Timo S. PAANANEN Final pre-press version: Originally pub- University of Helsinki, Finland lished in Apocrypha 26, (2015): 261–297 Roger VIKLUND (with some stylistic changes, mainly in the notes.) Sävar, Sweden AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MANUSCRIPT: CONTROL OF THE SCRIBAL HAND IN CLEMENT’S LETTER TO THEODORE * This article discusses Morton Smith’s role as a self-professed manuscript hunter in uncovering the only known copy of Clement’s Letter to Theodore, and critically assesses the existing studies on its handwriting. We argue that Stephen C. Carlson’s analysis is flawed due to its dependence on distorted images, that Agamemnon Tselikas’s study has a number of problems due to the unsuitability of applying standard palaeographic practices to a case of suspected deception, and that Venetia Anastasopoulou has made a sustainable case by arguing that Smith could not have imitated the difficult eighteenth-century script—a qualitative verdict strengthened by our quantitative study of the lack of signs of control. We conclude that the handwriting is indistinguishable from authentic eighteenth-century handwriting. Cet article discute le rôle de Morton Smith comme dénicheur de manuscrits en raison de sa découverte de la seule copie de la Lettre de Clément à Théodore, et évalue critiquement les études paléographiques menées sur cette copie. Nous estimones que l’analyse de Stephen C. Carlson est hypothéquée par la confiance excessive que ce paléographe accorde à des photographies médiocres, que l’étude d’Agamemnon Tselikas présente l’inconvénient de ne pas appliquer les critères paléographiques usuels dans le cas de faux, et que Venetia Anastasopoulou a produit une étude solide, à nos yeux, en argumentant que Smith ne pouvait pas avoir imité l’écriture difficile du XVIII e siècle – un verdict qualitatif renforcé par notre étude quantitative sur l’absence de signes de contrôle. Nous parvenons à la conclusion que l’écriture du manuscript ne peut être distinguée d’une écriture authentique du XVIII e siècle. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––– * We wish to thank Scott G. Brown, Allan J. Pantuck, and David Blocker for their extensive criticism and helpful suggestions. 2 TIMO S. PAANANEN – ROGER VIKLUND [262] Morton Smith (1915–1991) took three sets of photographs of Clement’s Letter to Theodore, and left the original document in the tower library of the monastery of Mar Saba. He could not take the document with him since it was the property of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate.1 This statement is worth making, because it cuts to the heart of the pervasive myth that the late Columbia professor of ancient history behaved deviously in the way he presented this document to his peers. As a recent commentator noted, an “academic folklore” has grown up around this topic, which has been handed down from scholar to scholar “like an esoteric tradition.”2 This folklore includes the charge that Smith failed to secure access to the manuscript so that other scholars could corroborate his findings.3 This in turn has been used to support the suspicion that Smith himself forged the text.4 Following the death of Smith in 1991, these voices have become increasingly insistent, and the folklore has become increasingly ingenious.5 Instead of passing on this academic hearsay, we have opted for an introductory statement that is most likely to be true and will allow us to place Smith’s actions in a more defensible framework. This will be discussed in more detail below. With such doubts in the air, some scholars have taken a suspicious stance towards anything connected with the manuscript of this Clementine letter. The interplay between the developing folklore and the known facts has allowed even the standard, mundane practices of modern academic manuscript hunters to be presented as evidence of foul play. Consider, for instance, how Smith’s addition of his name and a number (#65) to the front of the printed book in which this manuscript was written (a standard cataloguing procedure) has been used to argue that the book actually 1 Morton SMITH, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 13. 2 Scott G. BROWN, “Factualizing the Folklore: Stephen Carlson’s Case against Morton Smith,” HTR 99 (2006): 291–327, at 291. 3 Quentin QUESNELL, “The Mar Saba Clementine: A Question of Evidence,” CBQ 37 (1975): 48–67, at 49–50. Smith and many others interpreted Quesnell’s criticisms in this article as insinuations that Smith had created the letter himself. Cf. Scott G. BROWN, Mark’s Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith’s Controversial Discovery (ESCJ 15; Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005), 12, 35–36, 73. 4 E.g. Jacob NEUSNER, Are There Really Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels? A Refutation of Morton Smith (SFSHJ 80; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 29; Donald Harman AKENSON, Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 85. 5 BROWN, “Factualizing the Folklore,” 291–293. CLEMENT’S LETTER TO THEODORE 3 belonged to Smith;6 or how Smith’s “sudden [263] mood swing from ‘worst expectations’ to ‘walking on air’” when he came across the letter has been used to “raise doubts about his truthfulness” and to profile him as evincing a personality disorder;7 or how Smith has been suspected to have been working as a secret agent for the United Kingdom or the United States, rather than having been genuinely interested in the (monastic) libraries for antiquarian reasons.8 In recent years, some scholars have also presumed that Smith was so devious as to conceal cryptic clues in both the manuscript and his writings about it that disclose his identity as the true author of the letter.9 An endeavour to put Smith and his practices into proper context has barely begun, for scholars have only recently begun to delve into Smith’s archival remains.10 There is 6 When interviewed by Lee Strobel, Craig A. Evans said that he found it strange that “Smith 65” was penned on the front of the book containing the Clementine letter, since you would not write in books “if you were a guest in somebody’s library”; Lee STROBEL, The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), 50–51. 7 Peter JEFFERY, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 10, 243; based on Jeffery’s writings and the discovery story of the manuscript in SMITH, Secret Gospel, 10–11, 18, 93, Donald Capps even ventured to make a diagnosis: Smith suffered from narcissistic personality disorder; Donald CAPPS, “The Diagnostic Question” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the SBL, New Orleans, November 21, 2009). 8 Charles W. HEDRICK, “Appendix: Interview with Agamemnon Tselikas,” in Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate: Proceedings from the 2011 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium (ed. Tony Burke; Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2013): 60–66, at 61, 64–66 (#4, #25, #32). 9 E.g. Stephen C. CARLSON, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2005), 33, 42–47, 58–64; Francis WATSON, “Beyond Suspicion: On the Authorship of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark,” JTS 61 (2010): 128–170, at 152–155. 10 Guy G. STROUMSA, “Comments on Charles Hedrick’s Article: A Testimony,” JECS 11 (2003): 147–153; Allan. J. PANTUCK and Scott G. BROWN, “Morton Smith as M. Madiotes: Stephen Carlson’s Attribution of Secret Mark to a Bald Swindler,” JSHJ 6 (2008): 106–125; Morton Smith and Gershom Scholem, Correspondence 1945–1982 (ed. Guy G. STROUMSA; Leiden: Brill, 2008); Allan J. PANTUCK, “Response to Agamemnon Tselikas on Morton Smith and the Manuscripts from Cephalonia,” BAR 37 (2011), accessed October 3, 2015, http://dbcfaa79b34c8f5dfffa-7d3a62c63519b1618047ef2108473a39.r81.cf2.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uplo ads/secret-mark-handwriting-response-pantuck-2.pdf; Allan J. PANTUCK, “Solving the Mysterion of Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark,” BAR 37 (2011), accessed October 3, 2015, http://dbcfaa79b34c8f5dfffa-7d3a62c63519b1618047ef2108473a39.r81.cf2.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uplo ads/secret-mark-handwriting-response-pantuck.pdf; JEFFERY, Unveiled, 1–14, 149–184 offers the most comprehensive biographical treatment of Smith to date including his career as a manuscript hunter, but it exhibits hostility towards its subject. For the latter point, consult Scott G. BROWN, “An essay review of Peter Jeffery, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical 4 TIMO S. PAANANEN – ROGER VIKLUND no doubt that Smith was a [264] self-professed “manuscript hunter.”11 Historically, the birth of this noble profession has been traced to the Italian Renaissance, when the good Humanists of Florence and other cities of Northern Italy began to piece together the Forgery,” RBL (2007), accessed October 3, 2015, http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/5627_5944.pdf. It should be noted that the publication of Smith’s letters in Correspondence (ed. STROUMSA) has invited divergent interpretations from scholars. Stroumsa argues in his introduction that the letters evidence how Smith “developed his own view on the nature of Jesus’ rituals” based on the Clementine letter (Guy G. STROUMSA, “Introduction,” in Morton Smith and Gershom Scholem, Correspondence 1945–1982 (ed. Guy G. STROUMSA; Leiden: Brill, 2008), vii–xxiv, at xiv), and that they also show the “evolution” (STROUMSA, “Introduction,” xvi) and “gestation of his interpretation” (STROUMSA, “Introduction,” xvii). We agree that, in Stroumsa’s words, this “strongly points to the total trustworthiness of Smith’s account of his important discovery” (STROUMSA, “Introduction,” xxi). However, Pierluigi Piovanelli has contested Stroumsa with an alternative interpretation. Piovanelli believes that the correspondence shows how “Smith was exposed to Scholem’s … theories about Jewish mysticism … and started thinking about the historical Jesus as a truly Jewish messiah à la Sabbatai Tzevi”, and–in a precarious situation with his career–“realiz[ed] that, in order to make a stronger proposal about the historical Jesus as a miracle worker/magician, he was in need of more consistent proof.” In Piovanelli’s interpretation, thereafter, Smith would have manufactured an “extremely sophisticated forgery … as a tool for promoting ideas that existed beforehand in his own head”; Pierluigi PIOVANELLI, “Halfway Between Sabbatai Tzevi and Aleister Crowley: Morton Smith’s ‘Own Concept of What Jesus “Must” Have Been’ and, Once Again, the Questions of Evidence and Motive,” in Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate: Proceedings from the 2011 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium (ed. Tony Burke; Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2013): 157–183, at 180–181. One example of his interpretative choices, cited in both his French and English articles on the correspondence, is the emphasis put on Smith’s statement in his letter to Gershom Scholem, dated October 6, 1962 (#76), in which Smith claims to “have the evidence” for his views on the historical Jesus, as an indication of Smith having manufactured that very evidence; Pierluigi PIOVANELLI, “Une certaine ‘Keckheit, Kühnheit und Grandiosität’ . . . La correspondance entre Morton Smith et Gershom Scholem (1945–1982): Notes critiques,” RHR 228 (2011) 403–429, at 413; PIOVANELLI, “Halfway,” 171–172; citing Correspondence, 132– 133. Yet the contents of Clement’s Letter to Theodore function as “evidence” just as well whether Smith manufactured or genuinely discovered the manuscript (as long as the potential spuriousness remains undiscovered), i.e. Smith’s certainty for having the “evidence” remains the same in both cases. The unavoidable ambiguousness for assessing motives lies at the heart of Piovanelli’s interpretation, or as he himself notes, “Une telle reconstruction, basée sur une lecture aussi honnête et “sans malice” que possible des lettres de Smith et Scholem, est, selon la formule consacrée, sinon vraie, du moins vraisemblable”; PIOVANELLI, “Keckheit,” 423. We will return to the topic of motive in the Epilogue. 11 SMITH, Secret Gospel, 8. CLEMENT’S LETTER TO THEODORE 5 “lost knowledge” of the classical world.12 The prevalent [265] attitude of the times held that “the rightful” owners were “too ignorant to be worthy of” the documents they might have in their possession.13 For centuries afterwards, it was the primary goal of the manuscript hunter to locate and secure ancient documents, and to bring them back to “safety” (i.e. into the realm of the “civilized” Western world). As contemporary travelogues demonstrate, this behaviour of the Western adventurers had changed the Eastern attitudes toward them by the mid-nineteenth century, and made the book guardians unwilling to part with their treasures “on any terms whatever.”14 Technological innovation in the form of the camera brought forth a new paradigm for manuscript hunting. Leo Deuel attributes the shift to Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson at the turn of the twentieth century, when the two Semitic scholars let go of the desire to possess the manuscripts they wanted to study. The new breed of manuscript hunters wanted first and foremost to make previously unknown manuscripts available to the scholarly community. The libraries and archives, whether monastic or secular, could continue to tend to their priceless documents. The visiting academics were content on making catalogues and photographing the manuscripts for the purpose of further study.15 At this point, it is time to consider where Smith fits into all of this. At the turn of the 1950s, he was profoundly interested in manuscripts related to Isidore of Pelusium.16 Having done charity work for the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem,17 Smith received letters of introduction to present at the monasteries. Between 1951 and 1952, he visited a number of private, public, and monastic libraries and succeeded in his effort to locate “all the major Isidore-related manuscripts in western Europe.”18 Armed 12 Jocelyn HUNT, The Renaissance: Questions and Analysis in History (London: Routledge, 1999), 17–19. For an alternative narrative of the Renaissance-induced manuscript hunting in relation to Clement’s Letter to Theodore, see Charles W. HEDRICK, “Secret Mark: Moving on from Stalemate,” in Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate: Proceedings from the 2011 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium (ed. Tony Burke; Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2013): 30–66, at 39–41. 13 Leo DEUEL, Testaments of Time: The Search for Lost Manuscripts and Records (New York: Knopf, 1965), 21–22. 14 Henry Octavius COXE, Report to Her Majesty’s Government on the Greek Manuscripts Yet Remaining in Libraries of the Levant (London, 1858), 10–11. 15 DEUEL, Testaments of Time, 303–316. 16 Smith’s letter to Gershom Scholem, dated March 31, 1951, in Correspondence, 54–57 (#28). 17 Smith’s letter to Gershom Scholem, dated December 4, 1950, in Correspondence, 47–50 (#26). 18 PANTUCK, “Response to Agamemnon Tselikas,” 2–3. 6 TIMO S. PAANANEN – ROGER VIKLUND with a camera19 and publishing his notes on the manuscripts,20 Smith firmly belongs to the new manuscript [266] hunter archetype. On occasion, he also generously shared his findings with other scholars and encouraged them to publish them in his stead.21 Of the thousands of manuscripts that Smith encountered, photographed, and catalogued, only Clement’s Letter to Theodore has evoked demands that he make the item available to his colleagues, as if the possibility of forgery were somehow more pertinent to this particular manuscript, as if the monastic library Smith found it in were incapable of keeping it safe, and as if sans theft he would have had the opportunity to take it with him. We suspect that two reasons are responsible for the extraordinary reaction to this particular document. First, this Clementine letter contained quotations from a μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον (Theod. II.6, 12), allegedly composed by Mark (Smith called this text the Secret Gospel of Mark), which made it of interest not only to scholars of Clement but also to the larger field of Christian origins. Second, the theories about Jesus that Smith based on these quotations struck a nerve with his colleagues.22 Smith argued that this text revealed Jesus to be a magician who offered his disciples a mystery rite by which they were “possessed by Jesus’ spirit” and “participated by hallucination in Jesus’ ascent into the heavens.”23 What is more, on one occasion in each of his books on Clement’s Letter to Theodore Smith suggested that symbolism related to this union 19 Smith took some five thousand photographs of manuscripts in this one trip alone; STROUMSA, “Comments,” 150. See also Smith’s letter to Gershom Scholem, dated January 26, 1953, in Correspondence, 62–63 (#31). 20 Morton SMITH, “Σύμμεικτα: Notes on Collections of Manuscripts in Greece,” Ἐπετηρὶς Ἑταιρείας Βυζαντιῶν Σπουδῶν 26 (1956): 380–393. In Smith’s letter to Gershom Scholem, dated August 1, 1955, in Correspondence, 79–82 (#40), at 80, Smith notes that publishing catalogues of manuscripts is “a worthy cause” in itself. 21 PANTUCK and BROWN, “Madiotes,” 110. In a letter to H. Dörries, dated April 25, 1959, Smith wrote a detailed description of the location of a manuscript of Macarius he had encountered, enclosed photographs he had taken, and instructed the well-known Macarius scholar on how to gain access to the original. We wish to thank Pantuck for bringing this letter to our attention. 22 Cf. STROUMSA, “Introduction,” xiv: “The discovery itself seems to have deeply offended the religious sensibilities of many scholars, who could not conceive of such a picture of the Lord emerging from a credible ancient text.” 23 SMITH, Secret Gospel, 113–114; Morton SMITH, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 251; Morton SMITH, “Clement of Alexandria and Secret Mark: The Score at the End of the First Decade,” HTR 75 (1982): 449–461, at 455. CLEMENT’S LETTER TO THEODORE 7 could have gone as far as “physical union” between Jesus and the disciples.24 These are extraordinary ideas, and the reactions they provoked among scholars ranged from incredulity to indignation. [267] Smith narrated his discovery of Clement’s Letter to Theodore in his book The Secret Gospel.25 As part of an extended trip to the East encompassing libraries in Jordan, Israel, Turkey, and Greece,26 Smith entered the ancient monastery of Mar Saba in the summer of 1958 with permission from His Beatitude Benedict of Jerusalem. Under the supervision of a monk, Smith had access to the Mar Saba tower library, where he combed through the printed volumes for manuscripts that had been left behind when the majority of them had been transferred to Jerusalem in the latter half of the 1800s.27 At the end of his stay, he found a copy of a letter written on three of the end pages in a copy of Isaac Vossius’s 1646 edition of Ignatius’s letters, Epistulae genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris.28 From the title of the manuscript alone (“From the letters of the most holy 24 “Freedom from the law may have resulted in completion of the spiritual union by physical union”; SMITH, Secret Gospel, 114; “a baptism administered by Jesus to chosen disciples, singly, and by night. In this baptism the disciple was united with Jesus. The union may have been physical (… there is no telling how far symbolism went in Jesus’ rite), but the essential thing was that the disciple was possessed by Jesus’ spirit”; SMITH, Clement, 251. See also Shawn EYER, “The Strange Case of the Secret Gospel According to Mark: How Morton Smith’s Discovery of a Lost Letter of Clement of Alexandria Scandalized Biblical Scholarship,” Alexandria 3 (1995): 103–129 for the reception of Smith’s writings. 25 SMITH, Secret Gospel, 1–25. 26 PANTUCK and BROWN, “Madiotes,” 107 n. 1. 27 SMITH, Clement, ix. Agamemnon Tselikas offers three dates for major transfers of manuscripts: 1857, 1864, and 1887; Agamemnon TSELIKAS, “Agamemnon Tselikas’ Handwriting Analysis Report,” BAR 37 (2011): I–XV, at VI, accessed October 3, 2015, http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical- topics/bible-interpretation/agamemnon-tselikas-handwriting-analysis-report. An “Appendix: Summary Report of Agamemnon Tselikas” was published in Hershel SHANKS, “Was Morton Smith the Bernie Madoff of the Academy?” in Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate: Proceedings from the 2011 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium (ed. Tony Burke; Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2013): 135–144, at 142–144. The same summary is also published under the heading “Agamemnon Tselikas’ Summary” on the above BAR website. 28 Recently, Piovanelli has brought up the unique nature of the discovery of Clement’s Letter to Theodore, which he describes as “the only case in the history … in which an important text by a major [ancient] author would have been found copied at the end of a European book”; PIOVANELLI, “Halfway,” 160–161. Though we believe him to be technically correct, however, by adding qualifications such as “major” and “European” he has excluded many possible parallels. First, Smith himself noted that “many of the printed books [in the monastic library of Mar Saba] contained extensive handwritten passages”, and 8 TIMO S. PAANANEN – ROGER VIKLUND Clement, the author of the Stromateis. To The- [268] odore”) he could imagine the implications for Clementine scholarship. He made three sets of photographs of the letter and left it in the Mar Saba library.29 Was Smith’s faith in the ability of an Eastern library to safeguard a book warranted or not? After all—as Smith’s critics pointed out—the Mar Saba library let out books and manuscripts to “members of the order” without keeping records of their coming and going, had witnessed at least one major fire a century earlier, and had employed loose manuscript pages as binding material.30 In the case of the Clementine letter, however, the trust was well-placed—but only so far, as we are about to see. Eighteen years after Smith’s 1958 visit, Guy G. Stroumsa went to the monastery accompanied by three other scholars from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.31 They were able to locate Vossius’s book with its handwritten letter still intact, and bring it to the Patriarchal Library in Jerusalem. An analysis of the ink used to write the letter never happened though, since at the time only the Israeli police could perform such an analysis, and Archimandrite that, evidently, paper “had been in short supply at Mar Saba during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”; SMITH, Secret Gospel, 11. Second, as Hedrick has observed, “it is not unusual for the works of early authors to appear in manuscripts of a very late date and in a considerably different script from the original author’s time period,” citing for examples the works of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War (all the major manuscripts are from the tenth to fifteenth centuries), Polybius’s Histories (only extant manuscript from the eleventh century), the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (all the principal manuscripts are from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), and the Gospel of Peter (only extant manuscript from between the sixth and ninth centuries); HEDRICK, “Secret Mark,” 39–42. 29 Pantuck confirms that “Smith took three different sets of photographs of MS65 at Mar Saba, and only one and a half of these sets have been published,” and that they now reside at the Jewish Theological Seminary; personal communication. 30 QUESNELL, “Clementine,” 49–50. See also, NEUSNER, Tannaitic Parallels, 27–31. Recently, the lack of library control has been raised in PIOVANELLI, “Keckheit,” 423, and PIOVANELLI, “Halfway,” 161. Smith, however, gave no indication that anyone besides the monks inside the monastery could borrow books from the library; Morton SMITH, “Monasteries and Their Manuscripts,” Archaeology 13 (1960): 172–177. See also Allan J. PANTUCK, “A Question of Ability: What Did He Know and When Did He Know It? Further Excavations from the Morton Smith Archives,” in Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate: Proceedings from the 2011 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium (ed. Tony Burke; Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2013): 184–211, at 206. 31 The other three were David Flusser and Shlomo Pines, both professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Archimandrite Meliton from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, at the time a research student at the Hebrew University. CLEMENT’S LETTER TO THEODORE 9 Meliton from the Patriarchate would not hand the book over to them.32 In hindsight, the transfer of the Clementine letter would have been better left undone. Thomas Talley’s attempts to study the letter in 1980 were “frustrated,” for the librarian Kallistos Dourvas told him that the two folios of the manuscript had been removed from the book and were being repaired.33 A few years later, Per Beskow obtained permission from the Patriarch [269] to see the manuscript. When he came to the library in November 1984, however, he was denied access on the grounds that “the manuscript had been sprayed with insecticides”—a reason given six months earlier to his colleague Anders Hultgård as well (though Hultgård was trying to consult a different manuscript).34 Somewhat earlier, in June 1983, Quentin Quesnell had gained access to the letter. At that time, the manuscript was covered by removable plastic, and Quesnell had the opportunity to study it on more than one occasion for about two hours each time. Dourvas, the librarian, took the leaves to Photo Garo Studio in Jerusalem and had them photographed.35 Since the early 1980s, there have been no other sightings of the manuscript, despite numerous attempts to locate it.36 The most recent search by Agamemnon Tselikas turned up Vossius’s book, but failed to locate the pages with Clement’s letter.37 Rumours in the academy of the reasons for the manuscript’s disappearance and of its hiding place are too numerous to enumerate here. 32 STROUMSA, “Comments,” 147–148. For a more detailed narrative, consult STROUMSA, “Introduction,” xx–xxi. 33 Thomas J. TALLEY, “Liturgical Time in the Ancient Church: The State of Research,” Studia Liturgica 14 (1982): 34–51, at 41. 34 Personal communication; see also Per BESKOW, Fynd och fusk: Falsarier och mystifikationer omkring Jesus (Örebro: Libris, 2005), 147–148; Per BESKOW, “Modern Mystifications of Jesus,” in The Blackwell Companion to Jesus (ed. Delbert BURKETT; Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): 458–473, at 460. 35 Personal communication. After Quesnell’s death in 2012, materials related to his study of the letter, including the photos, shall be made available through the Smith College Archives. 36 Dourvas’ assurance that the manuscript was in the library until his resignation in 1990 seems uncertain, for it would require that he had actually checked its state shortly before he left; cf. Charles W. HEDRICK and Nikolaos OLYMPIOU, “Secret Mark: New Photographs, New Witnesses,” The Fourth R 13 (2000): 3–16, at 8–9; BROWN, Mark’s Other Gospel, 25. 37 TSELIKAS, “Handwriting Analysis Report”, III. 10 TIMO S. PAANANEN – ROGER VIKLUND Manuscript Access Control Up to this point, we have strived to place the manuscript hunting activities of Smith in their proper context, summarized the discovery story of Clement’s Letter to Theodore and described its transfer to Jerusalem and its subsequent disappearance. We consider these details important for two reasons. First, scholars have suggested that only the examination of the physical document can dissolve doubts about its authenticity.38 Second, controlling access to documents called into question plays a prominent feature of many cases of forgery, with the [270] perpetrator doing his best to hinder the attempts of others to study the item at close range.39 Therefore, an important question is, did Smith really try to control access to the manuscript of Clement’s Letter to Theodore? And if he did not, what are the implications? In light of the above discussion, we suggest he did not. Vossius’s book was left intact in the monastery of Mar Saba, but not because Smith wanted to hide it away from closer study.40 Rather, it was because photographing manuscripts and then leaving them undisturbed was the defining characteristic that differentiated the new manuscript hunters from their older, less scrupulous forbears.41 Though Smith devoted much space to the question of the text’s authenticity, he was preoccupied mainly with whether the letter was stylistically Clementine or not, a question for which 38 QUESNELL, “Clementine,” 49–50; Bart D. EHRMAN, “Response to Charles Hedrick’s Stalemate,” JECS 11 (2003): 155–163, at 159–160; David HENIGE, “Authorship Renounced: The “Found” Source in the Historical Record,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 41 (2009): 31–55, at 52 n. 44; David LANDRY, “Noncanonical Texts: The Da Vinci Code and Beyond,” WW 29 (2009): 367–379, at 374. 39 Regarding Clement’s Letter to Theodore this point has resurfaced recently by Henige: “[Smith] seemed remarkably indifferent … to the fact that his source was no longer available—all this as though personal reputation were a legitimate substitute for free and open access”; HENIGE, “Authorship Renounced,” 41. 40 Part of the academic folklore on Smith documented in BROWN, Mark’s Other Gospel, 25–26. 41 Cf. STROUMSA, “Introduction,” xx: “he did with [the manuscript] exactly what a scholar working in a library should do: photograph the text, publish a list of the documents analyzed, and put the book back on the shelf afterwards.” Cf. also Tony BURKE, “Introduction,” in Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate: Proceedings from the 2011 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium (ed. Tony BURKE; Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2013): 1–29, at 27: “Smith appears to have done what is expected of anyone in his position: he found an interesting manuscript, photographed it, cataloged it (adding his own reference number to the front page), left it where he found it, and returned home to publish his findings.”