms, taken after Smith’s visit, confirm the basic features he reported. They also underscore that the tower library was not a secure, climate-controlled archive; loss and mutilation of manuscripts there is sadly normal. To treat routine photographic limitations and a lack of additional 1950s witnesses as evidence of non-existence is, in their view, to demand a standard of documentation that very few genuine discoveries in similar contexts could meet.
8	Metzger’s framing of the letter as a probable modern forgery. In his widely read works, Metzger mentions it alongside conceded hoaxes and leaves readers with the strong impression that the safest view is to regard it as spurious.	Landau and Paananen point out that Metzger offers no independent analysis of the handwriting, language, or historical setting; he largely echoes Quesnell’s misgivings and adds his own distaste for the content. Metzger’s prestige then magnifies those misgivings far beyond the actual argument offered. In their reconstruction, Metzger functions more as a powerful amplifier of doubts than as a source of new evidence. Treating his “feel” for the case as proof of forgery simply re-labels subjective unease as authority.
9	Ehrman’s “hard to understand”: why didn’t Smith go back or demand scientific tests? Ehrman suggests that Smith’s failure to return or push for ink tests raises the suspicion that he had reasons not to press too hard.	Landau and Paananen reply that Smith did not control the Jerusalem Patriarchate or the Greek Orthodox Church; he could neither walk back into Mar Saba at will nor order ink-tests on patriarchal property. They recount later attempts by others to secure such tests, which were blocked by church and state authorities, illustrating that the obstacle was institutional, not personal. In the 1950s and 1960s, moreover, high-tech dating of manuscript ink was not a routine expectation. To retroactively demand that Smith have done what even well-placed scholars could not do decades later, and then turn his failure into a sign of guilt, is, in their view, deeply anachronistic.
10	Ehrman’s “hard to explain”: theological and linguistic anomalies, and Murgia’s “no errors” claim. Certain features are said to be theologically un-Clementine, the vocabulary contains many otherwise unattested words, and the copy shows virtually no scribal errors.	Smith already pointed out that Clement elsewhere speaks positively of secrecy, graded instruction, and even dissimulation for pedagogical reasons; the letter’s attitudes are unusual but not alien to his thought-world. Landau and Paananen add that any short text from Clement will necessarily include words not otherwise attested, and that Timo Paananen’s later stylometric work finds the letter’s overall linguistic profile to be comfortably Clementine. As for Murgia’s “no errors” argument, they regard it as a non-starter: some short marginal texts are copied cleanly, and our sample of the scribe’s work is too small to draw statistical conclusions. The attempt to turn theological nuance, a handful of rarer words, and the absence of obvious blunders into diagnostic signs of forgery is, in their view, methodologically unsound.
11	Ehrman’s “hard not to find amusing”: dedications, abrupt ending, and the Ignatius volume as hoaxer’s jokes. He assembles details that he reads as playful winks from a hoaxer.	Smith explains his dedications in straightforward religious and personal terms; Landau and Paananen agree that nothing in them requires a conspiratorial reading. They argue that Ehrman’s collection of “amusing” tidbits exemplifies what they call the “breadcrumb” style of forgery hunting: once one assumes there must be a hoaxer with a sense of humour, every coincidence becomes a deliberate clue. The abrupt ending of the letter is easily explained by the lack of further marginal space and by the fragmentary nature of the copy; the Ignatius volume explanation is addressed above. In their judgment, Ehrman is mistaking the pleasures of clever pattern-spotting for proof; the humour is real, but it lies in the construction of the Alternative Narrative, not in Smith’s alleged hoax.
12	The missing manuscript and blocked forensic testing as self-incriminating. Critics link the later disappearance of the pages and the failure to conduct ink or paper testing into a single suspicious package.	Landau and Paananen emphasize the chaotic history of the Patriarchate’s collections in the twentieth century: books have been moved, lost, vandalized, and stolen for generations, with no need to posit conspiracies. They recount how plans to test the ink were blocked not by Smith but by institutional reluctance and state interference; even decades after the controversy erupted, nobody could simply order such tests. The later disappearance of the pages—a phenomenon entirely beyond Smith’s control—cannot retroactively incriminate him. For them, turning ordinary dysfunction in a hard-pressed library into a sign of forgery is another instance of the Alternative Narrative’s tendency to treat every misfortune as evidence.
13	Ehrman’s cumulative “too good to be true” narrative. In both scholarly and popular books, he weaves the suspicions into a single story where an eccentric scholar obsessed with magic and sexuality discovers a text that fits his interests perfectly and leaves teasing clues, and after his death the manuscript disappears.	Landau and Paananen see this as the clearest example of what they call the “Alternative Narrative”: a compelling literary reconstruction that achieves its force from coherence and dramatic irony rather than from robust criteria. They argue that once each individual “clue” is examined, it turns out to be equivocal or methodologically weak; piling many such clues together does not strengthen the case but multiplies noise. They contrast Ehrman’s narrative with a “Standard Narrative” in which a real 18th-century copy of a Clement letter was discovered, imperfectly documented, and then lost. The same facts fit both stories; what tips the scales is not hard evidence but readerly preference. In their view, the forgery hypothesis, as presented by Ehrman and earlier skeptics, remains a rhetorically powerful suspicion, not a demonstrated conclusion.