Starting to Have Strong Doubts About Ariel Sabar's Timeline

[StephenGoranson]

The subject of my post was whether or not Clement wrote the Letter.
I you think it was, you're free to so say.
But, bridging from your off-point deflection, Morton Smith was a bit of a specialist in pseudepigrapha.
Hm.

[Secret Alias]

Deflection. The gay stuff is all a "deflection" because there is no evidence the text is a forgery modern or otherwise. Addressing your deflection. I think Morton Smith met Madjoucoff's father in Palestine who was a Greek Orthodox priest and other members of Atanas's family who were certainly English speaking Greek Orthdoox priests. I found Morton Smith's departure from New York in 1951. It says he was planning to stay for up to a year in Greece. He was not alone. There were many scholars on that boat and other boats. This wasn't a "gay cruise." Morton Smith was a serious scholar. I am certain that owing to his experience in the 1940s that he knew it would be invaluable for him to have a Greek speaking member of the Greek Orthodox community with him as he toured the monasteries of Greece. I know very few people on this board have experiences in foreign countries other than as tourists. I have been to at least 4 different continents were I needed translators (Brazil, Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia etc). Usually these translators are recommended by family members i.e. "I can't do it but my brother can." https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/upri ... 9-66/39799

Caption from album for a photo from 1938:

"I have employed a tutor for the evening hours (Basil Madjoucoff [his photograph appears in the album captioned 'The invaluable Basil']) and learn Arabic from him with almost humiliating difficulty. I think I’m beginning to improve and can now occasionally startle some particularly annoying yokel with some acid remarks in his native tongue."

In this case there is a very important piece of information from the obituary:

He (Atanas) put his talents to work as an interpreter for the British Army during the British mandate in Palestine. In 1948, he fled the war along with his mother, siblings and bother-in-law seeking refuge in Lebanon. His father remained in Jerusalem where he served the Orthodox church.

So Atanas in 1948 was living in a refugee camp in Lebanon. This is a very good motivation for anyone to want to emigrate to the United States. You don't need to add "barebacking" to the motivations for a son to want to help his family. Sheesh. His family all seemed to have come over to the United States. If people at this board had any experience with people who come from ancient cultures, taking care of their family is of paramount importance. Even if Atanas was a homosexual, and his immediate marriage, his subsequent brood of children, his devotion to Christianity all speak against this, he was certainly motivated to bring himself and his beloved family members out of a fucking refugee camp. Some other digression. Surely if Atanas's father couldn't leave Jerusalem because of the war of 1947 he couldn't leave to go off on some fucking scholarly fishing expedition with this bald American professor. So what did he do? He undoubtedly recommended his son. Was Morton Smith really thinking "hey Atanas has a nice ass I'd like to tap that" or, as I am certain, "this guy speaks Greek and English and is connected to the Greek Orthodox community he'd be perfect to bring to the monasteries of Greece. Can we stop being so obtuse for God's sake! When Quesnell needed to take photos of the manuscript in 1983 he went to the closest shop near the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate offices. In the same way Morton Smith went to the next best thing to getting a Greek Orthodox priest to accompany him on his journey of Greek monasteries - a Greek Orthodox priest's son. We know what he was doing in these monasteries because he told everyone in 1951. He was looking for manuscripts of certain Church Fathers. There is no reason to doubt this. So let's go back to our time line. Atanas undoubtedly took the boat from Lebanon to Piraeus thinking "hey this nice professor I met in Palestine when I was in my twenties and who is tied to a legitimate organization (the American School of Athens) is going to solve a big fucking problem in my life, the fact that my family's fortunes has complete gone down the tubes because of this war in 1947. Sex was not on his mind. Whatever the case Morton Smith went to Greece first and Atanas came later. The two men stayed at the American School in Athens. I can be almost 100% certain they were not fucking at the School (as it was called) nor in the monasteries they were visiting. I can't speak about the rugged paths that lead to the monastery but I doubt that very strongly. Atanas was only thinking about doing a good job to help out his family. 100% sure of that. They did their work in Greece and even though I can't find Morton Smith's name on the manifest I find dozens of names from the list of American professors staying at the American School in Athens, I am fairly certain that Sabar was accurate TO THE LETTER (not in spirit) about Morton Smith and Atanas being on the same ship back to America. I can't assure the dark thoughts of many here that "sex" was taking place between the two men on the ship. I do not think it was. Again let people's imagination be what it is. Atanas only had one thought on his mind, getting American citizenship to ultimately help out his family. I know this because my family were displaced people after WWII (DPs as they were called). Very familiar with this mindset. Again this was not a pleasure cruise. This was a profession setting. There were lots of scholars on the boat and Morton Smith and he were running into the same people they met at the School and were engaged in conversation nightly on scholarly topics. Atanas wanted only to make a good impression. The rest is made plain in his obituary.

Atanas immigrated to the USA in 1952 with sponsorship from his life-long friend Prof. Morton Smith, then professor of theology at Columbia University who he met in Jerusalem. Upon entry to this country, Atanas decided to change his last name from Madjoucoff to Salem to reflect the city of his birth. He soon moved to Providence, RI and acquired the nickname Tony.

Tony met his wife Lorice during church function at Saint Basil’s church in Central Falls, RI. They married in 1955, and resided in Lincoln, RI for almost 50 years where they raised their three children. He had many friends from his business, Salem Paint Company, which he started in the 1970’s. Tony also had many friends from the neighborhood, and church, Saint Basil the Great in Lincoln, RI.

There is no shame in being a homosexual. Atanas Madjoucoff was not a homosexual. It is shameful for people to suggest otherwise merely to suit a prefabricated agenda. It's shameful to drag innocent people into this web of resentment and lies that people try and construct.

[StephenGoranson]

Some, not all, of this, not for the first time, amounts to straw man arguments, i.e., pretending to refute things I did not write.
My work experience included some editing.
A publication can make mistakes, of course. The New York Times, for example, failed miserably in its reporting before the Iraq war. Ordinarily, though, a publication such as The Atlantic, and a skilled researcher and writer such as Sabar, have evidence for what was reported. Plus probably a review by a lawyer.
The matter of sex was raised by Morton Smith.
Again, recall what Theodor Gaster told Albert Baumgarten (published in the Elias Bickerman biography, 2010, page 209, last four words in bold type):
"Morton Smith is like a little boy whose goal in life is to write curse words all over the altar in church, and then get caught."

[Secret Alias]

So let's revisit Sabar's article and how it summarized Morton Smith's visit to Athens in 1951 - 52.

No less painful, perhaps, was that Smith’s washout at Brown separated him from his best friend. Atanas Todor Madjoucoff was a handsome Arabic interpreter, born in Palestine to Greek Orthodox parents. He and Smith had met in Jerusalem, apparently in the 1940s, and reunited in 1951, when Smith took a year’s research leave from Brown. Madjoucoff accompanied Smith to monastery libraries around Greece, and in August 1952, according to passenger manifests, they boarded the SS Excambion together, in Piraeus, for an 18-day voyage to Boston.

In Providence, Smith found Madjoucoff an apartment around the corner from his. But shortly after Brown told Smith that his time there was up, Madjoucoff changed his last name, married a woman he’d met through his church, and moved to the suburbs.

In the 1950s, nothing was going the way Smith wanted it to. He’d failed at the priesthood, and now he was failing at academia. Off campus, gay and lesbian people faced a brutal new wave of persecution, with President Dwight Eisenhower effectively banning them from government employment and a U.S. Senate subcommittee calling “homosexuals and other sex perverts” security risks who “must be treated as transgressors and dealt with accordingly.”

Smith floundered for three years before a job offer came from Columbia. It wasn’t in religion—the field he’d long aspired to join—but in ancient history. Smith accepted, and used his very first summer there, in 1958, to return to Mar Saba. He waited more than two years—until Columbia gave him tenure—to announce his “accidental discovery,” as he called it, of a surreptitiously gay Jesus.

After settling in New York, Smith paid regular visits to Rhode Island to see Madjoucoff. Their relationship was filled with private outings, personal confidences, and gifts to Madjoucoff’s children from a man they called “Uncle Morton.”

“There were secrets they kept among themselves,” Madjoucoff’s daughter told me, secrets her father didn’t even share with her mother. (“No one really knows” whether the men were lovers, she said; she and her eldest brother told me they had no evidence that their father was anything but straight.) Madjoucoff’s obituary (he died in 2019) called Smith his “lifelong friend.”

In the late 1970s, Smith had a brief relationship with an openly gay Columbia student. But not until after retirement did Smith attempt to come out.

Tell me what you want, Sabar wants Smith and Madjoucoff to have been lovers. It's essential for his piece. He couldn't find any documentable evidence of a homosexual relationship for his "Gospel of Jesus's wife" predecessor and so he pins all his "hopes" on Madjoucoff. Call me a little suspicious of how he portrays Atanas's family's attitude toward the possibility of their father being gay "they don't know." My guess is that their real answer was a lot closer to "No." I strongly doubt that they accepted taht their church going dad was having a romance with an American professor while his mother and brothers were living in squalor in a Lebanese refugee camp. But let's move on to the thing Sabar left out of his reporting.

1. Did Sabar mention even once that Atanas worked as a professional translator? Not once. Neither than the family operated as translators during the War.
2. Did Sabar mention that Atanas's father was a Greek Orthodox priest and thus Atanas would have professional connections and allow Smith unfettered access to the monasteries? No.
3. Did Sabar mention that Smith and Atanas time together was "supervised" by the American School of Athens and that the boat was they returned back to the United States on was filled with members of this scholarly organization. No.

But he happens to find time to mention how "handsome" he was and that Smith set him up like a mistress in an apartment. Funny his priorities. Sabar also gets the timeline wrong to for what happened after they returned (illustrated above). But let's also consider what Smith's need for a Greek translator reveals about his abilities in the Greek language. Smith famously could speak fluent Hebrew and demonstrated this in Palestine in the 1940s. Never needed a translator. But let's look at another forgery proponent's observations about this 1951 trip to Greece. Agamemnon Tselikas:

As Morton Smith says, in 1951 returned to Greece and visited libraries which are located in remote areas of Athens. In Cephalonia island the Monastery of Themata and St Gerasimos, in Dimitsana the Public Library, in Skiathos island the Monastery of the Annunciation and the private library of G. Rigas and, finally, the Zosimaia Library in Ioannina (Epirus). The purpose of his visit apparently was the study of manuscripts in Greek libraries bearing the hope of discovery of some unknown text. He visited the libraries for a few days, and speaks about the people who helped him with reccomendation letters. It is not known whether and how long remained in Athens, or if he studied manuscripts in the National Library. But curiosity causes the choice of these particular libraries at a time when the political situation in Greece was still not calm, and the public transport was not so easy. In 1982 when I visited the monastery of the Annunciation in Skiathos, normal road not existed, nor electicity, only an electric generator. In the same way difficult was the access to the Monastery of Themata at the same time. One may wonder, perhaps he was involved in some other type of civil service? It is unknown, however discutable.

and again in the interview I arranged between Hedrick and Tselikas:

4. Professor Tselikas checked [Smith’s publication] to see what kind of manuscripts Smith had been cataloguing [he referred me to the article by Smith “Notes on Collections of Manuscripts in Greece,” ΕΠΕΤΗΡΙΣ 1956: 380-93 in a section described as ΣΥΜΜΕΙΚΤΑ (miscellaneous); he pulled the volume off the shelf and photocopied a copy for me; in the article Smith records the manuscripts in which he was interested in monasteries at Cephalonia, Dimitsane, Skiathos, Ιερα Μονη του Ευαγγελισμου, the Library of the Rev. George Rigas, Εκκλησια των τριων ιεραρχων, Yannina; Tselikas himself has visited these monasteries]. Tselikas added that Smith has visited many monasteries and checked their libraries.

5. [Shortly before Smith made these visits to the monasteries in 1951-52, Greece had been involved in a civil war (1946-1949). The war was fought between the Greek governmental army, backed by the United Kingdom and the United States, against the Democratic Army of Greece, the military branch of the Greek Communist Party backed by Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania]. There were many secret agents from England[, the United States,] and other countries working throughout Greece [around this time]. Tselikas asks, was Smith involved in this activity as well [while on his visits to monasteries and libraries in Greece]? Tselikas himself was in Kefalonia in 1948 to make a list of monastic manuscripts.

24. It was not easy for Smith [to gain access] and to stay at the monasteries he visited throughout Greece. [Many of them are physically difficult to access because of their remote position]. Kefalonia, for example, had only a small difficult to find trail leading to the monastery.

25. The visits of Smith [the earliest I think in 1941] took place during the English administration of the area even before the state of Israel [1948] was created. One can ask if the young Morton Smith (I think he was about 33 years at this time) was so curious about the ascetic life style of the monk? He adds, someone must check his motivation for making this circle of monasteries and libraries. All travelers must have the permission of British and the federal government [Greek or U.S.?] It would have been easy for him to have passed along information about the Middle East because afterward was the war between Israel and the British (I think he means the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1947-48 culminating in the establishment of the Jewish State).

Clearly my experience in remote countries and regions tells me that Tselikas is asking how could Morton Smith have navigated through a region which didn't speak English. Atanas provides the clue. He had a Greek speaking translator. Since Atanas had survived the 1947 war in Israel he could survive the Greek civil war. He was like a war correspondent in terms of fearlessness (just like his father was described as "faithful" by the British army).

All this stuff about Morton Smith being a "spy" has crept up into Tselikas's mind because Tselikas has to assume that he was highly proficient in Greek to operate in these remote areas where no English was spoken. Not an unreasonable hypothesis given his familiarity with the remoteness. Nevertheless the presence of Atanas makes clear that he didn't need to be James Bond. He had a fearless translator. But this raises the final important question. Tselikas assumed that Smith might have had the ability in Greek to write a gospel fragment of Mark inside of a highly ornate and sophisticated Greek of Clement of Alexandria because he was a highly trained CIA operative who must have mastered Greek at a spy academy. But once we see that he didn't have any ability in speaking Greek and only wrote meaning correspondences to the Patriarchate in English and required the services of a Greek translator to navigate intercourse with every day Greek (which would only require a Berlitz level of Greek speaking ability) HOW THE FUCK TO WE IMAGINE THAT HE COULD WRITE AT THE LEVEL REQUIRED IN ANCIENT GREEK? It's absolutely crazy.

Tselikas basically says "all you non-Greek speakers can't tell that the letter to Theodore doesn't sound like ancient Greek because you don't speak modern Greek." That's the gist of his argument for forgery. So speaking modern Greek is a necessary gateway for understanding the nuances of ancient Greek. He says that the letter is riddled with anachronisms. I don't see it. AI doesn't see it. Other Greek speaking specialists I've consulted don't see it. But just on this point alone. Could Morton Smith as someone who couldn't speak basic Greek to Greek peasants. "Which way is it to ..." "Can we see this manuscript ..." and needed a translator. Really, this guy could write like Clement of Alexandria in his masterful prose? Give me a break.

The analogy is like this. Giuseppe's English has improved. But when he came to the forum for the first time. Could he have written a Shakespeare forgery. Even with a concordance of Shakespearian terminology and with the surviving works of Shakespeare. Could Giuseppe have pulled off the English compositional skills necessary to write a forgery of Shakespeare on let's say King Arthur. I say no.

[StephenGoranson]

Most of this is not relevant to the question that Sabar asked about the Letter: "Was it real?"

(Sabar wrote than A.M. went with him, presumably helpfully.)

Smith had a long time to compose the text and to put it into the Voss book, which, conveniently, showed no signs of ownership outside of Mar Saba, because, conveniently, the title page somehow went missing and the front cover and the spine binding went missing.

If you talk to people who knew him, a better question than "did he do it?" might be "was he capable of doing it?"

[Secret Alias]

You felt that honosexual innuendo was not the focus of the Sabar article. You're not even trying to be honest here. I counted 24 explicit references references to sex and perversion. He's clearly trying to hold up Atanas as Smith's gay lover. Please. Stop pretending. There is nothing else of value in the Sabar article other than that. It's a witches brew of perverted references. Carlson 2.0.

[StephenGoranson]

I have not written that Sabar did not go on about sex. Straw man stuff, again.

[Secret Alias]

I see you changed your original response. But the article does not provide any new evidence for the letter being a forgery. Instead it ends up cobbling together the worst things that Sabar could find about Morton Smith including the innuendo that Smith and this innocent translator (who is never referenced as such) Atanas Todor Madjoucoff was really Smith's gay lover. I will highlight things I see as being part of his smear campaign:

No less painful, perhaps, was that Smith’s washout (why this word?) at Brown separated him (=
reminds me of the old joke how do you separate the Greek men from the Greek boys? With a crowbar) from his best friend (he wasn't his best friend at that time he was Smith's fucking translator!!). Atanas Todor Madjoucoff was a handsome Arabic interpreter ("handsome" = trying to attribute to Morton Smith a homosexual interest when Tselikas clearly acknowledges he needed a command of the Greek language, his family were Greek Orthodox priests they could speak Greek) born in Palestine to Greek Orthodox parents. He and Smith had met in Jerusalem, apparently in the 1940s, and reunited in 1951 (I think it is more probable that Smith met Atanas's father and used his father as an interpreter and because Theodore was unable to leave Jerusalem he recommended his son, Sabar seems hazy about the facts too especially the dates) , when Smith took a year’s research leave from Brown. Madjoucoff accompanied Smith to monastery libraries around Greece (no mention whatsoever that they were being supervised or working under the guidance of the American School in Athens and that the two were residing with other scholars and interacting with countless other academics; why? because he wants to create the impression this was a secret lovers rendez-vous), and in August 1952, according to passenger manifests, they boarded the SS Excambion together, in Piraeus, for an 18-day voyage to Boston (no mention or no interest again of the number of academics also on this boat it's obvious from the manifest their academic credentials are listed on the manifest as well as their university affiliation).

In Providence, Smith found Madjoucoff an apartment around the corner from his (quite common I have done the same thing for people I sponsored but Sabar's word choice makes it seem as Smith was treating Madjoucoff as a Parisian mistress). But shortly after Brown told Smith that his time there was up, Madjoucoff changed his last name, married a woman he’d met through his church, and moved to the suburbs (the family website contradicts this saying that the name change happened immediately but Sabar's choice of wording ends up making it seem like he changed his identity to hide his "double life" as a homosexual with Smith "downtown" = the suburbs are for straight people).

(extended gay section follows to emphasize or contextualize the BS that this relationship was homosexual when it wasn't) In the 1950s, nothing was going the way Smith wanted it to. He’d failed at the priesthood, and now he was failing at academia. Off campus, gay and lesbian people faced a brutal new wave of persecution, with President Dwight Eisenhower effectively banning them from government employment and a U.S. Senate subcommittee calling “homosexuals and other sex perverts” security risks who “must be treated as transgressors and dealt with accordingly.”

Smith floundered for three years before a job offer came from Columbia. It wasn’t in religion—the field he’d long aspired to join—but in ancient history. Smith accepted, and used his very first summer there, in 1958, to return to Mar Saba. He waited more than two years—until Columbia gave him tenure—to announce his “accidental discovery,” as he called it, of a surreptitiously gay Jesus.

After settling in New York, Smith paid regular visits to Rhode Island to see Madjoucoff (again "regular" seems to be an exaggeration. Anything can be "regular" the San Andreas fault has "regulated" earthquakes. My guess is that "infrequent" is the more accurate term but it has already been modified after the whole section of gay history to mean "regular" like a boyfriend)Their relationship was filled with private (= when I go out with my performers I don't bring my wife because she can't stand hearing "mzungu (= white man) where is my money" all night, business is always "private" but again made to highlight or insinuate an ongoing homosexual relationship)outings (deliberate double entendre), personal confidences (again a deliberate sexualized gloss) , and gifts (again another trope) to Madjoucoff’s children from a man they called “Uncle Morton.”

“There were secrets they kept among themselves,” (I am sure this is a factual statement but my guess is that Sabar was just running the clock looking at his watch waiting for some statement that got picked up by his gaydar that could be used to put into the article) Madjoucoff’s daughter told me, secrets her father didn’t even share with her mother (going to strip clubs with my performers, commenting on this or that woman's matiti or matako are included in secrets I keep from my wife when I am out doing "private" business). (“No one really knows” whether the men were lovers, she said (again I think Sabar was waiting for any glimpse of "gold" like this, she probably said something like this or this but my guess is that there was hours of stuff he omitted that didn't fit his agenda); she and her eldest brother told me they had no evidence that their father was anything but straight.) Madjoucoff’s obituary (he died in 2019) called Smith his “lifelong friend.”
(he had to include this to "balance" the rest of the cherry picking but the damage is already done. He likely omits the full reference which suggests clearly that Smith used him to act as an intermediary with the Greek Orthodox monasteries "Atanas did well in school and had a knack for languages. He put his talents to work as an interpreter for the British Army during the British mandate in Palestine. In 1948, he fled the war along with his mother, siblings and bother-in-law seeking refuge in Lebanon. His father remained in Jerusalem where he served the Orthodox church. Atanas immigrated to the USA in 1952 with sponsorship from his life-long friend Prof. Morton Smith, then professor of theology at Columbia University who he met in Jerusalem. "
In the late 1970s, Smith had a brief relationship with an openly gay Columbia student. But not until after retirement did Smith attempt to come out.(the other bookend to contextualize the entire "discovery" of Morton Smith's name with a translator, the son of a Greek orthodox priest who acted as an intermediary with the Greek orthodox monasteries in 1952)

Do you think Sabar represented Morton Smith's relationship with Atanas Madjoucoff fairly? Do you think Madjoucoff's family are saying to themselves today "gee that was great that we spoke to that writer from the Atlantic to preserve a fair remembrance of our father's legacy? You're lying if you say yes to either of these questions. How would like your post-obituary to read like this?

Another thing Atanas and his wife were members of a Greek Melkite congregation where the liturgy was carried out in Greek. https://stgeorgemelkite.org/wp-content/ ... 7-Fall.pdf Given that his father was a Greek orthodox priest the odds are he could speak Greek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melkite_G ... lic_Church The obituary speaks about his language proficiency in the plural i.e. that he not only spoke Arabic but undoubtedly also Greek.

[Secret Alias]

I guess you feel Atanas is a necessary casualty in the war against Morton Smith.

[StephenGoranson]

Theodor Gaster. Remember him? Knew Smith well. His quote given to Al Baumgarten.

Though B. Landau and G. Smith--among others--made a good case that the Letter was after
Eusebius, though maybe, they thought, only within a few centuries after; but Prof. Derek Krueger offered that "no ancient stories defending the virtue of monk couples—none he knew of, anyway—took the guise of a lost gospel." Anomalous.

The quote from Anthony Grafton.

Smith's disappointments.

Research for possible forgery, except Smith's?