Agamemnon Tselikas’ Handwriting Analysis Report Did Morton Smith Forge "Secret Mark"?

[Secret Alias]

Well perhaps with that analogy yes. But I wrote:

Do I think that Mark Goodacre would forge a text to prove Q didn't exist? No I would never believe that. I would attack anyone who suggested such a proposition with almost the same vigor I have defended Morton Smith.

I stand by that. I think Goodacre is a brilliant scholar. Brilliant people don't have to lie or forge texts. I firmly believe that the noble through shame alone keep themselves from committing evil. I think Morton Smith would be too ashamed to do what they say he did. I think Mark Goodacre has a similar noble disposition. When you put so much time and effort into your reputation it's hard to believe someone would give that all away without being blackmailed or bankrupt. I don't get why some people would say that only one of these great scholars is a moral upright person.

[JoeWallack]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUUB96c6EpY

Agamemnon Tselikas’ Handwriting Analysis Report
Did Morton Smith Forge "Secret Mark"?

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/dai ... is-report/

In his extensive multi-part report, Tselikas explains that the handwriting of the Clement letter doesn’t match that of any other scribe at Mar Saba monastery, where the manuscript was discovered by Morton Smith, and in fact indicates forgery or imitation of 18th-century Greek script. Monastery records show that the book was not in its collection as of 1923, and due to strict supervision in the library, the letter could not have been copied into the book after 1923, so it must have been copied elsewhere and brought to the Mar Saba library later. Tselikas concludes that Smith’s opportunity and motive make him the most likely suspect and that Smith probably forged the letter or had someone else do it for him before bringing the book to Mar Saba.

Agamemnon Tselikas’ Summary:
Based on extensive report I sent you on the letter of St. Clement I expose here a summary of my remarks.

I noticed several grammatical errors in the text which we can divide into two categories: Those which are due to the “author” and those which are due to the copyist. The first category concerns syntactic and meaning errors, which St. Clement would not be possible to make. The second category concerns the wrong dictation of some words. This phenomenon is frequent in the Byzantine and post Byzantine manuscripts and we can not give particular importance. However, if the scribe generally appears as an experienced and very careful, some of these mistakes show that he had not sufficient knowledge of the language.

The main palaeographical observation is 1) that a big number of lines of the letters and links are not continuous, fact which means that the hand of the scribe was not moving spontaneously, but carefully and tentatively to maintain the correct shape of the letter. 2) That there are some completely foreign or strange and irregular forms that do not belong to the generally traditional way and rule of Greek writing.

Most convincing is that the edition of Ignatius with the letter already written by Morton Smith or by someone else was placed in the library by Morton Smith himself.

Once we prove that the handwriting of the letter is alien to the genuine and traditional Greek, we can accept that it is an imitation of an older script.

A comparison of the handwriting of the Greek letters of Morton Smith with the handwriting of Clement’s letter can not give significant evidence that Morton Smith is the scribe, and this because as imitation, certainly the scribe of the letter would not use his own personal style. Nevertheless, some factors point to Morton Smith. My conclusion is that the letter is product of a forgery and all the evidences suggest that the forger can not be other person than Morton Smith or some other person under his orders. Morton Smith was able to do it. He had the model (the described manuscripts), the appropriate and famous place for the discovery (St. Sabba Monastery), the reason (to become known and significant).

JW:
So AT compared the handwriting to everyone except the only person he should have compared it to, MS, and concluded that a letter which claims to have been written about 2,000 years ago and was relatively recently discovered must have been copied.

Yes , Morton Smith had motivation to publish what he found, but not to forge it. The motivation is people with religious beliefs trying to discredit MS. And regarding the approval of male bonding, so to speak, the odds are exponentially better that there was at least one gay monk at Mar Saba than MS was gay.

The Gospel Hoax Hoax lacks a professional methodology and the conclusion is not supported by the evidence presented. A definite conclusion needs witness evidence and the only witness evidence here is a first hand expert witness who spent a lifetime evidencing innocence, MS.

For the credentialed who gave Carlson positive feedback before he ruined his new career, wouldn't you have been a better friend by pointing out the problems with his book?


Joseph

The New Porphyry

[Ken Olson]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUUB96c6EpY

Agamemnon Tselikas’ Handwriting Analysis Report
Did Morton Smith Forge "Secret Mark"?

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/dai ... is-report/

In his extensive multi-part report, Tselikas explains that the handwriting of the Clement letter doesn’t match that of any other scribe at Mar Saba monastery, where the manuscript was discovered by Morton Smith, and in fact indicates forgery or imitation of 18th-century Greek script. Monastery records show that the book was not in its collection as of 1923, and due to strict supervision in the library, the letter could not have been copied into the book after 1923, so it must have been copied elsewhere and brought to the Mar Saba library later. Tselikas concludes that Smith’s opportunity and motive make him the most likely suspect and that Smith probably forged the letter or had someone else do it for him before bringing the book to Mar Saba.

Agamemnon Tselikas’ Summary:
Based on extensive report I sent you on the letter of St. Clement I expose here a summary of my remarks.

I noticed several grammatical errors in the text which we can divide into two categories: Those which are due to the “author” and those which are due to the copyist. The first category concerns syntactic and meaning errors, which St. Clement would not be possible to make. The second category concerns the wrong dictation of some words. This phenomenon is frequent in the Byzantine and post Byzantine manuscripts and we can not give particular importance. However, if the scribe generally appears as an experienced and very careful, some of these mistakes show that he had not sufficient knowledge of the language.

The main palaeographical observation is 1) that a big number of lines of the letters and links are not continuous, fact which means that the hand of the scribe was not moving spontaneously, but carefully and tentatively to maintain the correct shape of the letter. 2) That there are some completely foreign or strange and irregular forms that do not belong to the generally traditional way and rule of Greek writing.

Most convincing is that the edition of Ignatius with the letter already written by Morton Smith or by someone else was placed in the library by Morton Smith himself.

Once we prove that the handwriting of the letter is alien to the genuine and traditional Greek, we can accept that it is an imitation of an older script.

A comparison of the handwriting of the Greek letters of Morton Smith with the handwriting of Clement’s letter can not give significant evidence that Morton Smith is the scribe, and this because as imitation, certainly the scribe of the letter would not use his own personal style. Nevertheless, some factors point to Morton Smith. My conclusion is that the letter is product of a forgery and all the evidences suggest that the forger can not be other person than Morton Smith or some other person under his orders. Morton Smith was able to do it. He had the model (the described manuscripts), the appropriate and famous place for the discovery (St. Sabba Monastery), the reason (to become known and significant).

JW:
So AT compared the handwriting to everyone except the only person he should have compared it to, MS, and concluded that a letter which claims to have been written about 2,000 years ago and was relatively recently discovered must have been copied.

Yes , Morton Smith had motivation to publish what he found, but not to forge it. The motivation is people with religious beliefs trying to discredit MS. And regarding the approval of male bonding, so to speak, the odds are exponentially better that there was at least one gay monk at Mar Saba than MS was gay.

The Gospel Hoax Hoax lacks a professional methodology and the conclusion is not supported by the evidence presented. A definite conclusion needs witness evidence and the only witness evidence here is a first hand expert witness who spent a lifetime evidencing innocence, MS.

For the credentialed who gave Carlson positive feedback before he ruined his new career, wouldn't you have been a better friend by pointing out the problems with his book?


Joseph

The New Porphyry

Joe,

My point in posting this was not that Tselikas proved that Morton Smith forged it. I certainly accept he does not prove that.

My point is that Tselikas examined the Letter to Theodore an concluded it was not copied by an 18th century scribe, but by someone trying to imitate the hand of an 18th century scribe. (It's copied into a book printed in 1646 - no one was arguing it goes back earlier than that).

I was making the point that, despite the fact that Tselikas is indeed an expert in Greek paleography, his opinion is disputable. Indeed, some have disputed it and argued that it is indeed written in an 18th century hand.

Best,

Ken

[JoeWallack]

Joe,

My point in posting this was not that Tselikas proved that Morton Smith forged it. I certainly accept he does not prove that.

My point is that Tselikas examined the Letter to Theodore an concluded it was not copied by an 18th century scribe, but by someone trying to imitate the hand of an 18th century scribe. (It's copied into a book printed in 1646 - no one was arguing it goes back earlier than that).

I was making the point that, despite the fact that Tselikas is indeed an expert in Greek paleography, his opinion is disputable. Indeed, some have disputed it and argued that it is indeed written in an 18th century hand.

Best,

Ken

JW:
Well you did highlight the part about AT's conclusion that MS was the forger but in light of PK's New Neil Godfree inspired rule to always give the benefit of the doubt, maybe your source was a used book that already had the yellow highlights. Seriously, regarding what Ken Olson meant, I always accept that Ken Olson is the best interpreter of what Ken Olson meant, alive or dead, just as I accept that MS was the best interpreter of what MS meant.

While I've got you on the line, I consider you to be the best poster here, after KK (meant as a compliment). Us uncredentialed types really appreciate your contributions.


Joseph

[Secret Alias]

So your argument is that since the pilot of an airplane might make a mistake once and a while airlines shouldn't prefer pilots with more expertise or more familiarity with flying certain types of aircraft.

[Secret Alias]

I am going to start to share what experts on the Byzantine period say about Tselikas. Emails randomly found in my email server:

1. September 14, 2014

Dear Mr Huller,

I do not know anyone who specializes in hands of this period, except Mr Tselikas.


All best wishes,


Ch. D.


Charalambos Dendrinos

Senior Lecturer in Byzantine Literature

and Greek Palaeography

Director

Hellenic Institute

Royal Holloway

University of London

Egham

Surrey TW20 0EX, UK

[Secret Alias]

2. Even though Tselikas is the authority in handwriting from this period. I see that this is first of all a quite thorny theological problem,
>>> and since I am not a theologian but only a philologist (neohellenist)
>>> I cannot help you in all matters you deal with.
>>> Anyway, my impression is different of A. Tselikas' one, since I cannot
>>> find visible signs of a forgery. The ms. pages I saw seem to me a 17th
>>> c. ms, and all these signs that puzzle you have nothing to do with
>>> much later abbreviations of words like Κος, Κου (= nominative and
>>> genitive of κύριος = Mister/Monsieur).
>>>
>>> So, I think this is the end of my contribution to your interesting
>>> research. I wish you every success.
>>>
>>> Have a Happy New Year, good health, and stay safe!
>>>
>>> G.

[Peter Kirby]

I recently had occasion to quote Walter Stephens, to the effect that the presentation of a forgery requires its author to distance himself by taking another role, that of sponsor:

A third-stage pseudonym entails the transfer of authorship to a historical personage, one whose name is usually known to the intended audience. In many cases, a third-stage pseudonym is the marker of texts reviled as forgeries. ...

Obviously, the attribution must be made by someone. This some-one, this attributor, can be referred to as the sponsor. The sponsor is the mirror-reversed image of the third-stage pseudonym. As we shall see below, it (or “he”) denies authorial responsibility by transferring it elsewhere, and assuming the pose of textual mediator. That is, the sponsor cannot present the text to the reader as the work of someone else without implicitly or explicitly presenting himself as non-author in the same act. The sponsor “espouses” the text, as it were, as not consanguineous to himself, and falsely professes a non-incestuous relation to it.

in "Complex Pseudonymity: Annius of Viterbo’s Multiple Persona Disorder" (pp. 690-691), MLN 126 (2011): 689–708.

Walter Stephens distinguishes between two kinds of forgery (p. 691):

In the first place, we should distinguish between two forms of forgery, the literary and the diplomatic. Literary forgery is conventionally defined as the creation and deliberate misattribution of texts, whereas diplomatic forgery performs the same operations on physical documents. Literary and diplomatic forgery frequently occur together, as, for example, in a putative holograph letter of Shakespeare.

In the case of the Mar Saba letter, it can be considered whether it is (a) a genuine letter of Clement, (b) a literary forgery at any point after Clement up until it was written by an authentic hand of around the 18th century, or (c) both a literary forgery and a diplomatic forgery. Because they involve different competencies, then, for (c), the literary forger and the diplomatic forger could be the same person or two different people working together.

Stephens describes the role of a sponsor in presenting data claimed in favor of the attribution, defending the integrity of the chain of custody, and gathering authoritative witnesses to these assertions (p. 692):

In literary as in diplomatic forgery, attribution is paramount—if not to a historical personage, then to a fairly specific time and place. Attribution is the work of the sponsor, as noted above, but the sponsor must also recite whatever data he claims to have found about the authority of the witnesses to authorship and the integrity of the chain of custody—who has supposedly handled the document or scrutinized the text? To switch metaphors, the sponsor is an advocate, behaving as if presenting forensic evidence in a court of law. While he might be unable to guarantee that a document is a genuine letter by Shakespeare, he might hope to and authoritative witnesses to his assertion that it was copied (say) from an autograph letter destroyed in a fire at a London bookseller’s in April, 1823.

In a literary forgery, the sponsor can and does use multiple masks:

But because writing exists to overcome absence, the sponsor of a literary forgery does not ineluctably have to be a flesh-and-blood, gendered human: it may be nothing more than a paratextual “voice.” Just as the “hand” as a combination of graphic traits is paramount to the success of a diplomatic forgery, so the voice defnes literary forgery by leaving aresidue of grammatical and rhetorical traits in paratextual enunciations, leading to the differentiation between a mediatory “I” and the“I” of the putative author. This operation creates a narrator, whose relation to the text provides a model for the intended reader. The paratextual voice is so important that at times even an anonymous voice can sponsor a text effectively to its intended readers. The sponsor may appear in various guises vis-à-vis the text: discoverer, editor, translator, or commentator (including an adversarial one). All these functions presume a more fundamental role as transcriber. In whatever guise the sponsor appears, “he” is nothing more than the textual representation of a second, mediating voice.

Inherent to the task is, first and foremost, a need to identify oneself as someone other than the author:

The counterfeiter’s most urgent task is the identification of a non-author. This task logically precedes what we normally define as his only preoccupation, the attribution of the work to an author: ‘he did’ presupposes ‘I did not.’

Because of these various masks and because of the requisite earnestness of a sponsor-forger in identifying as someone other than the author, the opportunity is there to argue that the sponsor was not himself the forger but rather "the dupe of a previous forger" (p. 695):

However, between 1500 and 1750, only a few defenders argued that Annius’s texts were genuine: it was simply too easy to demonstrate their falsity by using the evidence of philology and literary criticism. Human intentions are another matter, and are inextricable from discussions of empirical authors. So Nanni could be defended as the dupe of a previous forger—at least, if readers overlooked the extreme coordination among the components of the macrotext that “Annius” claimed to be editing.

The forgery here was too ambitious relative to the capabilities of the forger:

But by creating such a complicated stratification of authorship, Annius inevitably exceeded his capacity to coordinate his pseudonymous texts with the extant fragments of their namesakes.

Agreeing with the observation that a forger intent on success may decide to create their forgery with an eye to parsimony, not developing very much beyond what is required to achieve the literary objectives of the forgery and to secure its claim to authenticity.

In his time, however, he was a man of some learning in the fields of Etruscan history and epigraphy, and he was also responsible for finding and publishing several authentic inscriptions:

In the Antiquities, Annius took credit for elaborate commentaries on these inscriptions, as well as on the eleven literary and historiographic texts. Ironically, Annius was a not inconsiderable epigraphist who discovered several authentic inscriptions, and made genuine revelations about the Etruscan language and alphabet. He has been called—without undue irony—the founder of Etruscology, and his commentaries on forged inscriptions have been characterized as the first treatise on epigraphy.

The creation of literary "secondary sponsors" from which the material is received is part of the forgery:

These are secondary sponsors, from whom Annius claims he acquired the texts of his pseudo-authors. Annius would object to this division of labor: he would claim the title of secondary sponsor for himself, while “modestly” attributing primary sponsorship to thesetwo pasteboard figures, neither of whom even has a textual “voice.”They are little more than bare names. Yet they serve a vital function. In no case does Annius assert that he personally discovered the original texts of his pseudo-authors, nor that he translated their texts. In fact, he implicitly denies both discovery and translation. Instead, he creates the two secondary sponsors, one remote in time, and the other from a distant country. Annius says that “William of Mantua” was a scholarly contemporary of Dante, while “Master George,” an Armenian, was Annius’s own acquaintance. Annius asserts that during a sojourn inMantua, he discovered “the Collectanea of a certain Magister William of Mantua,” which the scholar had put together about 1315, contain-ing the texts of authors named Xenophon, Fabius Pictor, Myrsilus,Cato, Antoninus, Sempronius, Archilochus, Metasthenes and Philo. A certain Master George, one of two visiting Armenian Dominicans, allegedly presented the texts of two other pseudo-authors, “Berosus Chaldæus” and “Manetho of Egypt,” to Annius, during the time the latter was Prior of a Genoese monastery.

These intermediaries allow too-probing questions about the supposed original texts to be deflected:

Whatever historical realities—if any—may lie behind William of Mantua and Master George the Armenian, their rhetorical function within the Antiquities is to serve as a kind of firewall, blocking readers’ access to the putative (and certainly fictitious) original versions of the eleven texts.

Creating this outline of a supposed chain of custody for these texts:

The total stratification of the Antiquities thus takes this form: as primary sponsor, Annius presents the twelve ancient texts (including the sole genuine one of Propertius) and the inscriptions to the reader by means of his commentaries and his assembly of the macrotext. Annius’s labors are dependent upon those of at least three secondary sponsors, the fourteenth-century William of Mantua, Annius’s contemporary George of Armenia, and Corsetto, the inscription-discoverer. Along with Annius, the three secondary sponsors mediate the reader’s experience of the texts, and he leaves hints concerning other secondary mediators, such as whoever translated the non-Latin texts.

The complexity of the literary forgery makes it easy to form incorrect conceptions about the text's goals:

Owing to its complex stratification and multifarious historical references, the Antiquities has been spectacularly misinterpreted even by readers who shared its objectives, from 1500until very recent times. It is an object lesson in the dangers of hasty or partial reading. As such, the Antiquities provides a limit-case that abundantly illustrates the theoretical implications of literary forgery.

Where the correct understanding of the text's goals is the one that perceives that the sponsor is the forger, and the various masks created in the process of the forgery are part of its craft.

In the case of the Mar Saba letter, there are ostensibly several different voices or hands:

(a) the author of a secret gospel of Mark
(b) Clement, the author of a letter to Theodore
(c) an anonymous copyist in the last pages of a book
(d) someone finding the book in a library

Similar questions can be asked of the Mar Saba letter regarding literary forgery of (a) and (b), diplomatic forgery of (c), and what relationship the sponsor has to all of this.

[Peter Kirby]

While I've got you on the line, I consider you to be the best poster here, after KK (meant as a compliment).

I somehow never make these lists of cool posters.

[Secret Alias]

Another thing that I don't get about this Duke University theory. Smith is a completely closet homosexual who guards his "real" sexual identity with an iron wall. What better way of keeping your secret safe than by forging a document where you let slip out that Jesus is gay? He's this complete genius can supposedly master Greek fluency, Byzantine handwriting, smuggling books, duping experts you consult with. But he's just so dense he can't foresee that by writing this "gay gospel" that his "gay secret" he's been zealously hiding is going to be revealed. Curses. Foiled again!

It's like being smart enough to take enough university course to build a nuclear bomb, buy all the uranium and yellow cake only to tell the clerk when he asks what you're planning to do with all this "build a bomb!"