Chapter One

“To the One Who Knows.”

It is a strange way to begin a book. These words stand at the threshold of Morton Smith’s 1973 Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, and from them grew what may be the most important academic conspiracy theory in the history of New Testament scholarship.

Smith had completed the draft of his study of the Mar Saba discovery in 1963. The text he had found in 1958 claimed to be an ancient letter of Clement of Alexandria referring to a “secret” Gospel of Mark. For reasons that are still not entirely clear, Smith’s scholarly book would take another ten years to appear in print. But already at that early stage he had chosen to begin it with a dedication:

“To the One Who Knows.”

It is difficult to explain why every twist and turn in this story became so fraught with confusion, distortion, and bitter acrimony. The problem was not simply Smith, his decisions, or his actions. Even the inanimate object at the center of the affair — the printed book itself — became a source of confusion. This was the battered 1646 printed edition of the letters of Ignatius, published by Isaac Vossius, which Smith examined in the library of Mar Saba in 1958. When that book was later retrieved from the monastery by young monks, at the prompting of three Israeli scholars, and transferred to the main Greek Orthodox library in Jerusalem, the journey itself — no more than an hour by car — generated another layer of rumor and distortion.

No one knows when the Voss edition entered the Mar Saba library. Most of the printed books at Mar Saba in 1958 had never been catalogued. Many had simply ended up at this lonely desert monastery because they were duplicates, damaged copies, or surplus volumes from the much larger holdings of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem. Another Greek Orthodox library, associated with the theological school at the Monastery of the Holy Cross, had also been closed when the Church could no longer sustain it financially, and its holdings were transferred to the main library in Jerusalem in the early twentieth century. Books moved from one place to another, and then sometimes to another again, with little paperwork and less certainty.

However the Voss book arrived at Mar Saba, its transfer was not recorded. When Morton Smith entered the monastic library in 1958, he was not consulting a fully catalogued collection. He was going through the blank leaves of printed books — some recorded, many unrecorded — looking for handwritten material that might have been added to their empty pages.

American scholars had been moving through the libraries of the Greek Orthodox Church in Palestine and elsewhere in the Mediterranean since the end of the Second World War. This was, in a sense, one of the academic “spoils of victory.” Had Germany prevailed in the Mediterranean, German scholars would undoubtedly have sent their own teams into these monastic libraries. Indeed, individual German missionaries and scholars had already photographed “interesting manuscripts” in the early twentieth century, though in a less organized fashion. After the war, it was the Americans’ turn.

The main American effort had passed through the manuscripts of the central Jerusalem library beginning in 1949. That official project had ended about five years before Smith’s visit to Mar Saba. Smith was then a young, ambitious professor at Columbia University. He was in the process of building a life for himself in New York. He had a girlfriend, the mother of one of his students. He was forty-two years old.

Looking back over his life, Smith may well have felt that he had taken an unusually long time to “settle down.” He was still unmarried and had not yet secured tenure at the institution where he taught. The thought that an important discovery might help secure his academic future must surely have crossed his mind.

Many men who had served in the Second World War found it difficult to marry, begin families, and settle into ordinary professional life. The trauma of war haunted them. But Morton Smith had not served in combat. He had spent the 1940s in Jerusalem, studying for the first of his two earned doctorates.

Smith’s 1948 Ph.D. from the Hebrew University was on Tannaitic parallels to the Gospels. He later received a Doctor of Theology from Harvard before taking up his post at Columbia and, ultimately, making his way to Mar Saba. During his earlier years in Jerusalem, he had fallen in love with a Jewish woman and had discovered that interesting things were often written in the blank pages of printed books. When he returned to the United States, he maintained an interest in both “fields.” All of his known romantic relationships were with Jewish women, and he continued to disappear for long stretches to exotic places in search of manuscripts.

These are the facts. But the story of the Letter to Theodore has a strange way of accumulating distortion.

When we return to the battered printed book in which Smith found a late seventeenth-century hand inscribing a text that purported to be a letter of Clement of Alexandria, the stated purpose of its transfer from Mar Saba to Jerusalem was straightforward. The Greek Orthodox Church was exercising its right to protect its own property from theft. Israeli tourists had been visiting Mar Saba and taking printed books as “souvenirs.”

Smith had discovered the handwritten text only eighteen years earlier. But the removal of manuscripts and printed books from Mar Saba to the central Jerusalem library had a much longer history. The same was true of transfers from Holy Cross and other monastic libraries under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate. Entire shelves in the Jerusalem library were devoted to manuscripts retrieved from these places over many years. The Letter to Theodore was eventually removed from the printed book in which Smith had found it, photographed, and placed on a shelf in Jerusalem alongside hundreds of predecessors.

Yet when the story was first recorded by another American professor, after he spoke to one of the three Israeli scholars present when the book was moved in 1976, history again became distorted. Seven years after the transfer, during an evening of levity and speculation that centered largely on Morton Smith’s sexuality and on possible ways that sexuality might have contributed to his forging the text and smuggling it into the library, David Flusser — an otherwise respected authority on the Jewish historian Josephus — gave Quentin Quesnell an account that was completely at odds with the story Guy Stroumsa would later publish.

Flusser told Quesnell, who recorded the conversation in his journal, a dramatic story about the transfer of the Voss book from Mar Saba to Jerusalem. According to Quesnell’s notes, Flusser said that “the library was a mess,” that the searchers at first “did not find the book,” and that when they finally did, it was “in the middle of a pile of books carelessly thrown on the floor, all covered with dust.” Flusser then turned the story into an indictment of Smith. What kind of scholar, he asked, could have allowed this to happen? How could Smith have walked away and left his “great discovery” to such a fate? In Quesnell’s version, the scholars were about to bring the book back to Jerusalem when Abbot Seraphim “raised hell,” insisting that they formally request it and that he would send it. They did so, and he did. Flusser was therefore surprised that the book was still in Jerusalem in 1983; he had assumed that Seraphim would have demanded its return to Mar Saba.

Stroumsa’s later comments seriously weaken the reliability of this story. When he encountered Quesnell’s written account after Quesnell’s death, Stroumsa observed that Quesnell “does not seem very reliable,” adding that his conversations with Flusser, “who was himself a very confused man,” had not helped him understand the matter correctly. Stroumsa then corrected the crucial detail. “It is false,” he wrote, “that the book containing the manuscript of Clement’s letter was found on a pile of books on the floor.” According to Stroumsa, who was present during the search, the book “was found by one of the young monks of St. Sabba, exactly on the shelf where Smith had put it back.”

This correction matters. The entire moral drama of Flusser’s anecdote depends on the image of Smith’s discovery abandoned in a dusty heap, as if Smith had negligently left the manuscript to decay. Stroumsa’s recollection removes that image altogether. The book was not found discarded on the floor. It was found where Smith had returned it.

Stroumsa’s comments go to the heart of the problem in reconstructing any reliable history of the Letter to Theodore controversy. None of the scholars involved emerges as consistently reliable. Flusser’s profession was to make sense of history; one would not expect him to engage in historical fabrication. But as we shall see, almost nothing about the story of the discovery is immune to distortion. Over the next two hundred pages, I will try to present an account of the manuscript as free from distortion as possible — a manuscript that the Jerusalem Patriarchate itself dated to 1672 CE.

The claim that Morton Smith forged the text is necessarily part of the legacy of the discovery. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it had largely taken over the narrative. But by then another development had taken hold. The Patriarchate had likely concluded that Western scholars were simply too irresponsible to have access to the text any longer. The official story is that the manuscript has been misplaced. But already by the 1980s there was a growing sense that professional scholars from the West were no better than the tourists from whom the manuscript had been rescued a decade earlier.

We must try, for a moment, to see things from the perspective of the unmarried men who populate the Jerusalem Patriarchate. In the West, and especially in the United States, we have a strange confidence in our own abilities. Study after study has demonstrated that Americans overestimate their qualifications. The classic formulation is Justin Kruger and David Dunning’s 1999 article “Unskilled and Unaware of It.” In that study, American college students who performed poorly on tests of logic, grammar, and humor nevertheless greatly overestimated their performance. Kruger and Dunning concluded that incompetent people often lack the very skills needed to recognize their own incompetence.

The drama surrounding the only other American professor to examine the Letter to Theodore illustrates this problem vividly. Quentin Quesnell learned that the manuscript had been moved from Mar Saba to Jerusalem from the published account of an unsuccessful attempt by a French priest to see it in the early 1980s. Quesnell was also almost certainly motivated by professional jealousy. Smith’s involvement in a major television series on Jesus had been widely reported. Quesnell then arrived at the library, swearing and demanding to see the manuscript, shouting theories about Morton Smith’s homosexuality, his supposed plot to destroy Christianity through a forged document, and the alleged portrayal of Jesus as a gay man.

The Greek librarian Kallistos Dourvas shouted and swore back. He ordered Quesnell to leave, re-enter, and begin again properly. By the time the two men had a more respectable conversation, Dourvas had learned several things about this American visitor. Quesnell had not originally believed that the text existed. He thought Smith had invented the entire story and supplied fake photographs. What is more, Quesnell knew almost nothing about seventeenth-century Greek handwriting. He was, in this respect, a complete ignoramus.

The situation must have seemed absurd to Dourvas. Here was a man so convinced of conspiracy, forgery, homosexuality, and plots to overthrow Christianity that he could not recognize the limits of his own competence. The Jerusalem Patriarchate had already determined that the manuscript was written in 1672 CE. During the discussion that took place on June 2, 1983, it became readily apparent to the librarian that despite his inability to read the Greek hand, the American visitor was not backing down. He was certain that the text was a forgery. His entire case rested on the personality of the man who had discovered it.

It must have seemed baffling. Dourvas’s familiarity with Greek manuscripts from the period, and his ability to read the ligatures of the hand, had no real effect on Quesnell. Dourvas’s first words to him, as Quesnell recorded them, summarized the encounter: “You think I am a piece of shit.”

In effect, the American did. Dourvas therefore agreed to do something he had not done a few years earlier with Thomas Talley. He agreed to bring out the manuscript for Quesnell to examine during the two weeks Quesnell planned to remain in Jerusalem. A challenge had been issued. Dourvas would try to convince him that the manuscript was hundreds of years old by giving him an education in how to read Greek handwriting from the period. He gave Quesnell a catalogue of the manuscripts in the Jerusalem Patriarchal Library and agreed to bring him whatever texts he wanted to compare, all in an effort to show that the Letter to Theodore was much older than Morton Smith — and, ultimately, that it belonged to the year 1672 CE.

On the first day of examination there seemed to be some promise. Quesnell wrote:

“Now, speaking as no expert, but just trying to remember what I read about forgeries in detective stories — I think I see all through the text, under magnification, the usual signs of someone trying to write in a style other than his own: breaks where there should be smooth loops linking the letters; wobbles at unusual and tricky places; and dots indicating the pen is resting while the writer is thinking where to move it next — dots at the beginning and end of words, syllables, letters.”

But by the third day of examination, Quesnell was forced to admit, in a letter to his wife, that the matter was not as simple as he had imagined. He could not accomplish what he had traveled from the United States to prove: that Morton Smith had forged the text.

“Well, it wasn’t quite as easy as I thought the other day. I’ve been examining loads of other writings from Mar Saba itself from the 18th century and many of them too have breaks and squiggles and perhaps hesitations. They’re not all forgeries. I do think they have many fewer than our friend’s; but that’s not as easy to prove as if they just had none at all. And some of them don’t seem to have soaked into the pages very much either. So experts are going to have to be consulted.”

That admission is the real beginning of the story. Quesnell had arrived in Jerusalem with certainty. He had come believing that the manuscript was a forgery and that he would expose it. But once he was forced to compare the Letter to Theodore with actual manuscripts from the same monastic environment, his confidence began to weaken. The signs that looked like forgery in isolation — breaks, hesitations, unevenness, ink behavior — appeared in other Mar Saba writings as well. They were not, by themselves, proof of anything.

The story of the Letter to Theodore is therefore not merely the story of a mysterious manuscript. It is also the story of modern scholars looking at a manuscript and seeing themselves: their anxieties, rivalries, suspicions, religious fears, sexual obsessions, and professional ambitions. Smith’s dedication, “To the One Who Knows,” may have been innocent, playful, or private. But in the world that grew around the Mar Saba discovery, it became an invitation to suspicion. Everyone wanted to be the one who knew. Very few were willing to admit how little they actually did.