Why Does the Discovery (and the Rejection of) the Letter to Theodore Matter?
The ancients recognized the power of giving something a name. The Bible begins with God granting Adam the authority to “give names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field.” Among Jews and Christians, a name was not merely the arbitrary assignment of letters and sounds to a thing. It could represent an attunement to the very essence of the thing itself. In this sense, the decision, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to name Morton Smith’s discovery—a lost letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria and addressed to a certain Theodore—a “modern forgery,” almost certainly perpetrated by its discoverer, marked, I will argue, a dangerous turning point in the study of early Christianity.
Morton Smith was a towering figure in the historical study of the Bible in the late twentieth century. He also made many enemies. Yet there is, and always has been, no decisive evidence that the Letter to Theodore was forged by Smith or by anyone else. The decision to attach this unfortunate label to the text lays bare, in my opinion, the profoundly unscientific character of much of biblical scholarship. Judaism and Christianity are religions built around accepted collections of so-called “holy Scripture.” But what makes one collection of writings holy and another collection not holy is, at bottom, a matter of historical judgment, communal authority, and theological preference. The Letter to Theodore exposes the subjective nature of the historical process by which the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John came to be treated as the fixed and exclusive limit of authoritative testimony concerning the life of Jesus Christ.
No one doubts that alternative canons existed in the early history of Christianity. Yet it is often assumed that these other traditions were led by rabid “heretics” who rebelled against the supposedly self-evident authority of the greater Church out of vanity, resentment, or personal motivation. If scholars were to stumble across an early Marcionite canon, for example, many would expect to find a New Testament basically similar to our own, only with passages connecting Christianity to Judaism explicitly removed. Such a canon would be easy to explain within the familiar heresiological framework: Marcion, the arch-heretic, allowed his personal hostility toward Jews and Judaism to cloud his judgment, and therefore manipulated the “true canon” of Christianity to align with his own worldview.
The heresy associated with the Letter to Theodore is not so easily trivialized. The letter presents a deeper challenge to entrenched assumptions about the origins of Christianity, especially its Eurocentrism. In short, Clement of Alexandria appears to attest to an African context for the earliest formation of Christianity as a church. This possibility was recognized, in another form, by the patristic scholar Thomas Oden. With the Letter to Theodore, we encounter something like the inversion of the familiar myth of Marcion “reducing” Christianity to fit his personal convictions. If Clement of Alexandria wrote the text that has come down to us, then it testifies to the possibility that Africa was not a peripheral or derivative location in Christian history, but the original place where the religion of Jesus first became a church. The text does not explain how a figure like Marcion, or later Roman tradition, came to displace this understanding and make Rome the proper center of the faith. We are left to reconstruct that process ourselves.
What the Letter to Theodore does suggest—though we must read between the lines and fill many of the gaps with evidence from Clement’s contemporaries and predecessors—is that a struggle between Europe and Africa, between Rome and Alexandria, was already underway in the late second century. Long before Clement may have written his correspondence with Theodore, a pseudo-historical case had been developed for a Roman line of authority founded on the twin figures of Peter and Paul, a Christian counterpart to Romulus and Remus with respect to the secular empire. Within this framework, in which a line of bishops emerged in Rome from a church supposedly rooted in Jerusalem, the African tradition of Alexandria was increasingly cast as the home of heresy, the place from which “false forms” of Christianity were said to emerge.
I cannot prove that Clement of Alexandria had this exact historical framework in mind when he wrote to Theodore. Nevertheless, the fact that the letter fits so naturally within this anti-African agenda makes it, in my view, extremely unlikely that Morton Smith forged the discovery. Put simply, Smith tried to make the text conform to his own central interests, especially his understanding of Jesus as a magician. But the text does not actually fit that agenda very well. For this reason, Smith himself needed the input of others in order to make sense of it. The Letter to Theodore is nothing less than the earliest surviving testimony to the African origins of Christianity as a church, and Smith, shaped by the assumptions and prejudices of his own academic world, had little interest in understanding the text in that proper historical context.
Had a Black scholar of early Christianity been the one going through dusty books at the Mar Saba monastery in 1958, the proper historical significance of the Letter to Theodore might have been recognized much more quickly. This point returns us to my original claim about the profoundly unscientific nature of the study of early Christianity. There are as many Jesuses as there are scholars who have studied him, and each “Jesus” manufactured by these academics typically emerges from the mold of the scholar’s own experience. Jacob Neusner’s criticism of his former teacher hits the mark, at least when reinterpreted critically. Morton Smith’s “homosexual magician”—the interpretation he developed after years of consultation with his academic peers—was a clear distortion of what the text itself actually says.
I have presented the central findings of this study before the Society of Biblical Literature, the world’s leading professional association for academic biblical studies, whose members critically examine the Bible, early Judaism, early Christianity, ancient languages, archaeology, and the broader historical world of biblical literature. I have also presented related findings before smaller academic bodies in Europe, with substantially the same conclusions. My argument is that Morton Smith fundamentally misread his discovery. In a pattern not uncommon in the field, he personalized the evidence before him, interpreting it through the lens of his own interests and assumptions. Put simply, Smith made the text about homosexuality, even though homosexuality is nowhere explicitly present in the passage itself.
Rather than demonizing those who resisted Smith’s claims, I offer this explanation for the academic stalemate that emerged after his death. His contemporaries, I will contend, correctly sensed that something had gone wrong in his interpretation. But lacking the technical command of Greek textual traditions necessary to identify the precise nature of the error, they displaced the problem from hermeneutics to authorship. Instead of recognizing Smith’s reading as an interpretive failure, they accused him of forgery. The book that follows is my attempt to correct this original sin.
From the vantage point of 2027, there is no longer any credible evidence for forgery. The major claims have been answered, one by one, through the sustained efforts of scholars who have defended Morton Smith’s innocence. Yet I want to distinguish my own project from that apologetic effort. I do not think Morton Smith is “innocent” in any broader intellectual sense. Nor do I think he is above censure. His subjective misinterpretation and misrepresentation of his discovery deserve criticism. The fact that many others in academia may have done something similar does not excuse him. The real problem is not that Smith imposed a specifically “gay” agenda onto the text. The problem is that he carried any agenda at all into the interpretation of what was, in 1958, effectively a virgin text. He should have published the text, made high-resolution images of the manuscript freely available to all, and allowed the scholarly community to interpret the evidence without his controlling framework. Had he done so, almost eighty years of misrepresentation—much of it initiated by Smith himself—might have been avoided.
No one doubts that alternative canons existed in the early history of Christianity. Yet it is often assumed that these other traditions were led by rabid “heretics” who rebelled against the supposedly self-evident authority of the greater Church out of vanity, resentment, or personal motivation. If scholars were to stumble across an early Marcionite canon, for example, many would expect to find a New Testament basically similar to our own, only with passages connecting Christianity to Judaism explicitly removed. Such a canon would be easy to explain within the familiar heresiological framework: Marcion, the arch-heretic, allowed his personal hostility toward Jews and Judaism to cloud his judgment, and therefore manipulated the “true canon” of Christianity to align with his own worldview.
The heresy associated with the Letter to Theodore is not so easily trivialized. The letter presents a deeper challenge to entrenched assumptions about the origins of Christianity, especially its Eurocentrism. In short, Clement of Alexandria appears to attest to an African context for the earliest formation of Christianity as a church. This possibility was recognized, in another form, by the patristic scholar Thomas Oden. With the Letter to Theodore, we encounter something like the inversion of the familiar myth of Marcion “reducing” Christianity to fit his personal convictions. If Clement of Alexandria wrote the text that has come down to us, then it testifies to the possibility that Africa was not a peripheral or derivative location in Christian history, but the original place where the religion of Jesus first became a church. The text does not explain how a figure like Marcion, or later Roman tradition, came to displace this understanding and make Rome the proper center of the faith. We are left to reconstruct that process ourselves.
What the Letter to Theodore does suggest—though we must read between the lines and fill many of the gaps with evidence from Clement’s contemporaries and predecessors—is that a struggle between Europe and Africa, between Rome and Alexandria, was already underway in the late second century. Long before Clement may have written his correspondence with Theodore, a pseudo-historical case had been developed for a Roman line of authority founded on the twin figures of Peter and Paul, a Christian counterpart to Romulus and Remus with respect to the secular empire. Within this framework, in which a line of bishops emerged in Rome from a church supposedly rooted in Jerusalem, the African tradition of Alexandria was increasingly cast as the home of heresy, the place from which “false forms” of Christianity were said to emerge.
I cannot prove that Clement of Alexandria had this exact historical framework in mind when he wrote to Theodore. Nevertheless, the fact that the letter fits so naturally within this anti-African agenda makes it, in my view, extremely unlikely that Morton Smith forged the discovery. Put simply, Smith tried to make the text conform to his own central interests, especially his understanding of Jesus as a magician. But the text does not actually fit that agenda very well. For this reason, Smith himself needed the input of others in order to make sense of it. The Letter to Theodore is nothing less than the earliest surviving testimony to the African origins of Christianity as a church, and Smith, shaped by the assumptions and prejudices of his own academic world, had little interest in understanding the text in that proper historical context.
Had a Black scholar of early Christianity been the one going through dusty books at the Mar Saba monastery in 1958, the proper historical significance of the Letter to Theodore might have been recognized much more quickly. This point returns us to my original claim about the profoundly unscientific nature of the study of early Christianity. There are as many Jesuses as there are scholars who have studied him, and each “Jesus” manufactured by these academics typically emerges from the mold of the scholar’s own experience. Jacob Neusner’s criticism of his former teacher hits the mark, at least when reinterpreted critically. Morton Smith’s “homosexual magician”—the interpretation he developed after years of consultation with his academic peers—was a clear distortion of what the text itself actually says.
I have presented the central findings of this study before the Society of Biblical Literature, the world’s leading professional association for academic biblical studies, whose members critically examine the Bible, early Judaism, early Christianity, ancient languages, archaeology, and the broader historical world of biblical literature. I have also presented related findings before smaller academic bodies in Europe, with substantially the same conclusions. My argument is that Morton Smith fundamentally misread his discovery. In a pattern not uncommon in the field, he personalized the evidence before him, interpreting it through the lens of his own interests and assumptions. Put simply, Smith made the text about homosexuality, even though homosexuality is nowhere explicitly present in the passage itself.
Rather than demonizing those who resisted Smith’s claims, I offer this explanation for the academic stalemate that emerged after his death. His contemporaries, I will contend, correctly sensed that something had gone wrong in his interpretation. But lacking the technical command of Greek textual traditions necessary to identify the precise nature of the error, they displaced the problem from hermeneutics to authorship. Instead of recognizing Smith’s reading as an interpretive failure, they accused him of forgery. The book that follows is my attempt to correct this original sin.
From the vantage point of 2027, there is no longer any credible evidence for forgery. The major claims have been answered, one by one, through the sustained efforts of scholars who have defended Morton Smith’s innocence. Yet I want to distinguish my own project from that apologetic effort. I do not think Morton Smith is “innocent” in any broader intellectual sense. Nor do I think he is above censure. His subjective misinterpretation and misrepresentation of his discovery deserve criticism. The fact that many others in academia may have done something similar does not excuse him. The real problem is not that Smith imposed a specifically “gay” agenda onto the text. The problem is that he carried any agenda at all into the interpretation of what was, in 1958, effectively a virgin text. He should have published the text, made high-resolution images of the manuscript freely available to all, and allowed the scholarly community to interpret the evidence without his controlling framework. Had he done so, almost eighty years of misrepresentation—much of it initiated by Smith himself—might have been avoided.
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