Morton Smith and the Unforgivable Sin

An idea developed by Peter Kirby. At the heart of this “unforgivable sin” idea is not really a question about one marginal letter in a backwater monastery, but about how the guild decides whom it is willing to tolerate when things get weird. The case study is the Mar Saba discovery: a text that claims to preserve Clement of Alexandria quoting a longer, “mystic” Mark, copied into the endpapers of an old printed book and then vanishing back into monastic limbo. Some people see the reaction to it as a classic moral panic: a find read as homoerotic, announced by a gay scholar, seemed to step over an invisible line, and from that moment normal scholarly latitude shrank. Under this reading, things that are actually fairly common in manuscript history—the absence from older catalogues, the disappearance of the volume, messy chains of custody in Eastern monasteries—were not weighed as ordinary risks but prosecuted as if they were proof of guilt. Others insist that this is sentimentalizing the problem: long before anyone made much of the discoverer’s sexuality, critics had already pointed to the lack of pre-1958 attestation, the later loss of the physical object, the odd obliteration of ownership marks, and the possibility that the hand is a modern imitation, and they have continued to press the stylometric and contextual oddities as the real issue. 

Once you strip away the psychologizing on both sides, the core idea that emerges is depressingly simple: the case stands or falls on material evidence that no one currently has. The cumulative anti-authenticity case—no earlier witness to the manuscript, a lost binding, a Western patristic volume in an unusual setting, and a hand some palaeographers mistrust—is stronger together than any component is alone, but it remains circumstantial. The stylometric claim that the Greek is “more Clement than Clement” sounds dramatic, yet depends heavily on genre, sample size, and the quirks of private-letter style. On the other side, the best argument that the text is genuinely ancient remains negative: there is no proven modern comparator, no second forged work in the same hand, no smoking gun in the correspondence that shows a hoax being planned. That, too, is thin ice; it is an argument from ignorance dressed up as reassurance. With the pages missing, laboratory tests cannot be run, and external corroboration has not appeared in the form of parallel citations or an independent copy. The upshot is that neither “hoax” nor “authentic Clement” can be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt; both remain possibilities mapped onto incomplete data.

What this really exposes is a tension Clement himself would have recognized: “we incline to ideas founded on opinion, though they be contrary, rather than to the truth. For it is austere and grave.” In the Secret Mark debate, the “ideas founded on opinion” can be pious horror at homoerotic overtones, or romantic fascination with esoteric Alexandrian gospels, or the irresistible drama of a brilliant scholar forging his own evidence; each offers a cleaner story than the hard admission that we may never know. The unforgivable “sin,” in that light, is not being too bold or too queer, but violating the tacit rule that our big narratives must be grounded in things we can still touch, date, and test. Until the Mar Saba pages resurface—or some independent witness to the text turns up—any responsible account will have to live with what scholars dislike most: probabilities without closure, method without verdict, and a file that stays permanently, and honestly, open.