Chapter Nine

 

Chapter Nine

The Absurdity of the Hoax Hypothesis

As the reader can see, I am fairly confident that the handwriting is “authentic” in the sense that it was the way the scribe authentically expressed himself. It was not a “made up” script. It was especially not something that Morton Smith culled from four different manuscripts that he saw on an earlier trip. Just think of the absurdity of the situation being argued here. Morton Smith is in a relationship with the mother of one of his students, the latest in a string of Jewish women that continues forward to Lotte Gaster in the 1970s. Despite these heterosexual relationships, Smith is supposedly “angry” — angry at the world for being gay. Despite getting a fantastic job at Columbia doing the very thing he apparently felt he was put on earth to do, namely the study of religion, he conceives a plot to destroy Christianity.

And how exactly is this plot supposed to work?

He is going to invent the existence of a Gospel of Mark from Alexandria. He is going to create this gospel by stitching together lines and phrases from the canonical Gospel of Mark. Then he is going to write an elaborate introduction to this fragment in the “character” of Clement of Alexandria, a Church Father he had never previously studied in any sustained way and about whom he had shown no particular interest. These two layers — the invented gospel and the invented Clementine frame — will also require an invented apostolic line in Alexandria from Mark. All of this is then going to be employed in order to introduce the “prank” that allegedly insinuates that Jesus was gay.

He is going to accomplish this by inventing a new scribal vocabulary. He will select some letters from four manuscripts that he photographed before 1958 — manuscripts that would, by astonishing coincidence, later happen to be among the texts examined by the greatest expert on Greek handwriting from this period when Biblical Archaeology Review asked him to assess the manuscript fifty years later. Smith is really clever. He does all of this down to writing γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ rather than γυμνὸς γυμνῷ in an untraceable seventeenth-century printed book. Then he has to get the book into the library. So he either recruits a gay Greek monk as a confederate, or he smuggles the book into the examination room and, while the monk is bringing him his allotment of three or four books at a time, takes the chance that the monk will not notice this distinct-looking book, with no front or back cover and a battered spine, being added to the pile.

Forget about the ten years he spent consulting with the leading scholars in the world over his fake manuscript. The greatest single accomplishment, apparently, was his ability to encode incredible subtleties at the level of Greek ligatures. He invents a special type of alpha — the Greek equivalent of our “a” — which becomes, for Agamemnon Tselikas, one of the penultimate signs of forgery.

This is where Tselikas’s argument becomes most revealing. His conspiracy theory for 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 seventeenth century until the late eighteenth,” and he also acknowledges that “the scribe is experienced and keeps constant ductus in the design of the letters.” These are not minor concessions. They admit that the manuscript looks old and that the scribe writes with a consistent ductus.

The heart of his case for forgery is therefore not that the writing looks modern. It is not even that the writing is incompetent. It is a subjective judgment that this same experienced scribe somehow had “poor knowledge of Greek writing,” because “the lines of the letters and links are not continuous,” which, according to Tselikas, means that the scribe’s hand “was not moving spontaneously, but carefully and tentatively to maintain the correct shape of the letter.” In other words, the scribe invented an entire pantheon of letters, wrote them consistently, wrote them with an experienced ductus, wrote them in a hand that immediately appeared seventeenth- or eighteenth-century, and yet, in the very success of this performance, betrayed himself as a foreigner like Morton Smith.

The chief witnesses for this alleged “unnatural” formation of letters are the instances in which words begin with alpha bearing a breathing mark and are written in two strokes. Tselikas complains that “the way on which the soft spirit as continuity of the line of α is strange.” His objection is not to the function of the sign. He does not deny that the letter is meant to stand at the beginning of a word with smooth breathing. His objection is to the way the sign is constructed: the curve is made in a second movement and then linked to the elevated line of the alpha. For Tselikas, this is strange.

But what Tselikas calls strange in the Letter to Theodore looks remarkably similar to an initial alpha in the signature of Philemon of Bostra found in the so-called “Confession” of Dositheus, Patriarch of Jerusalem, from May 1672. There the alpha appears at the beginning of the word ἁγιωτάτης, where the alpha represents rough breathing. The important point is not that the breathing is the same. It is not. The important point is the graphic construction. The initial alpha in Philemon’s signature is clearly constructed in the very way Tselikas finds suspicious in the Letter to Theodore: the breathing-like curve is made separately and linked to the alpha.

[INSERT FIGURES B–D HERE]

This is crucial. Tselikas treats the form as suspicious because it seems strange to him. But a similar form appears in a document from 1672 in the Jerusalem Patriarchate. This does not by itself prove that the Letter to Theodore was written in 1672. It does, however, show that the graphic form Tselikas finds suspicious belongs to the world of seventeenth-century Greek writing. The argument from strangeness begins to collapse once one finds the supposedly strange form in precisely the chronological and institutional environment to which the manuscript itself seems to point.

The problem is compounded by Tselikas’s own imprecision. He describes this sign as a “smooth breathing alpha.” But that is not quite right. There are about one hundred words in the Letter to Theodore that begin with alpha. Most of those words have smooth breathing. Only about a quarter of them employ the special initial alpha. The sign is therefore not simply a smooth-breathing alpha. It is a much more specific phenomenon.

The special initial alpha appears when smooth-breathed alpha stands at the front of a word, when pi follows alpha, and when a vowel follows pi. In other words, it is not merely an alpha with smooth breathing. It is an initial smooth-breathing alpha preceding pi when pi is followed by a vowel.

That sounds absurdly specific. But that is precisely the point.

The closest parallel in the broader literature is the familiar ligature for the common Greek word ἀπό. It is reasonable to suppose that the phenomenon in the Letter to Theodore developed from the same scribal habit: the close binding of alpha and pi in common ἀπ- openings. The Letter to Theodore shows the pattern repeatedly:

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

The same principle can even be seen when epsilon precedes pi and a vowel:

line 23: ἐπιθεὶς
line 43: ἐπικρύπτεσθαι

The sign is not employed, however, when the relevant form falls at the end of a line and is divided:

line 55–56: ἀπ᾽ / ἐκύλισε

Nor is it used when the initial alpha is followed by pi and a vowel but has rough breathing:

line 28: ἀπροφυλάκτως
line 40: ἅπασι

This allows us to state the rule more carefully. 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 not used when the following consonant creates a different cluster, as in ἀπρ-, or when the breathing is rough, as in ἅπασι. It is therefore not random. It is not merely decorative. It is not an arbitrary flourish. It is a scribal habit governed by a narrow graphic-phonetic condition.

This is the “Initial Smooth Breathing Alpha Preceding a Pi When Pi is Followed by a Vowel” rule.

Tselikas’s sloppiness lies in failing to recognize how specific the usage is. Whether intentionally or not, his presentation allows the reader to think that the special alpha appears haphazardly, as part of a general pattern of strange letter formation pointing to Morton Smith. But once the examples are collected, the opposite becomes clear. The scribe uses the form according to a precise internal habit. That habit is not merely consistent. It is so specific that even Tselikas did not identify it properly.

Now consider the implications for the hoax hypothesis. According to Tselikas’s theory, Morton 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 monastery library, perhaps with the help of an accomplice. Indeed, Tselikas’s own comments about the writing — especially his admission that the scribe is experienced and keeps a constant ductus — almost require an accomplice if the modern-forgery theory is to survive. Smith himself could not write Greek in such a hand. Venetia Anastasopoulou made that clear. So the hypothesis quietly shifts: Smith composed the text, but someone else wrote it.

Yet Tselikas’s own failure to recognize the rule governing the special alpha makes even the accomplice hypothesis unlikely. If someone as erudite as Tselikas did not recognize when this special alpha was meant to be used, then how did Morton Smith recognize it? How did his imagined confederate recognize it? How did they not only recognize it but encode it consistently into a forged manuscript?

The form is rare. Quesnell, who spent days examining dozens, perhaps hundreds, of manuscripts brought to him by Patriarchal librarian Kallistos Dourvas between June 6 and June 20, 1983, seems never to have encountered a clear example of this special alpha. His notes betray complete unfamiliarity with Greek paleography from this period. One gets the strong sense that the Smith College professor expected simply to arrive in Jerusalem and recognize the text as a forgery. The evidence from his notes, together with George Dragas’s eyewitness testimony concerning the events of June 2, 1983, reveals a very different story. Quesnell seems to have been genuinely shocked when Dourvas rejected the Morton Smith hoax hypothesis. The manuscript must have appeared older than Quesnell anticipated. Dragas recounts that Dourvas at some point handed him the manuscript, and that Dragas agreed with the librarian’s assessment concerning the antiquity of the text. Similarly, Quesnell wrote to his wife two days later that Dourvas’s certainty had a profound effect on him as the librarian brought what seemed like a never-ending onslaught of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts for comparison. “Well,” Quesnell admitted, “it wasn’t quite as easy as I thought the other day.”

Tselikas, by contrast, was familiar with the nuances of Greek letter formation in this period. That makes his failure more striking. His work suffers not from ignorance, but from an underlying sloppiness of execution and reasoning. His transcription of the Greek of the Letter to Theodore is error-ridden. More importantly for our purposes, his reference to the special initial alpha as a smooth-breathing alpha is factually incomplete. The form does not appear merely wherever smooth breathing appears over alpha. It appears in a restricted environment. That restriction is exactly what matters.

If the special ligature were common, the hoax hypothesis could perhaps absorb it. If it were entirely random, the hoax hypothesis could also perhaps absorb it. But it is neither common nor random. It is rare and rule-governed. The scribe who wrote the Letter to Theodore assigned it an unimaginably specific function within the document, a function that even Tselikas did not recognize in his 2011 report and that, to my knowledge, has not been described in any paleographic handbook. We are now supposed to believe that Morton Smith, alone among all figures in the history of Greek paleography, divined the usage of this special initial alpha and encoded it into his forged manuscript.

The absurdity deepens when we compare the Letter to Theodore with other material from the same period. The particular form of the alpha appears in another 1672 document from the Jerusalem Patriarchate, the “Confession” of Dositheus, in the signature of Philemon of Bostra. That manuscript would have been inaccessible to Smith in 1958 because he was working at a completely different library. But the function of the special alpha — its use in initial ἀπ- environments — is also attested elsewhere, including in Jerusalem Patriarchate/Holy Cross manuscript 113, an ascetic text from Egypt/Sinai catalogued by Papadopoulos-Kerameus and dated to the same year, 1672.

Here is the problem for the hoax hypothesis. In order to argue that Morton Smith created a manuscript identified with the year 1672, one would have to assume that he somehow took the form of the initial alpha from one 1672 manuscript in the Jerusalem Patriarchate, the so-called “Confession” of Dositheus, while assigning it the function of initial alpha from another 1672 manuscript in the same institutional orbit, Holy Cross 113. These were not manuscripts he had before him at Mar Saba. They were not manuscripts he had any reason to connect. They were not part of the four Kefalonia manuscripts Tselikas invokes as exemplars. And yet the Letter to Theodore agrees with them at precisely the level of obscure scribal habit.

Examples of special initial alpha functioning in this way do exist outside the Jerusalem Patriarchate, but they are few and far between. Cambridge, Christ’s College, MS Rouse 264, described as mid-seventeenth century, is one such text. Holy Cross 113 is another. The point is not that these manuscripts display identical handwriting. They do not. The point is that they participate in a shared scribal habit: a way of treating alpha and pi as a graphic unit in certain initial environments. The special alpha in the Letter to Theodore may therefore be unusual in form, but its function belongs to a real seventeenth-century scribal world.

[INSERT FIGURES FROM CHRIST’S COLLEGE MS ROUSE 264 AND HOLY CROSS 113 HERE]

The visual development is not hard to imagine. In earlier examples of the ἀπό ligature, the “tail” of the alpha is really the original connection to pi. Over time, that connective movement could become stylized, detached, or reconfigured as a special initial form. The alpha of the Letter to Theodore and the special alpha of Holy Cross 113 need not be identical to have developed from the same graphic heritage. They are cousins, not twins. They share a linguistic and scribal palette of forms and functions.

This is a much better explanation than the hoax hypothesis. In 1672, many scribes in the Jerusalem Patriarchate’s orbit may have shared expectations about how certain common Greek openings could be written. The Letter to Theodore, despite possessing an otherwise distinctive hand, nevertheless participates in this shared expectation. It agrees with other texts from the same place and year at a level too obscure to be plausibly invented by Morton Smith. This is exactly the kind of agreement one hopes to find when testing whether a manuscript belongs to a particular scribal environment. The agreement is not loud. It is not thematic. It is not something Smith could have advertised or exploited. It is buried in the way a scribe forms the Greek letter alpha before pi.

The defenders of the hoax hypothesis can, of course, continue to rearrange the evidence so that Morton Smith theoretically being able to know something becomes evidence that he did know it, and theoretically being able to do something becomes evidence that he did it. This has always been the method. Smith could have known Clement well enough; therefore he forged Clement. Smith could have seen an ink recipe; therefore he made old ink. Smith could have photographed Greek manuscripts; therefore he invented a post-Byzantine hand. Smith could have planted a book; therefore he did. But possibility is not evidence. And when the possibilities become this elaborate, they begin to expose the weakness of the theory they are meant to support.

The special alpha is fatal to the lazy version of the hoax hypothesis because it is not the sort of feature a modern forger would think to invent. A forger invents content. A forger imitates visible letter forms. A forger may copy ligatures from an exemplar. But here we are dealing with something subtler: the intersection of form, sound, word position, breathing, and following consonant-vowel sequence. To posit that Morton Smith invented or reproduced this system is to posit that he understood a rare post-Byzantine scribal habit better than the paleographer who later accused him of forgery.

That is not impossible in the abstract. But it is preposterous as history.

A better explanation is that the Letter to Theodore was not manufactured by Morton Smith at all. It was written by a scribe whose habits belonged to the same broad scribal world as other seventeenth-century Greek manuscripts associated with the Jerusalem Patriarchate. The special alpha is one trace of that world. The form may be rare; the function may have been forgotten; the hand may be distinctive. But the agreement is real. It places the manuscript not in Smith’s study, not in Columbia University, not in the fevered imagination of Anglo-American hoax theorists, but in the ordinary yet highly specialized world of Greek scribal practice.

This does not prove that Clement wrote the Letter to Theodore. It does not prove that Secret Mark existed in the second century. It does not decide every historical question raised by the manuscript. But it does help decide one question: whether Morton Smith created the physical manuscript. The answer is no. The special alpha is not the flourish of a modern prankster. It is the residue of a scribal habit. It belongs to the hand that wrote the manuscript, and that hand belongs to a world Smith did not invent.

The manuscript therefore “agrees” with other texts from its claimed chronological and institutional horizon. It agrees not by declaring itself old, but by behaving like something old. It shares with other seventeenth-century materials an obscure graphic logic that no one in the debate noticed because no one was looking closely enough. Tselikas noticed the form but misunderstood the rule. Quesnell saw the manuscript but lacked the background to interpret it. The hoax theorists saw suspicion everywhere but missed the most important fact: the scribe was not pretending to write this way. He was writing this way.

In the end, the special alpha gives us a miniature version of the entire problem. The manuscript appears strange because it is unfamiliar. The unfamiliarity is then converted into suspicion. Suspicion is then converted into accusation. But when the details are examined, the strangeness begins to look historical rather than fraudulent. What first appeared to be an anomaly becomes evidence of context. What Tselikas treated as a sign of forgery becomes, on closer examination, one of the clearest signs that the manuscript belongs to a real scribal environment.

Morton Smith would have had no reason to connect the form of an initial alpha buried in the signature page of one 1672 manuscript with the function of initial alpha in another 1672 manuscript off limits to him. He would have had no reason to encode such a rule into a forged Clementine letter. He would have had no way of knowing that, half a century later, a Greek paleographer would notice the form but fail to understand its restricted function. Nothing other than the wild imagination of later academics would suppose that Smith implanted an obscure paleographic form-and-function system into an often repeated letter of his alleged forgery.

The simplest explanation remains the best one. The Letter to Theodore was discovered, not created. Its handwriting is authentic to the scribe who wrote it. Its special alpha reflects a natural development of a scribal habit already present in the Jerusalem Patriarchate’s world in the very year with which the manuscript was associated. The hoax hypothesis requires Smith to have known too much, done too much, anticipated too much, and succeeded too perfectly. The manuscript itself requires only a scribe.