Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

Naked Ones with the Naked One

It is now established that the custodians of the manuscript believed, for reasons that are not immediately available to us, that the text had been transcribed in 1672 CE. Morton Smith dated the text to the eighteenth century. He was following the opinion of the majority of the experts he consulted. Only a small minority identified the text as being from the late seventeenth century. The opinion of the Greeks varied on this issue. But the one thing that all Greek paleographers agree upon is that the text does not say “naked man with naked man,” but “naked ones with the naked one.” The Greek is γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ.

In 2023 I sent cropped images of this word to forty experts to determine what it said. Everyone identified the first word as γυμνοὶ.

The list of consulted experts included Nigel Wilson from Oxford University; Chariton Karanasios from the Academy of Athens; Georgios Charizanes and Georgios Harizanis from Democritus University of Thrace; Eleni Kaltsogianni from the University of Ioannina; Anastasia Kontogiannopoulou from the Academy of Athens; Sotiris Mitralexis from the University of Winchester; Georgios Kalafikis from the Center for the Greek Language; Alexandros Alexakis, co-editor of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library at the University of Ioannina; Sergei Mariev from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz; Albrecht Berger from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; Ernst Gamillscheg from the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek; Filippomaria Pontani from Università Ca’ Foscari; Paolo Eleuteri from the University of Venice; Rosario Pintaudi, President of the Accademia Fiorentina di Papirologia; Guglielmo Cavallo, Emeritus Professor at Sapienza University of Rome; Claudio Bevegni from Università di Genova; and Cay Lienau from Universität Münster.

So we have acknowledged experts in the field of paleography from the period in question identifying the word one way, and then we have those who published something in the “academic debate” that developed over the last fifty years agreeing with Morton Smith’s reading. Interestingly, it does not matter whether the scholar promoted authenticity or forgery. The opinion was uniform: Morton Smith got it right. But the key distinction is that they “published something.” In other words, those who published something when they knew little or nothing about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Greek paleography now refuse to admit that their opinion was essentially worthless. They could not properly read the manuscript. They did not read the manuscript correctly. They were essentially, in the words of Celsus, arguing about the shadow of an ass.

The first person to discern the correct reading was, not surprisingly, an expert in Greek paleography from the period. Who would have thought? Without much fanfare, Agamemnon Tselikas published his transcription of the manuscript in 2011, rendering the expression as γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ. He provides a detailed table of what each letter can appear like in the manuscript. There is no listing for sigmas that look “iota-like.” Similarly, twenty-eight years earlier, Quesnell attempted to identify every instance where the scribe — the man whom Quesnell was then willing to imagine might be Morton Smith — made an error of execution because of his presumed inexperience. γυμνοὶ is not on that list.

More notably, Quesnell, like Tselikas, painstakingly enumerates every way letters can appear in the manuscript, and he does so in much greater detail than Tselikas. He even counts the number of times anomalies appear. There is no identification of the shape of the final letter of γυμνοὶ as a sigma.

The reason for this is simple. The final letter is not a sigma. Quesnell identifies only one possibility for sigma. The final letter of γυμνοὶ was clearly taken for granted to be an iota. In Tselikas’s case, he takes care to identify the difference between three kinds of sigmas and only two kinds of iotas. Most importantly — and correctly — he recognizes that every νος in the manuscript has a special ligature.

The final point precludes the possibility that γυμνός was written here. If the word had been γυμνός, it would have been spelled with the manuscript’s ligature for νος, rather than with nu, omicron, and then sigma separately. The accent moreover is clearly on the final letter, which has to be a vowel. Sigmas are always executed with three strokes; iotas with two. The final letter was plainly intended by the scribe to be an iota. My consultation with the aforementioned scholars, including Tselikas, makes clear that the iota was made on the downstroke from writing the word γυμνοὶ.

Clearly then, the last letter is iota. The accent is in its proper place if the word is the plural γυμνοὶ. The word is γυμνοὶ.

This is not a small matter. It is not a harmless variant, nor a trivial grammatical quibble. It changes the entire emotional and interpretive history of the Letter to Theodore. For decades, the phrase “naked man with naked man” functioned as the secret engine of the controversy. It allowed Smith, and then Smith’s critics, to place sexuality at the center of the discussion. It made the text appear more sensational than it actually is. It encouraged speculation about homoerotic initiation, libertine rites, and a hidden sexualized Jesus tradition. It made the Letter to Theodore seem like precisely the kind of text Morton Smith’s enemies imagined he would have wanted to discover — or invent.

But the manuscript does not say that.

The manuscript says γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ.

That is, “naked ones with the naked one.”

This single correction undermines one of the central assumptions of the forgery hypothesis. If Morton Smith forged the Letter to Theodore, then he forged a text containing the phrase γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ, only to misread it as γυμνὸς γυμνῷ. He then built part of his interpretation on that misreading. In other words, the forgery theory requires us to believe that Smith was both a master forger capable of producing a convincing Greek manuscript in an eighteenth-century or late seventeenth-century hand, and at the same time an incompetent reader of the very manuscript he had supposedly created.

This is impossible to take seriously.

The first major suspicion surrounding the Letter to Theodore was that no one besides Smith had ever really seen the manuscript in situ. That objection is now dead. Quentin Quesnell went to Mar Saba in 1983 and photographed the manuscript in high resolution. Those photographs, later deposited at Smith College, decisively confirmed that the manuscript was not a figment of Smith’s camera or imagination. Quesnell’s visit matters because it proves that the physical object existed independently of Smith’s published photographs. It also matters because his photographs make visible precisely the small details of the script that the older reproductions obscured.

The second suspicion, however, has persisted. Critics continue to say that if anyone had the intellect, erudition, perversity, and theatricality to create such a forgery, it was Morton Smith. This is the “genius forger” theory. Smith knew too much. Smith was too clever. Smith was too mischievous. Smith was too interested in secrecy, magic, homosexuality, and esoteric Christianity. Therefore, the argument goes, he must have created the text that so conveniently served his interests.

But the misreading of γυμνοὶ destroys this psychological fantasy. The question is not whether Smith was intelligent. He obviously was. The question is whether he possessed the particular technical skill necessary to compose, execute, and then successfully interpret a convincing post-Byzantine Greek manuscript. The evidence suggests that he did not.

Smith was a formidable historian of religion. He had a wide range of knowledge, a provocative imagination, and an immense command of ancient sources. But in 1958, when he encountered the Letter to Theodore, he was not an established paleographer. His training had not been centered on eighteenth-century Greek monastic handwriting. Reading Greek in printed editions, or even in more regular manuscript hands, is not the same thing as deciphering cramped post-Byzantine cursive. Still less is it the same thing as forging such a hand convincingly.

This distinction has been consistently blurred by defenders of the forgery hypothesis. They confuse Smith’s general erudition with specialized paleographical mastery. A man can know Clement, Origen, the rabbis, magical papyri, and the history of early Christianity without being able to reproduce convincingly the letter forms, ligatures, abbreviation patterns, accentuation habits, and scribal rhythms of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Greek monk. Those are different skills. The forgery theory needs Smith to have possessed them all.

Yet the actual record shows something else. Smith made errors. He revised his transcription. He changed accents. He corrected small details between his early work and the 1973 publication. These are not signs of a man unveiling a perfectly controlled deception. They are signs of a scholar working through difficult material, uncertain of some readings, and trying to improve his edition over time.

One sees this in the very history of the publication. Smith discovered the manuscript in 1958 but did not publish his major study until 1973. Forgery proponents have often treated this delay as suspicious. They imagine the interval as a period during which Smith refined the forgery, controlled access, and planned the unveiling. But the delay can be explained far more simply. Smith knew he was dealing with a dangerous text. He knew that any error in the editio princeps would be permanent. He knew that if he published too quickly and made mistakes, his reputation would suffer. The delay looks less like the confidence of a forger and more like the anxiety of a scholar afraid of public embarrassment.

This is especially clear from Smith’s unusual decision to file a preliminary transcription and translation with the United States Patent Office in 1958. That action has often been treated as bizarre, and perhaps it was. But it is not inexplicable. It was a way of staking priority while delaying full publication. Smith wanted to secure his claim to the discovery, but he also wanted time to produce a defensible edition. This is not the behavior of a man who already knows every letter of the text because he wrote it himself. It is the behavior of a man who fears being scooped, corrected, or humiliated.

The same pattern appears in Smith’s later work with Greek magical materials. Those who worked with him recognized his learning, but they also recognized his limitations. Roy Kotansky, who knew the field and the materials, observed that Smith did not always appreciate the subtleties and nuances of the idiom and that he was not a paleographer, epigraphist, or papyrologist in the strict sense. This is crucial. The man imagined by the forgery hypothesis is a master technician of Greek handwriting. The man remembered by colleagues was a brilliant but imperfect scholar who sometimes needed help with precisely the kinds of material details a forger would have had to control.

This is why the γυμνοὶ misreading is so devastating. It is not an isolated slip. It fits the profile of the real Smith. He was capable of bold interpretation but not immune from elementary paleographical error. He could see large historical patterns but miss the force of a small ligature. He could produce a dazzling theory and yet misread the word on which part of that theory depended.

The difference between γυμνοὶ and γυμνὸς turns on whether the final letter is iota or sigma. In the poor reproductions available to most readers, one could understand how the error persisted. But Quesnell’s photographs make the matter clear. The final letter is consistent with iota. The accent is placed as it should be for the plural. The scribe’s known sigma forms do not match the final letter. The expected νος ligature is absent. The manuscript’s own habits compel the reading γυμνοὶ.

If this were an undisputed manuscript of Clement, no one would hesitate. No one would invent elaborate defenses of the sigma. No one would say the final letter must be a sigma because Morton Smith read it that way. The only reason the debate exists is because the word is entangled in the larger mythology of the Letter to Theodore. Once the mythology is stripped away, the paleographical issue is straightforward.

The interpretive consequences are considerable. Smith’s reading, “naked man with naked man,” created a direct pairing. It sounded personal, bodily, erotic. It made the passage seem to refer to one naked male beside another naked male. The plural γυμνοὶ, however, changes the structure. “Naked ones with the naked one” is not the same phrase. It is less useful for the sensational reading. It is more awkward, more symbolic, more difficult. It does not deliver the sexual charge that the singular reading supplied.

That matters because the forgery theory has often depended on motive. Smith supposedly forged the text because it gave him what he wanted: a secret Gospel, Clement, Mark, an initiated youth, a nocturnal scene, and the tantalizing phrase “naked man with naked man.” But if the manuscript does not actually contain that phrase, then one of the most important motives is weakened. Smith’s alleged forgery failed to say what he most needed it to say.

A forger does not normally forge ambiguity where clarity would better serve him. If Smith wanted a homoerotic Jesus text, he could have written one. If he wanted “naked man with naked man,” he could have written γυμνὸς γυμνῷ. If he wanted a phrase that would detonate the theological imagination, he would not have written γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ and then relied on his own later misreading to produce the scandal. The whole scenario is incoherent.

The only way to save the forgery hypothesis is to make Smith into a figure of absurdly overdeveloped cunning. He must have written the plural deliberately, misread it deliberately, published the misreading deliberately, and allowed that misreading to make him look paleographically incompetent deliberately — all as part of some labyrinthine scheme to conceal the forgery. This is the “four-dimensional chess” theory of Morton Smith. It is not history. It is apologetics for suspicion.

Occam’s razor points in the opposite direction. Smith found a manuscript. He photographed it. He worked from imperfect images. He struggled with a difficult hand. He misread a small but important letter. He then interpreted the text in light of that misreading. Later scholars, trusting Smith’s transcription or lacking the paleographical competence to challenge it, repeated the error. That explanation accounts for all the evidence without requiring a genius forger who sabotages his own case.

The irony is that Smith’s misreading did more than anyone else to create the later scandal. The manuscript’s phrase, properly read, is not nearly so convenient for the story that came to dominate the debate. Smith inadvertently sexualized the text through transcription. His critics then accused him of having forged precisely the sexualized text that his own error had helped create. In this way the forgery hypothesis feeds on the misreading. It needs Smith’s mistake to be correct.

This also explains why the correction has been resisted. If γυμνοὶ is admitted, the entire rhetorical structure changes. The supposed “naked man with naked man” clue disappears. The alleged perfect fit between Smith’s interests and the manuscript becomes less perfect. The claim that the text was tailor-made for Smith weakens. The image of Smith as a forger who planted his own obsessions in Clement becomes harder to sustain.

None of this proves that the Letter to Theodore is Clement’s autograph. No one claims that. Nor does it prove that every line of the letter derives directly from Clement of Alexandria. The manuscript is a copy, and the history of the text before its appearance in the Vossius volume remains uncertain. But the question here is narrower and more decisive: did Morton Smith forge the manuscript? The reading γυμνοὶ makes that increasingly unlikely.

For Smith to have forged the manuscript, he would have needed to create an object that Quesnell could later photograph and that specialists would later recognize as consistent with a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Greek hand. He would have needed to master the scribal habits of the period, including ligatures and accentuation. He would then have had to forget, misread, or deliberately falsify the meaning of one of his own crucial forms. The theory asks us to believe too much.

By contrast, the non-forgery explanation asks us to believe something ordinary. A scholar discovered a manuscript in a monastery. He photographed it. He published it years later. He got some things right and some things wrong. One of his wrong readings was unusually consequential. That is all.

The delay in publication, then, should no longer be treated as evidence of forgery. It belongs to the same pattern of scholarly anxiety. Smith knew he had something important. He knew he was vulnerable. He wanted priority but feared error. He consulted, revised, waited, and still failed to catch the crucial mistake. Such behavior is psychologically intelligible. It is the behavior of an ambitious scholar trying to protect his reputation while handling a dangerous discovery.

The alternative is psychologically absurd. A forger who had composed the whole thing would not need fifteen years to work out what it said. He would know what it said. He would have designed it to say what he wanted. He would not leave the most explosive phrase dependent on a misreading of iota as sigma. He would not build his interpretation on an error that any competent paleographer might later expose.

This is why Quesnell’s role is so important. His photographs not only confirmed the manuscript’s existence; they also exposed the limits of Smith’s reading. In the earlier stage of the debate, skeptics could say that Smith alone controlled the evidence. After Quesnell, that claim became impossible. The manuscript existed. The hand could be studied. The letter forms could be compared. And when they were compared, Smith’s reading failed.

The same photographs that freed the manuscript from the charge of being merely a photographic trick also freed the text from Smith’s transcription. They allowed the manuscript to speak against Smith. This is the great irony. The best evidence against the idea that Smith forged the text is not that Smith was always right. It is that Smith was wrong.

A forger’s text normally serves the forger’s purpose. This text resists Smith’s purpose. It refuses to say what he thought it said. The manuscript corrects him. That is why the little iota matters. It is a paleographical detail, but it is also a historical witness. It testifies that the text had a life independent of Morton Smith’s imagination.

The final result is clear. The phrase is γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ. The word is plural. The final letter is iota. The accent confirms it. The sigma required by Smith’s reading is not there. The expected νος ligature is not there. The manuscript’s scribal system rules against him.

And with that correction, the most famous innuendo in the history of the Letter to Theodore evaporates.

The debate should now proceed from the manuscript, not from Smith’s mistake. The question is no longer what theological or sexual fantasy can be extracted from “naked man with naked man.” The manuscript never said it. The question is what γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ means in context, and why later scholars were so willing to ignore the evidence of the page in favor of the authority of Morton Smith.

The answer is uncomfortable. Both sides of the debate needed Smith too much. His defenders needed him as the brilliant discoverer. His critics needed him as the brilliant forger. But the manuscript reveals a third possibility: Smith as a brilliant but fallible scholar. That is the Morton Smith who actually emerges from the evidence. He was learned enough to recognize the importance of the discovery, but not skilled enough to read every letter correctly. He was bold enough to construct a provocative interpretation, but not cautious enough to see that one of its foundations was unstable.

That Morton Smith is historically plausible. The genius forger is not.

The correction from γυμνὸς to γυμνοὶ therefore does more than change a translation. It changes the evidentiary balance. It removes one of the strongest alleged motives for forgery. It exposes Smith’s limits as a paleographer. It shows that the text was not under his control. It confirms the value of Quesnell’s photographs. And it forces us to recognize that much of the controversy was built on a misread iota.

In the end, the simplest explanation remains the best. Morton Smith did not forge the Letter to Theodore. He found it, misread it, and then overinterpreted it. The manuscript was real. The word was plural. The scandal was partly manufactured by transcription. And the supposed “naked man with naked man” was never there.

It was not Clement who wrote that phrase.

It was not the Mar Saba scribe.

It was Morton Smith’s mistake.