Chapter Eleven

  

Chapter Eleven

The Popularizers

As we approach the end of our journey, we come face to face with the ultimate question: do the humanities really suck this badly?

I do not ask this entirely in jest. No one comes out looking good from this book. We have walked through the universities of America like a modern Diogenes, lantern in hand, searching for one honest person, and we have basically come up empty. Perhaps the modern need to “make a name for oneself” is antithetical to the loftier goals of the university, especially from an age when universities were populated largely by bored noblemen and men with enough leisure to pretend to objectivity. Few scholars now have that luxury. Everyone seems to have an agenda. Sometimes the agenda is personal aggrandizement. Sometimes it is ideological. Sometimes it is the much pettier instinct to treat anyone with a different point of view as a personal adversary.

In the end, the Letter to Theodore is nothing more than two sheets of paper, written on both sides in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century handwriting, copied into the blank endpapers of a printed book. Its history is impenetrable. Its present existence is now in doubt. And yet this small object, a few pages of Greek written more than three hundred years ago, managed to strike a nerve in modern scholarship. It exposed ambitions, resentments, rivalries, anxieties, and fantasies that were already there. It became the surface onto which scholars projected their fears about sex, religion, forgery, authority, and the collapse of inherited certainties.

What do the great works of the hoax-conspiracy genre have in common? In one sense or another, they are all attempts to replace serious scholarship with something more immediately satisfying to a broader audience. They are not merely wrong. They are theatrical. They transform paleography into detective fiction, philology into motive-hunting, and manuscript study into a story of hidden jokes and planted clues. The archive becomes a crime scene. Every accident becomes intentional. Every ambiguity becomes evidence. Every dedication becomes a confession.

Morton Smith’s The Secret Gospel is, of course, by far the best of the popular books in this field, having been reprinted many times since 1973. It is stylish, learned, strange, and seductive. Smith was a serious scholar writing for a broader audience. But after him came a different kind of popularization: books that did not merely present the manuscript to a larger public, but converted suspicion itself into the drama. The next most important work in this category is Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities, where, on top of embracing elements of Quentin Quesnell’s conspiracy theory, Ehrman finds significance in the specific placement of the Letter of Clement in Isaac Vossius’s 1646 edition of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch.

This is where the popularizing imagination begins to take over. Throughout the Middle Ages, additional letters attributed to Ignatius multiplied. This second-century church leader was even made, absurdly, to correspond with the Virgin Mary. Vossius, in a crucial scholarly development, recognized that a sizable portion of the Ignatian corpus consisted of very late forgeries, and one of the central purposes of his 1646 volume was to publish only the authentic letters. To Ehrman, this fact is not merely background. It becomes a clue. The Letter to Theodore, after all, is itself a letter that discusses forged documents and interpolations made into Mark’s text by theologically motivated scribes. It is also a letter that Ehrman suspects may itself have been forged. What, then, are we to make of the fact that it was copied into the end of a book whose editor had famously separated authentic from spurious letters? Ehrman asks whether this is “a craftily placed fingerprint” or merely “an intriguing coincidence.”

That is a good sentence. It is also exactly the problem.

Smith had a much simpler explanation. He recognized that a manuscript copied into the endpapers of a seventeenth-century printed book was unusual, but he did not treat the contents of the Vossius volume as the key to the mystery. He thought the explanation was practical: paper was scarce at Mar Saba, and blank endpapers were available. In support of this point, he was able to produce other examples from Mar Saba in which very ancient texts survived only in late, repurposed materials. The important fact about the Vossius volume, for Smith, was not that it contained Ignatius, nor that Vossius had separated authentic Ignatian letters from spurious ones. The important fact was that the book had blank pages.

Ehrman, by contrast, treats the Vossius volume as a conscious and meaningful choice. The forger, on this reading, did not merely need paper. He selected a book about authenticity and forgery in order to place his own forged letter inside it. The placement becomes part of the joke. The forger is not only forging; he is commenting on forgery. He is not merely deceiving scholars; he is leaving them a breadcrumb.

The theory becomes even more intricate when Ehrman notices the final printed page of the Vossius volume, the page facing the first handwritten page of the Letter to Theodore. On that page Vossius discusses not only the forged Ignatian letters but also spurious material inserted into another early Christian text, the Epistle of Barnabas. Vossius concludes by shaming the scribe responsible for those embellishments: “That very impudent fellow filled more pages with these trifles.” Because the Letter to Theodore begins on the facing blank page, Ehrman asks whether there was an “impudent fellow” involved here as well, either in ancient or modern times.

Again, as writing, this is clever. As history, it is perilous. The first blank endpage after the printed text is necessarily where any added manuscript would begin. The fact that Vossius’s final printed page discusses scribal interpolation is interesting, but the leap from interest to intention is enormous. Ehrman’s hypothesis requires that the person who copied the Letter to Theodore not only understood the Latin commentary on the facing page, but delighted in the irony of placing a forged letter beside Vossius’s rebuke of a mischievous scribe. This may be possible. Many things are possible. But possibility is not evidence.

There is one more twist. Ehrman suggests that Smith himself may have buried the clue. The facing page with Vossius’s “impudent fellow” is not reproduced in the photographs of Smith’s scholarly edition, the one scholars would naturally consult. It appears instead in the popular edition, where ordinary readers could not make much of it because the page is a Latin commentary on Greek texts. The implication is difficult to avoid: Smith knew the clue was there, placed it where it would not be noticed by scholars, and yet could not resist letting it appear in the popular book. The forger hides and reveals himself at the same time.

This is the hoax hypothesis in miniature. It requires Smith to be both cautious and reckless, both secretive and exhibitionistic, both scholarly enough to plant a Latin joke in Vossius’s Ignatius and theatrical enough to want someone to find it. The same pattern appears again and again. “For the one who knows” is both dedication and confession. “Naked man with naked man” is both mistranslation and clue. The Vossius volume is both random paper supply and deliberate stage prop. The final printed page is both accident of placement and planted fingerprint. The evidence is always made to do two things at once.

Smith and Landau rightly describe Ehrman’s hypothesis as remarkable and ingenious. It is. But ingenuity is not the same thing as probability. Indeed, the more ingenious the hypothesis becomes, the less historical it seems. It depends on barely perceptible minutiae. It requires a forger who anticipates not merely the scholarly reception of his text, but the future habits of different readerships: what scholars will consult, what popular readers will ignore, what Latin they will not read, what clues they will miss, and what later detectives will finally uncover. This is not sober reconstruction. It is literary criticism disguised as forensic history.

The problem with the popular hoax literature is not that it asks suspicious questions. Suspicion has its place. The problem is that it rewards clever suspicion more than careful explanation. It prefers the elegant clue to the boring fact. The boring fact is that old books often had blank pages. The boring fact is that monasteries reused paper. The boring fact is that Mar Saba preserved ancient material in late and repurposed forms. The boring fact is that the Letter to Theodore was copied where there was room to copy it. Against these ordinary realities Ehrman sets the alluring possibility of a planted joke about forgery. One can see why readers remember the joke. But one should also see why historians should be wary of it.

This is how the humanities fail when they fail. They fail not because scholars are unintelligent, but because intelligence becomes untethered from restraint. They fail because a clever reading is mistaken for a true one. They fail because professional skepticism becomes indistinguishable from paranoia. They fail because a manuscript ceases to be an object and becomes a mirror in which each scholar sees his own brilliance.

The basic facts are known by everyone who has ever commented on this document. In 2011, Tselikas produced a catalogue of printed books sent from the Jerusalem Patriarchal Library. A Vossius Ignatius is not listed among these books. But there were hundreds more books in the library than listed in the 1921 catalogue. As Pantuck notes, Smith’s notes show there were up to five hundred books in the tower library, the last enumerated text being 489. Other manuscripts that Smith found inscribed into printed books show that this was not an isolated phenomenon. Mar Saba MS no. 21 preserved fifteenth-century Sophocles folia reused as endpapers, showing that classical manuscript material had been recycled in later monastic bindings. Mar Saba MS no. 75 contained fragments of St. Macarius hidden in broken binding boards, with readings divergent enough to interest H. Dörries at Göttingen. Mar Saba MS no. 60 was important because Smith photographed it and consulted R. Draguet of Louvain, showing ordinary scholarly follow-up on his Mar Saba finds. Mar Saba MS no. 22 was a 1656 Venetian printed book rebound with older Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic fragments, demonstrating the reuse of old manuscript material at Mar Saba.

The conspiracy theory that sees Smith as singularly focused on planting one book under the guise of an anomalous trip to Jerusalem is simply ridiculous. The Mar Saba visit was one of many in the period. Smith’s trip to Greece in 1951–1952 was not a secret reconnaissance mission for a forgery but part of an established scholarly project: he was searching for particular texts of Isidore of Pelusium, the subject of Werner Jaeger’s Harvard doctoral work. Brown’s president had intervened to keep Smith on the faculty by offering him an instructorship and arranging time for research in Providence; he was later awarded a Guggenheim to pursue this work, and he spent a year in Greece photographing manuscripts at considerable expense. In 1955, Smith arranged with the Archbishop of Athens not to search specifically for the materials Jaeger needed, but to catalogue the manuscripts of the Meteora, one of the largest uncatalogued collections in Greece. This plan was interrupted when he received another Guggenheim in 1958, again for research in Providence that ultimately led to his discovery at Mar Saba. In 1958, after work in Turkey and northern Greece, he turned to the manuscripts of the Chalcedonese monasteries. In 1959, the year after the Mar Saba discovery, he was still trying to obtain funding to catalogue and photograph the manuscripts of the Meteora. In other words, Smith’s movements do not look like the path of a man preparing a planted hoax. They look like the career of a scholar obsessively engaged in the ordinary, tedious, and expensive work of locating, cataloguing, and photographing Greek manuscripts.

Ehrman’s deliberate oversimplification of the situation with respect to Smith’s activities at Mar Saba opens the door to the conspiracy theory initiated by Quesnell. But the emphasis on the “strangeness” of having the manuscript inscribed in a 1646 Vossius Ignatius can, I think, be explained by an appeal to a pre-Morton Smith Morton Smith: the seventeenth-century Anglican manuscript hunter Robert Huntington, who appears in the fateful year identified by the Greek Patriarchate, 1672.

The more economical seventeenth-century explanation for Mar Saba MS no. 65 begins not with Morton Smith, but with the historical accident that the printed book containing the Letter to Theodore was not an anonymous blank notebook. It was a copy of Isaac Vossius’s 1646 edition of Ignatius and Barnabas, precisely the sort of book that would have been useful to a seventeenth-century Anglican manuscript hunter searching eastern Christian libraries for patristic evidence. The question, therefore, is not merely whether someone could have written the Letter to Theodore into an old printed book. The more specific question is why a copy of Vossius’s Ignatius should have entered the orbit of the Jerusalem Patriarchate, and eventually Mar Saba, with a Clementine text written into its blank leaves.

Robert Huntington provides a plausible historical mechanism. Huntington arrived in Aleppo in 1671 as chaplain to the English factory, but he was not simply a parish priest abroad. He was an Oxford-trained orientalist, a collector of manuscripts, and a scholarly agent for men such as John Fell, Edward Pococke, Edward Bernard, and Narcissus Marsh. His later letters show an intense and repeated interest in locating Ignatian manuscripts in Syriac, Greek, Arabic, or any other eastern language. This is important because Vossius’s 1646 edition was the natural printed control text for precisely such a search. One did not go hunting for Ignatius in the libraries of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem in the 1670s in a vacuum. One went with the latest printed scholarly apparatus, or at least with access to it.

The reason for this search was not antiquarian whimsy. Ignatius mattered because Ignatius was useful. In the seventeenth century, the authenticity of the Ignatian epistles was bound up with one of the central ecclesiological disputes of the Protestant world: the antiquity of episcopacy. If the shorter Ignatian letters were genuine, then the monarchical bishop could be pushed very close to the apostolic age. If they were corrupt, late, or interpolated, the argument for episcopacy suffered. Anglican scholars therefore had a powerful institutional and theological reason to care about Ignatius. The search for eastern witnesses was not merely a search for old books. It was a search for ammunition.

This gives Huntington’s movements their real significance. He was not simply wandering in the picturesque sense. He was moving deliberately through the libraries and monasteries of the eastern Mediterranean with a very specific scholarly mission. He wrote to patriarchs and bishops. He asked after manuscripts. He wanted catalogues. He visited monastic libraries. He went to Egypt. He went to the Nitrian desert. He inquired about Sinai. He was interested in Syriac, Greek, Arabic, and other eastern forms of the Ignatian tradition. Again and again the same pattern appears: the Anglican chaplain in Aleppo becomes the manuscript hunter, and the manuscript hunter becomes the servant of a larger Protestant project.

That project explains why a Vossius Ignatius matters more than Ehrman allows. For Ehrman, the Vossius volume becomes a literary prop in a modern hoax. For Huntington, or someone like Huntington, it would have been a working instrument. It was the kind of printed book one would bring, consult, compare, lend, or leave behind when searching for manuscripts of Ignatius. Its presence in the story is not strange. It is exactly what the circumstances call for. A man searching eastern monasteries for Ignatian manuscripts would naturally have had a printed Ignatius, or access to one, just as Quesnell later carried Smith’s published book to Jerusalem when investigating the Letter to Theodore. Scholars travel with the tools of their inquiry.

The Aleppo setting strengthens the case. The English factory was not an intellectual backwater but a semi-collegiate expatriate institution with a chapel, a library, and a culture of learned clerical exchange. Its library contained major patristic, historical, biblical, and oriental works, including the Greek text of Ignatius and Barnabas edited by Isaac Vossius. Even if the surviving catalogue reflects the state of the library somewhat later than Huntington’s first arrival, the presence of such a book in that setting is exactly what one would expect. Frampton, Huntington’s predecessor, had already helped stock the factory library with theological and patristic books, and the Vossius Ignatius belongs naturally to that world of Restoration Anglican scholarship.

There is also a second feature of Huntington’s practice that has been insufficiently appreciated: he gave printed books as gifts. He did not merely hunt manuscripts with empty hands. He participated in a world of exchange. Printed books circulated as diplomatic objects, scholarly offerings, tools of persuasion, and tokens of friendship. When Huntington presented books to the Patriarch of Sinai, the list is revealing: a Greek Bible, an Arabic office book, the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, and chronological tables. The Clement volume is especially suggestive. Huntington did not present merely useful liturgical books. He presented patristic texts, and he did so in a context in which printed books could open doors among patriarchs and monastic authorities.

The gift of Clement to the Patriarch of Sinai does not prove that Huntington gave the Vossius Ignatius to Jerusalem. It proves something more basic and therefore more important: this is the kind of thing Huntington did. He moved among eastern Christian authorities with printed books in hand. He used books to cultivate relationships. He gave patristic texts to patriarchs. He understood that printed European scholarship and eastern manuscript culture could be brought into reciprocal contact. Once that habit is established, the hypothetical arrival of a printed Vossius Ignatius in the Jerusalem orbit becomes not extraordinary, but ordinary.

This is the point at which the modern imagination repeatedly goes wrong. It treats the Vossius volume as if it must have been selected by a twentieth-century forger because its contents are too perfect, too ironic, too literary. But in a seventeenth-century context the contents are not ironic at all. They are practical. Ignatius is exactly the author Huntington was seeking. Vossius is exactly the editor an Anglican scholar would know. A printed patristic volume is exactly the sort of object that might travel with a manuscript hunter. A blank leaf at the back is exactly the sort of surface on which a Greek text might be copied. The “clue” dissolves into context.

The third feature of the situation is the presence of scribes. Huntington did not need personally to have written the Letter to Theodore in Greek. Indeed, it is more plausible that he did not. The eastern Mediterranean world in which he moved was full of intermediaries: monks, dragomans, local scholars, patriarchal assistants, and scribes. At Aleppo in particular there were young Greeks available for precisely this kind of work. They could copy texts, transcribe notes, and assist visiting Europeans whose scholarly ambitions exceeded their access, their time, or their command of local manuscript hands. A Greek hand in a Vossius Ignatius does not require Huntington to have forged or even personally copied anything. It requires only that a Greek scribe copied a Greek text into a printed book associated with Huntington’s circle.

This is an important distinction. The modern forgery theory imagines Smith alone with the book, inventing Clement, imitating an old Greek hand, composing a text of astonishing patristic complexity, arranging the physical circumstances, and then waiting for someone to accuse him. The Huntington hypothesis requires none of this theatrical genius. It requires a scholar searching for Ignatius, a printed Ignatius at hand, access to Greek scribes, and a moment in which a Clementine text was copied into an available blank space. The act is not a crime. It is not even necessarily suspicious. It is ordinary manuscript culture.

The presence of young Greek scribes also helps explain the paleographical problem. The hand of the Letter to Theodore has often been treated as if there were only two choices: either an authentic eighteenth-century monastic hand or Morton Smith’s modern imitation. But a seventeenth-century Greek scribe working in Aleppo, Jerusalem, or the orbit of an eastern patriarchate gives us another category. Such a person need not have been a famous scholar. He need not have left a name. He need not have understood the full significance of what he copied. He may simply have been paid, asked, or instructed to copy a text. In that case, the hand tells us not that Huntington wrote the Letter, but that Huntington’s world supplied the kind of hand that could have written it.

The chronology is also suggestive. Huntington was in the East from 1671 onward and was in Jerusalem in 1672, the very year later associated by the Jerusalem Patriarchate with the Vossius volume or its entry into the patriarchal library system. This does not prove that Huntington personally donated the exact copy later found at Mar Saba. But it gives us a historically intelligible route by which such a book could have entered the Jerusalem orbit. A Vossius Ignatius connected with Huntington, the Aleppo factory library, Frampton’s earlier book supply, or the wider network of English Levantine manuscript hunters could have been carried, consulted, exchanged, copied into, or left behind in Jerusalem in or around 1672.

The broader ecclesiastical setting makes the hypothesis even more compelling. The 1670s were not a quiet age of detached scholarship. They were the period after the Lucaris controversy, the period of Orthodox engagement with Catholic and Protestant pressures, and the period in which Dositheos of Jerusalem emerged as a central figure in the defense and reorganization of Greek Orthodoxy. Printed books, patristic texts, confessions of faith, synodal documents, and manuscripts all mattered because they were weapons in ongoing disputes. A European printed edition of Ignatius was not merely a book. It was an intervention in debates over antiquity, bishops, succession, and the identity of the true church.

In that environment, a text attributed to Clement of Alexandria would have been interesting, but also dangerous. Clement was a Father. A newly encountered Clementine letter would attract attention. But this particular letter, if known, would not necessarily have been celebrated. It spoke of secrecy, initiation, Carpocratians, and a mystic Gospel of Mark. It acknowledged textual expansion and the existence of a more spiritual form of the gospel. It could be read as evidence of early Christian esotericism, or as a document too strange to be used safely in ecclesiastical controversy. If found by a manuscript hunter whose primary mission was to strengthen the Protestant case for early episcopacy through Ignatius, it might have been copied, noted, and then allowed to disappear into the back of a book.

The objection from silence is therefore weaker than it first appears. Many eastern texts seen, copied, excerpted, or noted by early modern scholars never entered print. Huntington himself was a collector and correspondent, not a modern archivist producing complete reports of every oddity he encountered. If the Letter to Theodore was copied into a printed book as a working note or because the exemplar could not be obtained, its later obscurity is not surprising. The same world that produced catalogues, extracts, mislaid manuscripts, rebinding, marginalia, and forgotten library transfers could easily produce a text that remained unnoticed until the twentieth century.

Nor should we imagine that silence implies indifference. A text can be interesting and still be unusable. A scholar can copy something because it is curious and then decline to publish it because it does not serve the cause for which he was collecting. This is especially true if the text appeared pseudepigraphic, theologically awkward, or difficult to authenticate. Huntington’s world was full of learned men who wanted old Christian texts, but they did not want all old Christian texts equally. They wanted texts that could be used. Ignatius could be used. Clement to the Corinthians could be used. A Clementine letter about a secret Gospel of Mark was another matter.

The paleographical objection also need not destroy the hypothesis. Smith’s consulted experts did not produce a single unanimous date excluding the late seventeenth century; the range included opinions extending back toward the late seventeenth century, even if the consensus leaned later. A date shortly before or around 1672 would be early relative to the average estimate, but it is not in the same category as a modern forgery. The relevant question is whether the hand can be made absolutely incompatible with a late seventeenth-century Greek copyist. If not, the 1672 hypothesis remains historically possible.

The hypothesis also accounts for the physical condition of the volume. A damaged Vossius Ignatius is easier to understand as a working book than as a pristine library copy. Such a volume could have travelled through Aleppo, Jerusalem, Sinai, or other eastern Christian centers as a reference tool in the search for Ignatian manuscripts. It could have been opened repeatedly, carried under rough conditions, exposed to climate and handling, rebound, stripped, repaired, or eventually retired to a monastic collection. Its later damaged state therefore fits a life of active use rather than undermining it.

This is also where the comparison with Smith becomes illuminating. Smith’s defenders have often pointed out that his actual activities at Mar Saba look like those of a scholar engaged in manuscript cataloguing, not a forger staging a drama. The same must be said, even more strongly, of Huntington in the seventeenth century. Huntington was a real manuscript hunter. He had real patrons. He had a real theological motive. He had real access to eastern monasteries. He had a real interest in Ignatius. He had access to printed patristic books. He had the habit of giving such books to patriarchs. He had access to Greek scribes. The elements needed to explain the Vossius volume are all present before Morton Smith was born.

This does not mean that Huntington must be declared the original discoverer of the Letter to Theodore. That would be to repeat the error of the popularizers by turning a plausible route into a solved mystery. The point is more modest and more powerful: Huntington supplies a historically plausible seventeenth-century pathway for the Vossius volume to reach the Jerusalem patriarchal world at precisely the relevant moment. A Vossius Ignatius in the hands of an Anglican manuscript hunter, moving through eastern Christian libraries in search of Ignatian evidence, is a far less fantastic explanation than the claim that Morton Smith fabricated the text in the twentieth century and somehow embedded it convincingly within the physical and archival history of Mar Saba.

The Huntington hypothesis requires only ordinary early modern behavior: travel, collecting, copying, exchange, scholarly curiosity, theological purpose, scribal assistance, and occasional silence. Huntington wandered from monastery to monastery looking for manuscripts, and especially for Ignatius manuscripts, because Ignatius mattered to the Protestant and Anglican case for episcopacy. He gave printed books to patriarchs, including a printed Clement of Rome to the Patriarch of Sinai, because printed books were instruments of scholarly diplomacy. He moved in a world where young Greeks could serve as scribes, copying texts into whatever paper or blank leaves were available. Put these facts together and the “mystery” of the Vossius volume becomes far less mysterious.

The modern hoax theory asks us to believe in a solitary genius-forger arranging a literary joke across centuries. The seventeenth-century explanation asks us to believe in a manuscript hunter carrying a relevant printed book through the exact libraries where such things happened. One explanation is theatrical. The other is historical. And if the humanities are to recover any dignity from this affair, they will have to learn again the difference between the two.