Chapter Three

By now the discerning reader may suspect that the evidence in this book has been unfairly stacked against the forgery argument of someone like Stephen Carlson and marshalled toward a defense of Morton Smith. Of course, whether it is or is not “stacked” is ultimately a matter of judgment. But after fifty years of accusation, insinuation, psychoanalysis, gossip, and bad detective work, there remains no evidence for forgery worth the name. The people who wanted, in effect, to ban Morton Smith’s discovery from serious scholarly consideration have largely succeeded, but they have not succeeded because they proved their case. They succeeded because suspicion is easier to circulate than evidence, and because the text itself was always going to offend the right people.

That does not mean, of course, that things cannot change. It may be that in the future scholars will finally listen to the muted judgment of the Jerusalem Patriarchate itself. The custodians of the manuscript never seem to have regarded the Letter to Theodore as a modern forgery. Their judgment, if I may put it bluntly, appears to be that we cannot be trusted with such a text. We, the community of self-centered narcissists called scholars, have shown over and over again that we are incapable of handling this “holy text” without turning it into an occasion for vanity, careerism, and accusation.

In 2017, with the help of Daniel N. Gullotta, then a young and exceptionally promising graduate student, I published an article on Quentin Quesnell’s 1983 examination of the manuscript. The article grew out of my efforts to preserve Quesnell’s personal papers at the Smith College archives, including never-before-seen photographs of the manuscript. It was one of those rare moments when my own impulsive nature did not trip me up. I knew the material mattered, and I knew it needed an objective voice. Daniel was, even then, a brilliant undiscovered talent, and his participation made the article stronger than it would otherwise have been. I have included that paper as an appendix to this investigation. 

The point of that research was simple. Quesnell, the first major scholar to raise the specter of forgery, had actually seen the manuscript. He did not merely speculate about it from afar. He examined it in Jerusalem in June 1983. He had access to it for hours at a time. He took notes. He arranged for photographs. And after all of that, he went away empty. No confession from the paper. No modern ink. No microscopic revelation. No forensic smoking gun. This fact should matter more than it does.

Morton Smith himself was aware that the Letter to Theodore had been moved from Mar Saba to the Jerusalem Patriarchal Library. He cites Thomas Talley’s account of his visit to the library in a paper published in 1982. This adds a strange intrigue to Smith’s encounter with Quesnell at Hebrew University on June 2, 1983. Guy Stroumsa recently reconfirmed to me, in French, that during Smith’s visit to Jerusalem, “je l’ai rencontré à son hôtel. Il avait refusé mon invitation à se joindre au déjeuner avant la conférence de Koester, ne voulant pas déjeuner avec quelqu’un l’ayant accusé de forgerie.” Smith did not want to have lunch with someone who had accused him of forgery. One can hardly blame him.

What Smith surely did not know was that Quesnell was in Jerusalem to examine the manuscript the following Monday. But the coincidence must have struck him. Smith was in Jerusalem filming material for Jesus: The Evidence, a major television production that included, in one episode, his discovery of the Letter to Theodore. And there, at a lecture on the same subject, was the man who had effectively accused him of forgery, sitting with David Flusser, another man who openly referred to Smith as an “evil man.” Smith must have wondered: why the hell is Quesnell in Jerusalem?

The producers of Jesus: The Evidence told me that Smith would have been booked into a very tight window, likely two or three days at most, at the Colony Hotel. He met Helmut Koester there for drinks and conversation after the Hebrew University events. In the same narrow period, Quesnell was securing his own access to the manuscript. Once one factors in jet lag and the trip to Mar Saba, which the producers remember as either June 1 or June 3, there was hardly any time for Smith to “check in” with the authorities at the Patriarchate to see how his “baby” was doing—the term, interestingly enough, that the similarly childless Quesnell used for the manuscript in conversations with his wife.

Stephen Carlson insinuates that there is something inherently suspicious about Smith’s failure to see the manuscript after 1958. This is really just a carryover from Quesnell’s 1975 article, where Quesnell criticized Smith for “abandoning” the manuscript by leaving it in situ at Mar Saba. Like so much in the forgery literature, this is looney tunes. Leaving a manuscript where one finds it is not suspicious; it is professional protocol. Besides, stealing manuscripts is against the law, in Israel no less than anywhere else. Had Smith removed the manuscript from Mar Saba, the very same people would now be saying that his theft proved his guilt.

This is the pattern. If Smith leaves the manuscript where he found it, he “abandons” it. If he had taken it, he would have stolen it. If he does not rush to the Patriarchate in 1983, he is suspiciously avoiding the evidence. If he had rushed there, he would have been attempting to control the evidence. The method is not historical reasoning. It is a machine for converting every possible fact into guilt.

The question is not whether Smith attempted to see the manuscript in 1983. We do not know. He may have tried and been refused. He may not have had time. He may have assumed that the production company had already made inquiries. He may simply have had no desire to stage some melodramatic reunion with a manuscript while Quesnell and Flusser were circling in the background. But if we discovered tomorrow that Smith had attempted and failed to see the manuscript, would that make him seem less guilty to the forgery theorists? Of course not. Their method is not to weigh evidence, but to arrange it so that it damages Smith’s reputation as much as possible.

The more interesting question is what was happening at the Patriarchate in June 1983. Quesnell must have known that Smith and Koester were in Jerusalem to film for Jesus: The Evidence. It is not hard to imagine the chaos. A television crew connected to Smith’s discovery may have been seeking access to film at Mar Saba or at the Patriarchal Library. At the same time, Quesnell was requesting access to the manuscript and had previously floated the possibility of FBI or Israeli examination. There was also construction going on around the building that housed the library; Quesnell himself notes the noise of the workers. It must have been a strange few days at the Jerusalem Patriarchate.

I have been part of enough television productions to know that one’s time is not one’s own. A production schedule consumes everything. Smith would have been where the producers told him to be. Still, it is worth noting that Quesnell’s brother later remembered Smith accusing Quesnell of stealing documents in 1983. John Quesnell did not remember the exact circumstances, and I do not believe for a moment that Quesnell stole the manuscript. There is a letter from the librarian to Quesnell dated September 1983 apologizing for the time it had taken to photograph the Letter to Theodore and other manuscripts Quesnell examined during his two weeks at the library. If the Jerusalem photographer was still processing Quesnell’s order in September, then Quesnell obviously did not walk away with the manuscript in June.

So what happened to the Letter to Theodore? The most likely answer is that it remained within the custody of the Jerusalem Patriarchate, perhaps in the office of the Secretary General or some other internal location. A Patristics student from Durham, connected to George Dragas, was present in Jerusalem and saw the manuscript in 1983 when Quesnell requested it. The Patriarchate never treated the manuscript as a modern forgery. That should count for something. In a sane scholarly world, it would count for a great deal.

But the modern forgery theory makes for a better story, and better stories sell better books. The idea that one can rely entirely on the notion that Morton Smith was a “bad guy” to make the forgery case is ridiculous. We now know that the first scholar to accuse Smith had two weeks in Jerusalem, examined the manuscript, and came away with nothing. I suspect, though I cannot prove, that the attribution to Clement is authentic. What can be argued more modestly, and more securely, is that the handwriting belongs to the period to which Smith assigned it. At the very least, as the Patriarchate itself effectively suggested to Quesnell, the text can be treated as an “authentic apocryphon.”

But these things are ahead of us. We must first go back to Quesnell and to the strange certainty that Morton Smith was the forger. That certainty seems to have crystallized around the twin dedications in Smith’s two books of 1973. From those dedications, Quesnell began to see hints everywhere. This is the psychology of the forgery case in miniature. A small perceived incongruity becomes a clue. The clue becomes a key. The key opens a secret chamber. And suddenly every detail, however ordinary, is part of the hidden architecture of guilt.

Smith and Landau, working through Quesnell’s notes and supplementing them with interviews, have described this mode of argument well. Many of the arguments for forgery, especially those involving hidden “breadcrumbs,” resemble conspiratorial thinking. A scholar notices some small anomaly, then explains it as a hidden sign pointing toward Smith’s authorship. The explanation then requires additional ingenious explanations, which often depend on factual errors. Refuting such claims takes far more space than making them. It is the Augean stables problem. One line of insinuation requires ten pages of shoveling.

Carlson’s work is the classic example as Smith and Landau note. Whether he is looking at handwriting, dedications, salt companies, bald swindlers, or supposedly concealed jokes, the logic is the same. The conclusion is already known: Smith forged the manuscript. The task is simply to find the clues he left behind. And if the clues are not obvious, that only proves how cleverly he hid them. If they are too obvious, that proves he wanted to be caught. This is not evidence. It is folklore with footnotes.

The same pattern appears, though in a more technical register, in Agamemnon Tselikas’s claim about ἀπόγραφον. Tselikas suggested that the manuscript’s use of ἀπόγραφον rather than ἀντίγραφον was suspicious, because ἀπόγραφον was supposedly a modern Greek term rather than the ancient word for a copy. If that were true, it would be potentially serious evidence. But the problem is that it is not true in the way the argument requires. The evidence does not sustain the neat conclusion. Once again, the alleged smoking gun turns out to be smoke blown back into the room by the investigator.

When we add the newer assessments to the opinions Smith solicited before his 1960 SBL presentation, the weight of expert opinion favors authenticity, or at least favors an eighteenth-century hand. Even those who suspect foul play have to posit a co-conspirator far more proficient in Greek and late Greek handwriting than Smith himself. But now we are no longer talking about Morton Smith alone. We are talking about an invisible accomplice, a Greek-writing ghost, someone competent enough to produce the manuscript but discreet enough to leave no independent trace of himself.

And then there is Nock. It is one thing to suspect that Morton Smith forged the Mar Saba Clementine. It is quite another to imagine that Arthur Darby Nock conspired with him. That is no longer merely suspicion. That is conspiracy theory in evening dress. As Smith and Landau show, Nock, as editor of Harvard Theological Review, once refused to publish a supposed saying of Jesus without compelling evidence that the manuscript actually existed. We are then asked to imagine that this same Nock either helped Smith forge the Letter to Theodore or silently permitted him to do so. The idea is absurd. It becomes even more absurd when we remember that Nock and Smith were not always in perfect harmony. In the years before the discovery, Nock had been sharply critical of Smith’s abandoned work on Mark. Are we to imagine that the tensions preserved in their letters were themselves part of the ruse?

Quesnell, to be fair, publicly insisted that his 1975 article was not an accusation of forgery. He claimed that he was merely defending a basic scholarly principle: that the person who introduces an exciting new manuscript find has a responsibility to make the manuscript available for scientific examination. But Quesnell’s private statements tell a different story. When Scott Brown asked him directly whether he personally thought Smith, in collaboration with “the one who knows,” had forged the document, Quesnell answered: “Of course I did.” He added that this was not the point of the article because it was a conclusion based on negative evidence. That is an extraordinary admission. The accusation was there from the beginning, even if it was kept just offstage.

The surviving drafts of Quesnell’s correspondence with Smith make the matter even clearer. In an earlier version of the letter he sent to Smith, Quesnell laid out the possibility that a modern scholar might have created such a text as a controlled experiment in exegetical and historical method. Such a scholar, Quesnell imagined, might eventually reveal the hoax and show that his original presentation had contained enough hints for careful readers to detect it. Quesnell then confesses the fatal sentence: “Now, having once conceived this possibility … I seem to be running into such hints and indications everywhere.”

There it is. Once the possibility was conceived, the signs multiplied. This is the grammar of conspiracy. It is also the grammar of paranoia. Quesnell knew the danger. He even admitted the possibility that it might all be his imagination. But the idea had already taken hold. Once he imagined that the dedications were clues, the entire edifice of Smith’s discovery could be re-read as a coded confession.

But here we come to the thing that was always operating beneath the surface. The real offense was not the dedication. It was not the photographs. It was not whether Smith had notified the Patriarchate in the correct way. The real offense was the content of the text and, even more, Smith’s interpretation of it.

This becomes clear in Quesnell’s review for the National Catholic Reporter. There he is not primarily concerned with manuscript protocol, scientific examination, or the chain of custody. He is animated by the sexual scandal. He opens with the young man who fled naked from Gethsemane: “What was he doing there? Taking a midnight swim? Walking in his sleep? Was he a camper? A lover? An exhibitionist?” Then comes the sneer: “Perhaps Jesus practiced all-night initiation rites over naked young men, while the disciples stood guard against Peeping Toms.”

This is not a neutral methodological concern. This is outrage dressed up as wit. Quesnell accuses Smith of playing a game in which one finds a new or overlooked text and then constructs the most bizarre and scandalous possible reconstruction of history. But what, in the world of 1973 Catholic biblical scholarship, could have been more bizarre and scandalous than the suggestion that Jesus was implicated in a homoerotic nocturnal initiation?

Here, I think, we finally reach the true origin of the forgery panic. The sin of Morton Smith was not merely that he discovered a text. His sin was that he interpreted the text as if it mattered. Worse, he interpreted it as if its homoerotic implications could not be piously explained away. He did not protect Jesus from the text. He did not protect the guild from embarrassment. He did not protect pious men from the possibility that the historical Jesus might not conform to the safe, bloodless, heterosexual imagination of mid-century Christian scholarship.

That is why the next chapter must turn to Smith’s real crime in the eyes of his opponents: his interpretation of the Letter to Theodore as evidence for a secret, nocturnal, initiatory rite with unmistakable homosexual implications. The forgery accusation did not arise in a vacuum. It arose in a world in which the very idea of a “homosexual Jesus” was intolerable. The question, then, is not simply whether Smith forged the Letter to Theodore. The question is why so many scholars needed him to have forged it.