Chapter Five

So we walk away from the last discussion with the basic sense that the Letter to Theodore was written with an "authentic" handwriting. Whether or not the scribing doing the writing was really copying a more original exemplar that ultimately came from Clement of Alexandria is not proven. But the suggestion from the Patriarchate of Jerusalem that the manuscript was written in 1672 remains intact and the theory that Morton Smith pretended to develop an "inauthentic" style of writing - a handwriting that wasn't his own is disproved. The entire "maybe it's possible - you can't prove otherwise" case of the American Guild of Professor's Who Have too Much Time on Their Hands has been been effectively debunked. 

But for all the discussion of codes and ciphers, it is surprising how little attention the self-professed authorities on the handwriting have paid to the most basic letter in the Greek alphabet: alpha. The debate has repeatedly drifted toward fantasies of hidden messages, planted clues, and conspiratorial gamesmanship. Yet the ordinary habits of the scribe — the way he forms a letter, when he uses one form rather than another, and what those choices reveal about his training — have often been treated as secondary.

This is especially strange because the hoax hypothesis has always depended on a paleographical claim. Its advocates must argue not only that Morton Smith forged the Letter to Theodore, but that he forged it in a hand plausible enough to deceive people familiar with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Greek manuscripts. They must also explain how Smith placed the text into the back of a 1646 Vossius edition of Ignatius, a book which the Jerusalem Patriarchal library, under Kallistos Dourvas, at the very least identified as having entered its system long before the modern controversy. How the book moved from Jerusalem to Mar Saba remains an interesting question. But for the issue of forgery, it is ultimately a trivial one. There simply was not the time, leaving aside the technical impossibilities, for an outsider like Smith to copy out a fake Clementine letter under the watchful eyes of the monks of Mar Saba.

Tselikas, to his credit, seems to recognize the difficulty. His theory requires nothing short of a conspiracy between Smith and one of the monks to get the Vossius volume into the library. Quesnell, in a different way, was forced toward a conspiracy of his own, involving Smith and his teacher Arthur Darby Nock. This is the recurring pattern. The Morton Smith hoax hypothesis breaks down because the advocate is forced by the evidence into conspiracy theories. The more closely one looks at the physical and institutional circumstances, the more the theory depends on invisible accomplices, impossible access, and a level of technical expertise that no one has ever demonstrated Smith possessed.

But the more serious problem is smaller, quieter, and more devastating. It lies in the letter alpha.

The “Initial Smooth-Breathing Alpha Before Pi Followed by a Vowel” Rule

Tselikas’s conspiracy theory about the origins of the Letter to Theodore is remarkable for what it does not say about the paleographical evidence. He acknowledges that “the first impression created by the first glance at the manuscript of Clement’s letter is that the writing belongs to the late 17th century until the late 18th,” and that “the scribe is experienced and keeps constant ductus in the design of the letters.” These are not minor concessions. They mean that, on first inspection, the handwriting looks exactly like what one would expect from a manuscript associated with the late seventeenth or eighteenth century.

The heart of Tselikas’s case for forgery is therefore not that the hand looks obviously modern. It is that the same experienced scribe supposedly shows “poor knowledge of Greek writing,” because “the lines of the letters and links are not continuous,” which, he claims, means that the hand was not moving spontaneously but carefully and tentatively in order to maintain the correct shape of the letters. In other words, the scribe somehow invented an entire world of convincing seventeenth-century Greek letter forms and wrote them with a steady ductus, but also betrayed himself by writing them too carefully. This is a strange argument. It asks us to imagine a forger who is both extraordinarily competent and strangely incompetent at the same time.

The chief witnesses for this alleged “unnatural” formation are the cases where words beginning with alpha and smooth breathing are written with a special two-stroke form. Tselikas says that “the way in which the soft spirit is written as continuity of the line of α is strange.”

[Figure B]

Yet what Tselikas calls “strange” in the Letter to Theodore looks remarkably similar to an initial alpha found in the signature of Philemon of Bostra in the so-called “Confession” of Dositheus, Patriarch of Jerusalem, from May 1672.

[Figure C]

This initial alpha appears at the beginning of the word ἁγιωτάτης, where the alpha carries rough breathing.

[Figure D]

The alpha in Philemon of Bostra’s signature is clearly constructed in the same basic way as the special initial alpha in the Letter to Theodore. It is “strange,” according to Tselikas, because “the connecting line also is not continuous, as would be expected, but the curve of the soft spirit is done in second movement and simply has been linked to elevated line of α.” But the same kind of construction appears in another document from precisely the same Jerusalem patriarchal environment and the same year later associated with the Letter to Theodore.

This matters. Tselikas does not object to the function of the letter. He objects to its construction. He thinks the two-stroke formation and the curve of the breathing mark look suspicious. But here again the judgment is subjective. We are told what is “normal” and what is “abnormal” without any clear apparatus for deciding the matter. The same form, or something very close to it, is treated as suspicious in one document while existing naturally in another.

Quesnell’s notes reveal a different problem. They betray his almost complete unfamiliarity with Greek paleography from this period. One gets the strong sense that the Smith College professor expected to arrive in Jerusalem and simply “recognize” the manuscript as a forgery. But the evidence from his notes, together with George Dragas’s eyewitness account of June 2, 1983, reveals something very different. Quesnell seems to have been genuinely shocked when Dourvas rejected the Morton Smith hoax hypothesis. The manuscript must have looked older than Quesnell expected. Dragas recounts that Dourvas at one point handed him the manuscript, and Dragas agreed with the librarian’s assessment regarding the antiquity of the text. Two days later, Quesnell wrote to his wife that Dourvas’s certainty had a profound effect on him, especially as the librarian brought out what seemed like a never-ending series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts. Quesnell’s letter begins with a telling admission: “Well, it wasn’t quite as easy as I thought the other day.”

Tselikas, by contrast, did know the period. He was familiar with the nuances of Greek handwriting. That is what makes the weaknesses in his report so frustrating. His transcription of the Greek of the Letter to Theodore is full of errors. More importantly for the present argument, his description of the special initial alpha as simply a smooth-breathing alpha is factually incomplete. There are about one hundred words in the Letter to Theodore that begin with alpha. Most of them are pronounced with smooth breathing. Only about a quarter of these employ the special initial alpha. So the form is not simply a “smooth-breathing alpha.” It is a special initial alpha used under far more specific conditions.

The rule is this: the special form appears when a smooth-breathed alpha stands at the beginning of a word, is followed by pi, and that pi is followed by a vowel.

The closest phenomenon known from the broader scribal tradition is the special ligature for the common Greek word ἀπό. It is reasonable to suppose that the Letter to Theodore preserves a secondary development of this older writing practice. The special form appears in examples such as:

line 3: ἀπὸ
line 4: ἀπέρατον
line 6: ἀποῤῥίπτοντες
line 22–23: ἀπόῤῥητα
line 28: ἀποθνήσκων
line 32: ἀπατηλοῖς
line 38: ἀπόγραφον
line 42: ἀποκρίνου
line 47–48: ἀποκρίνασθαι
line 51–52: ἀπέθανεν
line 54: ἀπῆλθεν
line 56: ἀπὸ
line 70: ἀπεδέξατο

A similar phenomenon appears even when epsilon precedes pi and a vowel:

line 23: ἐπιθεὶς
line 43: ἐπικρύπτεσθαι

But the form is not used when the alpha-pi-vowel sequence is broken by the layout of the line:

line 55–56: ἀπ᾽ / ἐκύλισε

Nor is it used when the initial alpha is followed by pi but the following sound creates a different cluster:

line 28: ἀπροφυλάκτως

Nor is it used when the breathing is rough:

line 40: ἅπασι

The conclusion is unavoidable. The special alpha in the Letter to Theodore appears in certain smooth-breathed ἀπ- openings where alpha, breathing, and pi form a familiar written-sound unit. It is blocked, or at least not used, when the following consonant creates a different cluster, as in ἀπρ-, or when the breathing is rough, as in ἅπασι. This is not haphazardness. It is a rule.

Tselikas’s sloppiness lies in failing to recognize how specific the usage is. Whether intentionally or not, his description encourages the reader to imagine that the special alpha appears randomly, as part of an artificial system of letter forms invented by a modern forger. But the manuscript itself says otherwise. The scribe is not sprinkling a strange alpha wherever he likes. He is using it according to a narrow and consistent scribal habit.

Now consider what follows if the hoax theory is correct. We are asked to believe that Morton Smith not only forged the text, imitated a late-seventeenth-century Greek hand, and smuggled the manuscript into a monastery library, but also invented and consistently applied a rule so specific that even Tselikas did not identify it in 2011. Smith would have had to know when to use this special initial alpha and, just as importantly, when not to use it. He would have had to understand that it belonged not to all smooth-breathed alphas, but to a particular initial ἀπ- environment, usually before a vowel. He would then have had to encode this habit into the manuscript without ever drawing attention to it.

This is absurd.

According to Tselikas’s conspiracy theory, Smith would have had to write the manuscript into the blank pages of the 1646 Vossius Ignatius before coming to Mar Saba and then smuggle the book into the library with the help of an accomplice. Tselikas’s own comments about the handwriting — that the scribe was experienced and that the writing gives the first impression of a late-seventeenth- to late-eighteenth-century hand — already suggest the need for an accomplice trained in Greek manuscript production. But the alpha rule makes even the monastic accomplice theory improbable. Put simply: if someone as erudite as Tselikas failed to recognize when the special alpha was meant to be used, why should we imagine that Morton Smith, or some unnamed conspiratorial monk, not only recognized the rule but reproduced it successfully?

The special form is very rare among the documents and manuscripts of the Jerusalem Patriarchate. Quesnell himself witnessed that he never saw even one example of this special alpha in the dozens, if not hundreds, of manuscripts brought to him by Patriarchal librarian Kallistos Dourvas between June 6 and June 20, 1983.

[Figure E]

The scribe who wrote the Letter to Theodore assigned this form a remarkably specific function. Tselikas did not notice it. No later critic of the manuscript noticed it. So far as I know, no paleographical handbook has described this exact usage. Yet we are supposed to believe that Morton Smith, alone among all figures in the history of Greek paleography, divined this obscure principle and planted it into his forged manuscript.

The implausibility deepens when we compare the Letter to Theodore with other seventeenth-century material from the Jerusalem Patriarchate. The special initial alpha used in the Letter resembles a form attested in the 1672 “Confession” of Dositheus. But the functional rule governing its use resembles the practice found in another text from the same milieu: Jerusalem Patriarchate / Holy Cross manuscript 113, an ascetic text from Egypt or Sinai catalogued by Papadopoulos-Kerameus and dated to 1672.

[Examples from Holy Cross 113]

Another parallel appears outside the Jerusalem Patriarchate in Cambridge, Christ’s College, MS Rouse 264, described as a mid-seventeenth-century manuscript.

[Examples from MS Rouse 264]

The alphas are not identical, but the underlying habit is recognizable. Both the Letter to Theodore and Holy Cross 113 appear to preserve a scribal expectation about special initial alphas before ἀπ- openings. The form itself may have developed from the older ἀπό ligature. In such cases, the “tail” of the alpha is not a decorative flourish at all. It is the remnant of the original connection to pi.

[Examples of ἀπό ligature]

This gives us a much simpler explanation. In 1672, scribes in the Jerusalem patriarchal world were working within a shared repertoire of forms and functions. They did not all write identically. But they shared a scribal palette. The Letter to Theodore, despite its distinctive hand, shares an expectation about special alphas with other manuscripts from the same place and period. This is exactly what one would expect if the manuscript is what the Jerusalem Patriarchate understood it to be: a text copied in that seventeenth-century environment.

The alternative requires too much. In order to maintain the Morton Smith hoax hypothesis, one would have to assume that Smith somehow took the form of the special alpha from one 1672 Jerusalem manuscript, such as the “Confession” of Dositheus, and combined it with the function of special initial alphas from another 1672 Jerusalem manuscript, Holy Cross 113. But Smith had no access to these materials in 1958. He was working in a different library. The relevant manuscripts were not sitting open before him. Nothing in the known history of Greek paleography suggests that the rule had been identified, explained, or made available to him.

Of course, one can always rearrange the evidence to keep Smith theoretically capable of anything. If a manuscript feature is unusual, the hoax theorist can say Smith invented it. If it matches a seventeenth-century feature, the hoax theorist can say Smith cleverly copied it. If it matches a feature from a manuscript he could not have seen, the hoax theorist can invent an accomplice, or an unknown source, or a lost chain of access. But this is not historical reasoning. It is the preservation of a theory at all costs.

The better explanation is also the simpler one. Morton Smith discovered the Letter to Theodore. He did not create it. The proof is not that every feature of the manuscript is ordinary. The proof is that its unusual features agree with other unusual features from the same scribal world. The special alpha is not a modern mistake. It is a seventeenth-century habit. It belongs to the same Jerusalem patriarchal environment in which the book itself was later remembered.

Smith would have had no reason to connect the form of an initial alpha buried in the signature page of one manuscript he could not access with the function of an initial alpha in another manuscript also unavailable to him. Nothing but the wild imagination of later academics would suppose that he implanted this obscure paleographical form and function into the most common letter of the Greek alphabet. The best explanation for why it is there is that it belongs there. The Letter to Theodore preserves a natural scribal habit already present in the Jerusalem Patriarchate in the very period when the document was understood to have been written.