Facts Showing that Smith did not Forge Mar Saba 65

Idea developed by Peter Kirby: One way to read the whole “Smith forged Mar Saba 65” controversy is as a test of whether people are willing to let evidence talk, or whether they’re going to cling to a tidy villain even as the case against him collapses under basic questions of capacity, opportunity, and script.

The starting point is brutally simple: could Morton Smith, as an actual human being with a finite skill set and limited hours in the day, have produced the Clementine letter in the back of that Voss volume? The people best positioned to answer that are not internet sleuths but scholars who worked directly with him on precisely the kind of difficult Greek that forgers would need to master. Roy Kotansky’s testimony is devastating for the forgery thesis not because it is sentimental (“Morton would never…”) but because it is technical. Having read and corrected Smith’s translations of Greek magical papyri, having watched him fumble readings of magical gemstones at the Getty, Kotansky describes a scholar with good Greek but not the hyper-specialized, palaeographic, idiomatic command you need to fabricate an 18th-century monastic cursive and a grammatically tight pseudo-Clement in it. In Kotansky’s judgment, Smith “would never forge, nor could he.” The “would never” is debatable; the “could not” is the point.

That squarely targets the mechanical core of the accusation. Mar Saba 65 is not just “Greek.” It is a flowing, confident hand in a style that experts have dated to the 18th century, and a text that constantly traffics in Clementine turns of phrase while maintaining natural syntax and idiom. To ascribe that to Smith is to posit a secret second career: the Columbia professor who, with no prior or subsequent evidence of such skill, somehow trains himself up to the level of a first-rate monastic scribe and subtle pasticheur of Clement, produces exactly one forged manuscript, and leaves no trace of the years of palaeographic and stylistic drill that would have been required.

Modern attempts to test the “Smith did it” thesis have not rallied to support it either. A forensic handwriting analysis commissioned specifically to explore the forgery claim concluded that the Mar Saba hand is not Smith’s hand. That does not prove the text is ancient or Clementine, but it directly undercuts the idea that we are looking at Smith’s disguised script. Against this, the forgery literature has leaned heavily on jokes, coincidences, and “gotcha” readings—alleged confessional winks, supposed forger’s tremor, numerological patterns. Scott Brown’s critique of this style of argument made the obvious but necessary point: when the backbone of your case is literary innuendo rather than palaeography and forensics, you are no longer doing manuscript criticism, you are doing mood music.

The alignment of skills evidence and handwriting analysis is then reinforced by a second line of argument drawn from Smith’s actual life. The forgery hypothesis requires extensive premeditation. On that theory, Smith spends years before 1958 mastering Clement’s style, devising the letter, rehearsing an 18th-century cursive, perhaps even navigating the practicalities of getting such a book into a Greek monastery library. And yet the concrete recollections we have of his life in the late 1950s show none of that. His time is relatively freer before the discovery, then suddenly devoured by the text after the discovery. His personal relationships taper off as he becomes absorbed, even obsessed, with the manuscript he found. That is exactly what you would expect if he stumbled on something that became the central project of his career. It is the opposite of what you’d expect if he had already known the text intimately because he had manufactured it.

There is also the logistics problem. People who know the Mar Saba library have called it “impossible” for someone to have smuggled in a doctored book without the monks noticing, and later follow-up confirmed that the printed Voss volume with the letter in its endpapers was indeed there in the 1970s. The monks were protective of it. It is a strange scenario for a forgery supposedly planted in the late 1950s as a prank or academic stunt. If this were just a modern joke, why would the resident community treat the volume as something to hold on to, not a contaminated oddity to quietly remove?

Even the notorious γυμνός / γυμνοί issue, which has generated enough ink to float a small ship, tends to cut against the image of Smith as master-forger. On close inspection the first “naked” in the key phrase looks very much like a plural—γυμνοί—ending with an iota rather than a sigma. Many who have studied the photographs independently have seen this. Smith, however, transcribed it as singular γυμνός and spun an interpretation (“naked man with naked man”) that dovetailed perfectly with the eroticizing reading his critics later seized on. But if he had fabricated the letter and the script in the first place, why would his own hand produce an ambiguous form that most observers naturally read as plural, forcing his published transcription to appear strained against the paleography? The scenario makes far more sense if Smith was trying, imperfectly, to read someone else’s highly cursive 18th-century Greek and got one of the more challenging letter clusters wrong—exactly the kind of misreading Kotansky describes from other contexts.

Against these very concrete considerations stand the usual circumstantial murmurs. The letter appears in the endpapers of a printed book rather than on loose folios. The manuscript has late external attestation and is now unavailable. Smith was, by some accounts, a prickly or unconventional character. A pulp thriller once imagined a forged Clementine text in a monastery not unlike Mar Saba. The stylometry is “too Clementine” for some tastes. Any one of these can seed suspicion; all of them together can generate an atmosphere. But atmosphere is not authorship. None of these points, even cumulatively, identifies a forger or demonstrates that Smith had the technical means to execute such a forgery. They are compatible with multiple scenarios: a genuine Clementine letter transmitted in a quirky way; an early modern monastic pastiche; a 20th-century forgery not by Smith; or yes, a forgery by Smith. Suspicion is cheap; a worked-out, evidentially anchored scenario is expensive.

This asymmetry is what the more reflective side of the debate keeps circling back to. The “Smith did it” thesis rests disproportionately on narrative convenience: if the text must be modern, and if Smith is the one who found and published it, then he becomes, in a probabilistic sense, the most “likely” candidate among known individuals. But that is only because he is the only named person in the frame. Swap in “some unknown forger in the 18th century” and the prior probabilities change. Introduce the real difficulty of faking a fluent 18th-century monastic hand. Remember how much easier it is to cook up “too Clementine” diction from printed editions than it is to imitate a script style you have never written in your life. Suddenly the tidy picture of the Columbia professor, alone at night perfecting his pseudo-Clement and his pseudo-hand, looks less like hard-headed skepticism and more like a myth scholars tell because they dislike saying “we don’t know.”

The psychological charge embedded in this is not trivial. The Letter to Theodore, if genuine, destabilizes a lot of comfortable stories about how Christian origins hang together. Even if it is not by Clement, but is still old, it expands the space of what “Mark” could have been in the second century. For many, it is less threatening to spend decades trying to nail Morton Smith than to concede that there may be important things we simply don’t know about how Christianity and its texts began. A forged Clementine letter by a modern scholar feels like a solvable crime. An anomalous Clementine letter that resists both easy authentication and easy dismissal feels like a permanent question mark.

The upshot for the Secret Mark debate is not that the letter must be authentic, or that the case is closed. It is simply that the specific indictment “Smith forged it” looks, on sober review, weaker than its cultural grip would suggest. The most probative lines of inquiry—skills audits, handwriting analysis, timelines, behavior around testing—tilt toward the conclusion that Smith did not fabricate Mar Saba 65. Once that is granted, the field of live options widens. The letter could still be a forgery, but if so it is more plausibly an early modern one, created by someone who naturally wrote that script and had access to patristic materials long before Stählin and concordances. Or it could be a genuine Clementine letter preserved in a late copy. Either way, the spotlight ought to shift away from personality and toward philology, transmission history, and comparisons with Clement’s securely attested works.

In that sense, the “facts showing that Smith did not forge Mar Saba 65” are less about clearing one man and more about forcing the conversation onto harder, less theatrical ground. If Smith is not the forger, then all the easy dismissals that treat Secret Mark as a 20th-century prank stop doing the heavy lifting. One has to grapple instead with the letter’s language, theology, intertextuality, and the peculiar but not unprecedented ways monastic libraries preserved and repurposed old texts. That is a more demanding conversation than simply retelling the story of a clever professor hoodwinking everyone. But it is also where anything resembling historical understanding has to begin.