Chapter Two

I began the previous chapter by suggesting that the debate over the “authenticity” of Morton Smith’s discovery tells us something larger about the decline of Western thought. I connected it with the promise many people once associated with the 1960s: the hope that truth, openness, and intellectual honesty might eventually displace the old will to power. By now, we have lived long enough to know that this promise was not fulfilled. But how did this loss of idealism play out in the controversy over the Letter to Theodore?

We should begin with the word “authenticity” itself.

Our English word “authentic” comes from a Greek root meaning something like “one acting on his own authority.” In ordinary usage, a document is authentic if it comes from the person it claims to come from. In this case, that would mean Clement of Alexandria. Yet the Greek Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which owned the manuscript, seems to have concluded in the years after its discovery that the Letter to Theodore was not actually written by Clement. Instead, it was treated as an “authentic apocryphon”: a real manuscript, but not a genuine work of Clement, supposedly written in the year 1672. How the Patriarchate arrived at that date remains unclear. It simply entered the institutional memory of the library.

By 1976, the physical manuscript had been moved to the Jerusalem Patriarchate Library, into the section devoted to holdings brought from the monastery of Mar Saba. Before that, it had belonged to the monks there. The abbot, Seraphim, later recognized as a saint in the Greek Orthodox Church, initially refused to release it. He agreed only because he was promised that it would be returned. But that promise was not kept. Those involved in the removal appear to have known that the manuscript was never going back. It had been “rescued” from the desert monastery out of fear that outsiders might steal it.

That fear of outsiders shaped everything that followed. The manuscript was almost never shown to non-Greeks. The one major exception was Quentin Quesnell. Otherwise, direct examination seems to have been reserved for ordained members of the Greek Orthodox Church. The document continued to fascinate officials in Jerusalem. The teacher of both the current General Secretary and the present Patriarch, Theophilos, reportedly referred to the Letter to Theodore as a “holy text.”

The official story is that the manuscript is now “lost.” But “lost” may not be the right word. It may simply have been withdrawn from the eyes of foreigners, who were always viewed with suspicion. One former Jerusalem librarian explained the attitude well: the great treasures of the monastic libraries had been stolen in the past, and many had later surfaced in Western collections. The librarians saw themselves as guardians of the sacred possessions of the Church, protecting them with whatever strength they had.

Against this background, the idea that these guardians were unknowingly protecting a forgery planted by an American university professor is, frankly, absurd. Yet this is where the modern debate often went. It reveals a colonial assumption at the heart of the discussion: that Western scholars, rather than the manuscript’s actual custodians, were the only people capable of understanding what the Greeks possessed.

This brings us to another abused word: “forgery.”

In the Secret Mark debate, “forgery” is often used as though it means only one thing. It does not. There is a difference between a forged hand, a false attribution, a literary imitation, and a modern hoax. To say that the Letter to Theodore is not by Clement is one claim. To say that someone imitated Clement’s style is another. To say that the handwriting itself is a modern counterfeit is still another. And to say that Morton Smith personally produced and planted the manuscript is a far more extreme claim.

Much of the debate has failed because these distinctions were blurred. The handwriting of the Letter to Theodore is not “forged” merely because the text contains Clementine vocabulary. The presence of Clementine diction, even in unusual concentration, might be relevant to the question of authorship, but it is not evidence that the physical hand is a modern imitation. The claim that Clement’s style has been imitated is a literary argument. The claim that the script itself is a modern counterfeit is a paleographical argument. The claim that Morton Smith planted the text is a conspiracy theory. These are not the same thing.

Quentin Quesnell could not read the handwriting of the Letter to Theodore when he decided, in 1975, that it was a forgery. He had no authority to determine whether the script was genuine eighteenth-century Greek handwriting or a modern imitation. What he had instead was suspicion. And although he was careful not to state his theory fully in public, his private notes allow us to reconstruct its general shape. In Quesnell’s imagination, Morton Smith had orchestrated a hoax, perhaps with some shadowy connection to the great classicist Arthur Darby Nock, as an act of contempt toward the New Testament scholarly community.

Quesnell did not present this as a formal argument. His “proof” was largely an interpretation of the dedication in one of Smith’s books: “To the One Who Knows.” Smith and Landau, working from the Smith College archive and from Quesnell’s original 1975 paper, confirm the same basic conclusion. Quesnell believed that the dedication in Smith’s academic volume, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, and the dedication of Smith’s popular book to Arthur Darby Nock were clues. They were, in his mind, hints deliberately left behind by Smith for someone like Quesnell to decode.

Smith and Landau argue that Quesnell was privately entertaining a conspiracy theory as early as 1975. I think they are right, though they only scratch the surface. Quesnell must have known that Nock had once entertained the possibility of a homosexual Paul. Smith’s own suggestion of a homoerotic dimension in the Secret Gospel was more muted than his critics often implied, but it was there, especially in his translation of the Greek, where Nock’s influence was significant. How Quesnell moved from that fact to the idea of a homosexual conspiracy is harder to explain.

The dedication to Nock itself was not mysterious. Arthur Darby Nock, a lifelong bachelor and one of the great historians of religion of the twentieth century, died in January 1963. Smith completed the first draft of Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark about six months later. The dedication was almost certainly an act of homage. There was nothing sinister about it.

Morton Smith’s close friend Levon Avoyan, apparently the only person to whom Smith spoke openly about his homosexuality, offered a much simpler explanation of the phrase “To the One Who Knows.” Avoyan understood it as a slightly mystical admission of uncertainty. Smith himself was not claiming final knowledge. He did not even necessarily “believe” all of his own theories with perfect confidence. He remained uncertain down to the day the book went to press. In that sense, the dedication was almost playful: only some hidden, ideal knower could finally resolve the matter.

This explains why Smith consulted so many experts. He did not know. He wanted help. He tested possibilities. He asked questions. He lived with uncertainty.

And this brings us back to the point made in the previous chapter: Quesnell’s suspicion may have developed from disappointment with his former idol. Quesnell had come out of a dogmatic world in which a religious order claimed to possess answers. It may have been impossible for him to imagine that someone as brilliant as Morton Smith could need so much help, or could present a theory while still remaining uncertain about it. Into that void, Quesnell poured suspicion.

He could not read the handwriting. He did not have the expertise to decide whether the manuscript was authentic, imitated, or modern. Indeed, as Thomas Derr, Quesnell’s colleague at Smith College, later recalled in Smith and Landau’s book, Quesnell did not really believe that Smith’s discovery existed at all. That explains how he could travel all the way to Jerusalem without first doing serious background work on eighteenth-century Greek handwriting. He boarded the plane expecting to find nothing.

The more extreme things Derr remembered Quesnell saying at Smith College—that Smith was involved in a homosexual plot to undermine Christianity—echo the story later told by George Dragas, who remembered Quesnell shouting similar warnings when he entered the Patriarchal Library in 1983.

How do we square this image of Quesnell with the public image of the liberal former Jesuit who followed his feminist Catholic wife, Jean Higgins, to Smith College?

Perhaps the answer is simpler than it first appears. Quesnell may not have left Marquette willingly. He would likely have preferred to remain where he had grown up, near his dying mother and his brothers. He certainly loved Jean, and he may sincerely have supported aspects of her feminist agenda. But he seems to have kept his fixation on homosexuality hidden from her.

His 1983 letters to Jean show how carefully he managed the story. His dramatic confrontation in Jerusalem became, in his letter home, a calm report: “I got into the Patriarchate this morning, talked to the officials and to the librarian. I’ve been promised the ms. for Monday morning.” His evening with David Flusser, which appears to have included a harsh discussion of Smith, was recast as “a long conversation with ... an enormously learned old man ... who is also absolutely convinced that Smith engineered the whole thing.”

Jean Higgins likely had no idea how deeply Smith’s homosexuality shaped Quesnell’s campaign against him. She worked alongside Smith College president Jill Ker Conway to make the college more accepting of homosexuality. Quesnell’s private notes and his letters to his wife tell two different stories. In the letters, he presented himself as a sober investigator. In the notes, a more troubled and personal fixation appears.

Smith and Landau are right to point out that Quesnell’s earliest published response to Smith reveals far more than his later academic article. His first publication on the discovery was not the 1975 article in Catholic Biblical Quarterly. It was a short review of Smith’s Secret Gospel in the National Catholic Reporter on November 30, 1973. There, Quesnell was not primarily concerned with handwriting, provenance, or scholarly method. He was animated by the sexual implications of Smith’s interpretation.

He opened with a sarcastic riff on the young man who fled naked from Gethsemane in Mark 14:51. What was he doing there? Was he swimming? Sleepwalking? Camping? Was he a lover? An exhibitionist? Quesnell then mocked Smith’s suggestion that the youth might have been involved in an all-night initiation rite. The anxiety is obvious. For Quesnell, the problem was not merely whether the Letter to Theodore was ancient. The problem was what Smith’s reading appeared to imply about Jesus.

This was the deeper issue. Jesus was not gay. The disciples would never have believed such a thing. Clement of Alexandria, a Church Father, would never have preserved such a tradition. Therefore, for Quesnell, the text had to be false.

So where did the idea of a gay Jesus come from? This is where the imagined conspiracy with Nock begins to make “sense,” in the limited way that conspiracies ever make sense. It would have been unbecoming for a serious scholar to indulge such theories publicly, and Quesnell must have known this, since he never spelled out the theory in print. But he seems to have revealed fragments of it to anyone who showed sustained interest.

In his notes, Quesnell acknowledged the uneven reception of his 1975 article. He wrote that some scholars approved of it, even enthusiastically—among them Paul Achtemeier, Bruce Metzger, John McKenzie, Werner Kümmel, Joseph Fitzmyer, and, much later, Martin Hengel, Jacob Neusner, and David Flusser. But he also conceded that it was not always clear whether their approval extended to everything he affirmed or privately believed. That qualification matters. Scholars may have welcomed a challenge to Smith’s claims without endorsing Quesnell’s deeper suspicions.

It is also worth noting that later lines of attack are already present in Quesnell’s notes. Pre-publication versions of early 2000s papers by Peter Jeffery and Stephen Carlson appear there. Whether by coincidence or direct influence, many of the arguments Quesnell initiated in 1983 resurfaced years later in published form. One of the most important was the idea that the Letter to Theodore’s strong resemblance to Clement’s style might have been artificially produced by using Otto Stählin’s compendium of Clementine vocabulary and phrases, published in 1936. The Smith College archive preserves Quesnell’s own attempts to reconstruct the Letter to Theodore from Clementine phraseology.

Later scholars, including Eric Osborn and Andrew Criddle, developed these observations into the argument that the Letter to Theodore is “too Clementine to be Clement.” But this is precisely where the misuse of “forgery” becomes most evident. A text can look unusually Clementine without proving that it is a modern forgery. It might be a short letter written in Clement’s own epistolary idiom. It might be a later ancient composition imitating Clement. It might be a medieval or early modern pseudo-Clementine text. Or it might be modern. The stylistic observation alone does not decide the question.

Enrico Tuccinardi made this point forcefully in 2020. He did not deny that Criddle had identified a real anomaly. The Letter to Theodore does appear unusually saturated with Clementine language. But Tuccinardi argued that Criddle overinterpreted this anomaly. The analysis was not decisive evidence against Clementine authorship, much less sure evidence of forgery. Criddle’s method, Tuccinardi noted, had already proved unreliable when applied to other authorship problems. The difficulty is especially acute because the Mar Saba letter is so short. With a tiny text, the relationship between unused words, rare words, and hapax legomena becomes unstable. One cannot build a secure verdict of forgery on such a fragile statistical base.

Tuccinardi’s most devastating point was also the simplest: we possess no corpus of genuine Clementine correspondence against which the Letter to Theodore can be fairly compared. We have Clement’s treatises, but not a body of Clement’s private letters. Without comparable Clementine letters, or at least further samples of Clement’s epistolary style, it is extremely difficult—perhaps impossible—to use the letter’s stylistic anomaly as proof that it is spurious.

In plain terms, Tuccinardi’s conclusion was this: Criddle noticed something interesting, then asked that observation to carry more weight than it could bear. The Letter to Theodore may be hyper-Clementine. That might fit a forger. But it might also fit a short letter written in a distinctive Clementine register, or a later ancient author imitating Clement. The evidence does not justify the confident leap from “this style is unusual” to “this is a modern forgery.”

Other notable scholars followed a similar path. Craig Evans highlighted, at most, curious parallels to a 1940 Canadian novel set at Mar Saba. Peter Jeffery pointed to alleged allusions to Wilde’s Salome in the Letter to Theodore. Jonathan Klawans and others found it difficult to believe that a Church Father such as Clement would urge Theodore to lie. Bart Ehrman speculated about the use of the Voss edition of Ignatius as the physical setting for the inscription, if the letter were a forgery. Francis Watson insisted that suspicion of Morton Smith’s involvement was “beyond suspicion,” arguing that the mystery gospel of Mark resembled pastiche gospels referenced by Clement’s contemporary Irenaeus. Other theories have invoked Aleister Crowley, Morton Smith’s supposed bad character, and similar biographical or literary associations.

What is most notable about these attempts to fulfill the “promise” of Quesnell’s 1975 article is not their individual strength, but the willingness of so many distinguished scholars to enter the arena. None of these suggestions, taken by itself or in combination with the others, convincingly establishes “inauthenticity”—whether that means that Clement did not write the letter, that the text was not copied in the eighteenth century, or that Morton Smith forged and planted it. They all develop from Quesnell’s initial suggestion that Morton Smith was one of the greatest scholars of his generation and therefore capable of almost anything associated with the letter. But this premise is deeply flawed. Smith was brilliant, but he was not omnipotent. He was no more capable of doing everything required by the forgery hypothesis than any of the scholars who later imagined that he had.

This is why we have spent so much time examining Quesnell’s role rather than treating each subsequent suspicion as an independent breakthrough. The field never advanced very far beyond Quesnell. Stephen Carlson, for instance, merely reorganized bits and pieces of Quesnell’s suspicions into a more comprehensive argument. Carlson was, in many ways, a more capable advocate of the same basic notions. It remains unclear whether Quesnell alerted Carlson to the existence of the high-resolution images of the Letter to Theodore manuscript that he had arranged for the Jerusalem librarian to photograph in 1983. Carlson’s decision to rely on lower-resolution images in order to fulfill the promise of detecting “tremors” in the handwriting is only one example of the problem.

But Carlson’s most revealing inheritance from Quesnell may be his interest in the idea that Smith was engaged in producing a “hoax,” even leaving “clues” throughout his discovery in order to be caught. This seemingly silly idea was transferred directly from Quesnell to Carlson, though in my personal correspondence with Carlson, when I asked whether Quesnell had influenced The Gospel Hoax, he was careful in his reply:

“Again, I am reluctant to discuss private correspondence or conversations. At any rate, my book documents the source for my discussion on the ‘one who knows’ on p. 129 n. 20: ‘Noticed by Quesnell, “Mar Saba Clementine,” 66: “Who is “the one who knows”? What does he know?”’ Also, a careful reader of my book may notice that I did not affirmatively assert or claim that Nock is the ‘one who knows.’ When I wrote the book, I just thought it was part of the mystification and didn’t have to mean anything, though since then I’ve become rather partial to Jeffery’s view that ‘the one who knows’ is none other than Smith himself, or perhaps anyone who gets the joke.”

This is true as far as it goes. Carlson nowhere develops the specific homosexual conspiracy theory that Quesnell favored, even though Morton Smith’s homosexuality is a foundational element in both Carlson’s and Jeffery’s later works. But these later hoax hypotheses all share the same structure: Morton Smith not only forged the Letter to Theodore but left clues behind to be discovered—the bald forger, Morton Salt, “the one who knows,” and the rest. This structure did not arise naturally from the 1958 discovery. No reasonable scholar would have arrived at this scenario independently, let alone repeatedly, unless the idea had first been suggested by Quesnell in 1975. In other words, the later Da Vinci Code style of argumentation, developed in the age of Dan Brown, had already been established in the Secret Mark debate by Quentin Quesnell.

If these ideas are not native to the 1958 discovery, where did they come from? This is where the original published suggestion involving Arthur Darby Nock and “the one who knows” becomes so important. If Morton Smith’s lifelong bachelorhood led Quesnell to assume the Columbia professor’s homosexuality, the same may have been true of Nock. What if the other half of the conspiracy theory generated the idea of coded references?

It is striking that at least one other scholar claimed to have found homosexuality in the early Church by uncovering clues in Nock’s writings. The Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong long attributed his “discovery” of St. Paul’s alleged homosexuality to Arthur Darby Nock. Spong noted that the possibility of Paul being homosexual was raised as a question in Nock’s 1937 book on Paul. “I was absolutely floored by how it opened up Paul to me,” he said. But a review of Nock’s St. Paul reveals no explicit statement of this idea. If Spong was right, the suggestion must have been encoded in precisely the manner Quesnell later attributed to the Letter to Theodore.

The first step for both Spong and Quesnell was the same: Nock had to be imagined as speaking obliquely. Writing in the 1930s, the idea of a homosexual Paul could not be stated openly. It would have to be veiled. Nock asks, “How could Paul hold the Law to have failed?” and then makes a striking turn toward sexual desire. The point of difficulty for Paul, he suggests, may have lain in sexual desire, of which Paul speaks. Those who observed the Law were as conscious as other men of moral struggle, especially the struggle against sins of impurity in act and thought. These sins, and many others, were explained as due to an “evil instinct” implanted in man.

But did Judaism ever specifically identify heterosexual desire as sinful in this way? Could Paul have so interpreted it? Didn't the first lines of Genesis identify the command "be fruitful and multiply" as a blessing? The natural way of interpreting Jewish exegesis would be to exclude heterosexual desire from other kinds of sexual desire. And this is exactly what Nock does. But not an overt manner. He strangely sprinkles his most insightful or at least interesting observations regarding sex, Torah observance and Paul's preference for asceticism in the very manner hoax hypothesis proponents 

Nock then directs the reader to follow the argument much later in the book. This “evil impulse” was not thought to be wholly bad, since it led to life, marriage, children, and riches. Nor was it irresistible, since the study of the Law and the performance of charity were believed to counter it. It was said that God would suppress it in those who “nibbled it away.” While asceticism was foreign to Judaism in general, Jewish students were advised to be austere, and Jewish saints are described as leading ascetic lives. Nevertheless, Jewish sources do not associate the “evil impulse” with the flesh. They set it in the mind and will. Paul, by contrast, Hellenizes it.

The works of the flesh include sins that go beyond the physical realm: idolatry, enmities, jealousy, rivalry, divisions, factions. Paul’s implicit moral code develops along the line of works of the flesh and fruits of the Spirit. Paul never abandoned his belief that the Spirit was the sole ultimate criterion, and that virtues were a natural flowering of the Spirit in human lives. But through this classification he was able to incorporate into his own scheme the familiar lists of virtues and vices.

Then Paul turns to questions raised in a letter from the community. The first was whether a man should have sexual relations with his wife. The question may have arisen partly because of expectations of the Coming, but also perhaps because of the idea, present in some pagan circles, that abstinence had occult value. Paul replies by expressing the personal conviction that abstinence is ideal, while emphasizing that concession is better than sin and that either party must satisfy the other’s needs if they are felt. So too with the unmarried and widows: it is good for them to remain as Paul, but better to marry than to be consumed with desire.

In all this, as in his approximation to a new ethical code, we see Paul’s common sense and practical judgment. As for divorce, a woman is not to leave her husband; if she does, she is to remain unmarried or be reconciled. A husband is not to divorce his wife. Here Paul gives the Lord’s command. But when dealing with a Christian married to an unbelieving partner, Paul gives a personal direction for which he does not claim the Lord’s authority: the Christian is not to leave the unbelieving spouse. If the partner departs, so be it; otherwise, the marriage remains.

This leads to a new doctrine, preparing us for Paul’s desire “to depart and be with Christ,” which he says is far better. The passage of the Christian to the promised life is now seen from the standpoint of the individual. The transformation once expected as a public accompaniment of Christ’s appearance begins now as a gradual and continuous process. Death is followed not by sleep in Christ, but by union with him. The bodily existence of the present is conceived as burdensome and confining. The result has definite affinities with Hellenistic personal mysticism, which had already found its way into Jewish circles. The Book of Wisdom, which Paul knew, sometimes displays a Greek hostility to the body and represents the soul after death as dwelling with God.

What matters here is not whether Spong was right about Paul. The point is that Nock could be read, by a certain kind of reader, as communicating more than he explicitly said. Quesnell seems to have read Smith and Nock in precisely this way. The clues were never simply clues. They were the imagined traces of a hidden world: bachelor scholars, sexual secrecy, private knowledge, esoteric jokes, and a text that seemed to imply the unthinkable about Jesus. Once that interpretive machine was switched on, almost anything could be made to fit.

That is the central confusion. “Forgery” became a way of collapsing different problems into one emotionally satisfying accusation. But the questions must be kept separate. Is the handwriting modern? Is the manuscript what it appears to be physically? Is the attribution to Clement correct? Is the language artificially Clementine? Is the embedded gospel material ancient, secondary, or modern? Each question requires a different kind of evidence.

Quesnell began with suspicion and then searched for arguments to justify it. Later critics refined some of those arguments, sometimes with far greater sophistication. But the original psychological structure remained: Smith’s discovery seemed impossible because it implied something intolerable. The handwriting was secondary. The manuscript was secondary. Even Clement was secondary. The real scandal was the possibility that an ancient Christian text could preserve a tradition that disturbed modern assumptions about Jesus, secrecy, initiation, and sexuality.

That is why the word “authenticity” became so unstable in this debate. It was never only about whether Clement wrote the letter. It was about who had the authority to decide what Christianity could have contained, what ancient manuscripts could be allowed to say, and what kinds of evidence Western scholars were willing to see.