Distinguishing some questions about the "Letter to Theodore"

[Secret Alias]

Just saying there are possibilities.

[StephenGoranson]

No.
(Optional: Have you ever spent a day in quiet?)

[StephenGoranson]

Do you write in archaic scripts?

[RandyHelzerman]

With regard to the question of whether Secret Mark was based on 18th-century handwriting found at Mar Saba, I think this quote from the wiki article is germane. Quesnell was trying to prove that the letter was a forgery, but every time he brought up some suspicious aspect of the handwriting, Dourvas was able to produce authentic exemplars of 18th-century handwritten Greek which exhibited that feature.

>>>>SALIENT POINT:<<<< Quesnell and Dourvas were *not* at Mar Saba when they were doing this. Somebody had the brilliant idea of removing the codex from the institution which had preserved it for centuries, and had it brought to Jerusalem.

So the defeating exemplars which Dourvas produced could not be characterized as idiosyncratic of the exemplars from Mar Saba. Everything which Quesnell found to be suss was matched by Dourvas--and from authentic exemplars *not* from Mar Saba.

The last line of the wiki quote, I think pretty much sums it up: " Eventually, he gave up his attempts and wrote that experts had to be consulted."

Yeah. Experts need to be consulted, and they need to see the actual Letter to Theodore from the actual codex. If we had the letter, we would be able to very quickly prove one way or the other. As long as we don't, the question must and shall remain open. That's just the hard, ugly truth of this dismal affair.

The scholarly community was unaware of Quesnell's visit until 2007 when Adela Yarbro Collins briefly mentioned that he was allowed to look at the manuscript in the early 1980s.[88][85] A couple of years after Quesnell's death in 2012, scholars were given access to the notes from his trip to Jerusalem.[89] They show that Quesnell at first was confident that he would be able to establish that the document was a forgery.[90] However, when he found something he thought was suspicious, Dourvas (who was confident that it was authentic 18th-century handwriting)[91] would present other 18th-century handwriting with similar characteristics.[90] Quesnell admitted that since "they're not all forgeries" it would not be as easy to prove that the text is a forgery as he had expected. Eventually, he gave up his attempts and wrote that experts had to be consulted.[92]

[StephenGoranson]

Wikipedia may not be the ultimate arbiter.

[Secret Alias]

Let's put it this way. That's the last entry in the "journal." He stopped recording his investigation. But he stayed on to June 19 or 20. He must have gone to Mar Saba. The indications are there. But Quesnell not mentioning to "broad scholarship" that he had the photos to everyone is really puzzling. I take it that he was still interested in somehow proving it was a forgery but deciding it couldn't be done or that it could only be done by a test that wasn't being allowed by the Patriarchate. Stalemate is probably a fair word for how he would characterize the situation holding the manuscript in his hand.

But look at someone like Goranson. There is no possibility of giving in. Like a Japanese soldier on a remote island the war goes on and on. I spoke to Quesnell many, many times while he was alive. He still thought it was a forgery. He had that "gut" feeling. Never left him. Just couldn't figure out how to prove it without the test.

[Secret Alias]

What I find puzzling is it's twenty six years since Morton Smith allegedly wrote the manuscript (in 1983). He doesn't say this explicitly. But I think he thought that a twenty five year old MS would look different than a two hundred and fifty year old manuscript. You know the ink the blots the freshness of the handwriting on the page. It didn't. Whether or not those expectations were well founded is another issue. But I have papers I wrote twenty five years ago. They look like they could have been written a year ago. Is the paper different? Are the conditions different in an arid climate? I don't know. But I preserved these papers. I've read them dozens upon dozens of times. He went there with no plan because he must have thought it would just "look different" than a two hundred year old MS because it was written twenty five years ago ... and then it didn't.

[Secret Alias]

There's a point on June 8th I believe in his letter to his wife, the last day of the journal where, he's obviously feeling "this ain't happening." The day before in the journal he's talking about detective stories and its all positive. By the 8th it's like not sure what to do.

[Secret Alias]

First Day Wednesday June 1

A.M Called Pontifical Biblical Institute. Talked to Director UM(?) Dalton. No room there until the 16th. Went to see him. Talked of project and prospects. He arranged room at White Sisters on Nablus Rd near Ecole Biblique and Orthodox Patriarchate but can't get in.

No one whose name I know is home and library is not open "aux étrangers."

Talked to M Arnand (Vatican representative for pilgrimages) he says just barge in on the Patriarchate and demand (ask) to "le secrétaire en chef." That's the only way to get results from them.

Second [written above the word 'First' which is crossed out] Day: Thursday June 2

A.M saw sec'y of [two scribbles] Chief Secretary
who sends to librarian: says it is up to him
Librarian (Charistos [in Greek letters]) says come back Monday from 8:30 to 11:30 am
see the ms. Sophia found it &
brought it from Mar Saba 10 years ago (c.)
Feels sure that it is 18th c. old
Says there were heretics, heretical schools
often at M.S. and this is fragment [sic] in part in part of a Hapousi (?)
to one of their books. He does not think it is from S. Clement. He remembers someone noting in some [monastic] publication that some did report seeing this in the 16th ? 17th ? century
He does not want others to come with me to work on the ms. He is not worried that the ms. is used for anti-Xtn [anti-Christian] propaganda.

[Marginal note] >> I must find find Flusser and Meliton <<

asked if there are other books with 18th c. notes written in. He says no, not here; perhaps at Mar Saba. I could go and look.

P.M. Called David Flusser. His name was in the book. Exciting conversation with this extraordinarily learned man. By "intuition" he perceived at once that the Clementine thing was a hoax or forgery (in the sense of my own later unpublished paper). So was it a hoax by Clement? Improbable.
So was it a Carpocratian forgery? But then it promoted homosexuality which is unknown - their doctrine called for salvation through union of the sexes. Was it 17th c forgery? (Texts from the Decameron have a monk teaching a woman the Pater Noster the whole night through! And homosexual Jesus is taught by Marlowe, among others. Perhaps.
So is it modern by Smith? Could be. Flusser i[s] as impressed, as I had been, by Smith laboring to [illegible] prominent names in approval of his own opinions. How strange - and unlike him usually.
Also with Smith's thesis that NT scholars don't know how to read a simple text.
Then he concluded - what if Smith is himself a homosexual? And he knows a woman who almost married Smith, but whom Smith finally refused to marry on the grounds that he - then a Protestant - could not marry a Catholic. Was this a cover-up? (All thru Flusser played Fr Brown looking for deeper psychological motivations).
He said that Strussner (?) had missed this issue too.
When he asked me directly if I knew anything, I admitted having been told - after I did the article - that it was common knowledge in the Columbia Seminar that Smith was.
We will meet again Saturday. Flusser asks what I will do. Suggests calling Yadin for help, even police help, in getting the ms. and having the ink analyzed. Says there are other books at Mar Saba with writing in them which could serve for comparison.
Knows Meliton Charistos. Both scholars but Meliton much more effective. Ousted by new Patriarch. (But how come Xaristos didn't seem to know Flusser?)
Of both were in on the recovery of the ms. from Mar Saba?)
Oh yes, Flusser was one of those who went out. The library was a mess. They did not find the book. And then they did - in the middle of a pile of books carelessly thrown on the floor, all covered with dust. What kind of a scholar, he asks about Smith, could have permitted this? Walked off, leaving his great discovery to such a fate?
They were about to bring it back when Abbott Seraphim raised hell, said they had to request it, & he would sent it. They did & he did. So Flusser was surprised it was still in Jerusalem - thought surely Seraphim would have demanded it back by now.
I confessed to Flusser my admiration for much of Smith's earlier work & my sincere expectation that he would confess his hoax when I exposed it - confess that he had set a trap for NT scholars & laugh that so many had fallen into it & rejoice that at least one hadn't. But instead he didn't and carried his indignation up & down the country.
Third Day: Friday June 3rd.

Ecole Biblique - all day. Checked all indexes etc. for any recent references to this problem. Found a couple & copied the Dutch NTh & ThLZ pages summing up present state of problem (including my part in it). Have okay to work in the EB library afternoons and weekends (except Sunday).
Fourth Day: Saturday June 4th - EB in the a.m. Tried to call Flusser to change 8:30 pm appt, but not possible. Walked over there in evening. Talked till 12. Had to sleep at the YMCA ($24.50 w/o bath!)
During pm. at EB found many volumes from Holland mid-17th c. with writing in them. Studied its condition. Made exact notes.
Evening: Flusser says he'll ask Magen Besky [Q consistently misspells ‘Magen Broshi’ curator of the Shrine of the Book museum throughout] for help - Director of the Scrolls Museum. And Yadin
But aware that Orthodox probably won't want Jews in on this.
Fifth Day. Sunday. Continued my private magnifying study of Smith’s photos, picking out suspicious spots. Talk to Magen Becky he says Israel has no non-destructive technique for what I want. Explains something of how to have blown ups done.
Sixth Day. Monday. 6/6. Saw ms. Delighted to find p. 11 of volume with its “practice” letters. And to find the suspicious [illegible word], breaks & irregularities in great number typical of forgeries. PM in Ecole Biblique checking all on Greek paleography. Also found Papalopoulos-Kerameus [who in 1883 was responsible for creating an inventory of Greek manuscripts belonging to churches and monasteries and specifically Hierosolymitike Bibliotheke, a catalogue of the Jerusalem patriarchal libraries vol.1, St. Petersburg, 1891] and picked out mss from Mar Saba I wanted for comparison.
Seventh Day Tues. 6/7: Worked over several volumes of [Greek letters] mathemataria homework of theological students and monks. Also others some quite close to Smith 76. Make a list of peculiarities I can’t find yet. PM – National Library to see Director (rec’ by Bescky & a specialist in Greek paleography. He’s not there sadly (?) but I searched catalogue and found tons of stuff.
Letter 1
June 2, 1983
Dear Jean,
Still can hardly believe that you are not in the next room or just around the corner, ready to turn up if only I yell loudly enough. I hope you found all in reasonably good order at home, including of course the loved one. (Has he begun talking to you again, or still punishing you for your long absence? And for apparently having done away with your husband en route.)
I got into the Patriarchate this morning, talked to the officials and to the librarian. I’ve been promised the ms. for Monday morning. But they are not very keen on testing that would require the involvement of other persons. Well this is still the first day. I’m asking Bill Dalton of the Biblical Institute [= Vatican] to write them some encouragement meanwhile. The librarian himself is quite convinced that the writing is old and was done in the late 18th c. Thinks perhaps I’ll be convinced too when I see it. Maybe. That’s what this is all about.
Meanwhile, Jerusalem continues deathly hot. I stay out of the sun, sip water all day from our electric cooled corridor taps, take frequent cool showers, change often, move slowly, and gradually become acclimated. This house is on the Old Damascus road, just north of the old city, just outside the Damascus gate. The buses to east Jerusalem and the whole “west bank” have their terminus just outside our gate, so the area is teeming with Arabs. And of course once you pass through the wall into the old city, almost everything is Arab. The Greek Patriarchate however is within the walls, as are the great Christian shrines of the Via Dolorosa, the Holy Sepulchre etc.
I couldn’t get anything but busy signals from People’s Express my last day in London, so I finally called Capitol and booked for return to NY on June 23rd following the pattern you worked out of taking an over night train and ferry to Brussels. But I haven’t cancelled the BTWA you made for the 22nd either. Going Brussels means saving $50, but putting in the extra day of travel plus the added distance to NY. I’ll let you know final plans later.
Meanwhile I have some contacts to make at the Ecole Biblique (next door to us) and the Hebrew University telephone (sic!) this afternoon. Staying as quiet as possible to avoid heat prostration is gradually proving very restful. Hope you are finding something to rest you up a bit too.
[new pen] 4 hours later (9:00 pm). The weather has changed with a refreshing cool breeze making it even a bit chilly as I ran home tonight trying to avoid being locked out. Curfew is 9:00 pm. But the really good news was a long conversation with Prof. David Flusser of Hebrew U. – an enormously learned old man – Catholic [with later addition ‘NO’ circled in bold later added with a line as correction] colleague of Werblowsky (the guy in my group at the Moonie conference) and he Flusser is also absolutely convinced that Smith engineered the whole thing. His grounds are his remarkable intuition – of which he provided other examples. That is, he saw at once on reading the supposed Clement text that it was a joke, it ended up convincing the reader of the opposite of what it seemed to say. It was written not to exempt [now written sideways on the left side of the page] Jesus of Carpocratian slander but to convict him of them. (This is true but I saw it only after writing my article. I wrote this up in another article which I have never published). Anyway starting from that, he simply carefully analyzed who might have done this & ended up with Smith as the most probable. I am meeting him again Saturday night. He was enthusiastic when he heard who I was. His own work & writing have never left him a chance to investigate the text as I want to do. [now written sideways on the right side of the page] He is one of those however who went to Mar Saba to find the ms. it was lying with [illegible words] a heap covered with dust on [cut off] Love, love, love Q
June 6, 1983
Dearest Jean,
Well, this has been a rather sensational day. I did get to see the manuscript at 8:30 and worked on it till 11:30 (their daily limit at the Patriarchate). The librarian was very nice. I got my honorary cup of coffee (Greek) of course. The manuscript itself is two free sheets that they have removed from the printed volume they were a part of. The two sheets are kept in a plastic binder which you are asked not to open.
The first thing I did was check the volume itself – which they handed me separately – to see if it contained any notes. The librarian said that it didn’t. But it does. On page 11, there was about twenty squiggles across the top & down the right margin. They turn out to be Greek letters. The last five are clearly identifiable. They are the 18th c. way of writing [Greek letter pi] namely [ligature] repeated about 5 times. On the top there are a couple of different B ‘s and a couple of others, each one repeated with variations. Of course you know how I take it. It’s like Rosie practicing Philly’s signature. The book itself contains mostly Greek texts & the Greek text style is in many ways like the 18th century hand of the ms. It’s as if a modern – M.S. for instance, were reading the book, tried to see if he could imitate the type, so different from the Greek we’re used to, and … But though the ink of those efforts looks much like the ink of the ms. I don’t think the same person wrote both. His efforts on p. 11 are too amateurish. Still, if he went off & practiced for a long time – perhaps. But more probably he would have hired a Greek.
Anyway, what do I find in the ms, magnified by two glasses? 1. No penetration of the page (Neither had the p. 11 writing penetrated). Not even where the ink of the ms is laid on heavily, as it is in a couple of places is there any notable penetration. 2. No spreading out of the letters from ink soaking in, as in all my other examples. 3. A sharply black colored ink, which I have not found in any 18th c stuff – but I only have about 8 samples. 4. Now, speaking as no expert, but just trying to remember what I read about forgeries in detective stories – I think I see all through the text, under magnification, the usual signs of someone trying to write in a style other than his own: breaks where there should be smooth loops linking the letters; wobbles at unusual & tricky places; and dots indicating the pen is resting while the writer is thinks where to move it next – dots at the beginning & end of words, syllables, letters. [ligature] has for instance. And finally changes in the way letters are made as the text goes on, as if he’s learning on the job. And also evidence that some letters are made with different motions of the hand in different places. That is, under magnification, you can tell which direction the pen was moving when it wrote, whether an a was made [a with accent] or [a with another accent] etc. The differences indicate that the writer is thinking about what the result will look like and not about what he is writing.
This afternoon I hunted up all I could on Greek paleography in the Ecole Biblique & read it. Very exciting. Wish you were here.
There are nice cool breezes mornings & evenings. Jerusalem is 800 or so feet above sea level. Wailed prayers from the mosques and Oriental music from the bazaars continue to fill the air. But I’m fine.
See you soon. Pray they let me get some good photographs first.
Love
Quinton

Wednesday June 8
Dear Jean
Well, it wasn’t quite as easy as I thought the other day. I’ve been examining loads of other writings from Mar Saba itself from the 18th century and many of them too have breaks and squiggles and perhaps hesitations. They’re not all forgeries. I do think they have many fewer than our friends; but that’s not as easy to prove as if they just had none at all. And some of them don’t seem to have soaked into the pages very much either. So experts are going to have to be consulted. But the librarian shudders every time I suggest more people coming. Anyway, we’re getting to be pretty good friends. He has agreed to go with me out to the Mar Saba monastery. He is convinced there is another secret door there which will lead to a cache of manuscripts like the door & mss they found in 1887. Not that we can hunt for that this time. One would have to live there, as he did for a month one time.
The Patriarchate is funny. I enter a tiny dark office next to a tiny dark study-room. He occupies the office, I the study-room; we are the only two. But just outside is a small courtyard, about 20 feet in each direction. And out there just a few feet from us, Greek Orthodox monks and workmen (and women occasionally) shout at each other at the top of their lungs. And when the phone rings in the porter’s lodge just below, you wonder why he just didn’t answer from his window, he shouts so loudly to the person on the other end. It’s our Gk restaurant scene all over again.
I found lots of stuff on Greek paleography at the University, where the Director happens to have that for his own specialty. It’s all really fascinating. Here at table people in singles, couples and large groups, of all languages come and go. Food is simple and abundant. House very clean, modern and nice. Weather quite good – from terribly hot at mid-day down to the very pleasant temperature it is right this minute in my room.
More on Israel – one further difference from my last visit is, I think, that they don’t much use bilingual signs anymore either. This seems strange, considering their American tourist influx, but it’s largely true. Just Hebrew. Street names are also in Latin letters usually, but many quite important traffic & parking & directional notices are not. You would be happy to see the strong proud look of the young women. They stand so straight & tall. I suppose it’s not really beautiful or [illegible]; rather the result of a couple of years service in the army. But at least they know they’re equal (I’m not counting the women of the Hasidim under their veils nor the Arab women who are obviously strong but not very enviably lugging those huge baskets around on their heads.
Wish you were here for a few selfish reasons as well as the fun you might have seeing all this. But you aren’t so I will have to hurry home to you. How are the lectures coming? I pray you’re moving along as rapidly as you hoped and not getting caught up in too many other things. And above all that you are well. I pray that the doctor wasn’t too dismay (?) at what you brought home from your six month neglect (?). And I hope you are warm. And dry. As I am. It’s still nice for a change.
Love Quinton

[StephenGoranson]

Some old carbon ink is readable.
Ever heard of Dead Sea Scrolls?