How Could Quesnell in 1983 Have Not Immediately Recognized to Theodore was a Recent Forgery if it Really Was?

[DCHindley]

Looking into this a bit more; there can be suspicious evidence when writing on old paper. What is known as feathering of ink due to deterioration of the paper.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=01M ... nk&f=false



However, in this case the writing was in any case done on old paper.

I'm not clear that there would be an obvious difference between writing on paper a hundred years old and paper three hundred years old.

Andrew Criddle

If I recall correctly, before 1501 little or no sizing was used, at least in printed books. I think that paper intended for writing was usually sized with gelatin through the early 16th century. Voss published in 1646, thus 17th century. Alum sizing started to be applied in the 16th century and was widespread by the 17th century (Voss' time).

A Brief Review of the History of Sizing and Resizing Practices
by Karen Garlick (1986)
https://cool.culturalheritage.org/coola ... 05-11.html

[R]esearch conducted at the National Bureau of Standards in the 1940's ... showed that test papers from the 17th and 18th century contained about 3-6% gelatin, suggesting that the original sizing had not deteriorated. Modern ink applied to the surface of these papers did not feather.

Not sure if "test papers" refers to writing paper or printed book paper.

Didn't Stephen Carlson buy his own used copy of Voss' book just to get a closer look at what it was made of and how the surface of the paper would take handwritten ink?

I guess the point I am trying to make is that the sizing for print books was not ideal for writing with ink and pen, for which writing paper, sized differently, is best suited. The latter would make for poor printing paper.

[andrewcriddle]

I like you. I don't want to appear unkind. You know this is BS. The whole claims of "problems" with the MS. It is what it is. Even the "gay thing." Have you read this?

https://secretmarkblog.blogspot.com/202 ... k.html?m=1

I think this closes the book on Secret Mark. Best thing ever written on the subject.

I wasn't able to get full access but I read most on Google books.

If you actually read the account in the Dionysiaca (See https://archive.org/details/dionysiaca0 ... 5/mode/2up ) the story of Staphylus does not seem particularly close to Secret Mark. It is at a literal level a story of a banquet which allegorically uses drunkenness as a neoplatonic symbol of spiritual experience.

If there were stronger parallels then on the one hand it might support authenticity but on the other hand it might indicate that both are post-Clementine neoplatonic influenced works. However, as it is IMVHO the links are rather flimsy.

Andrew Criddle

[Secret Alias]

Be that as it may are you saying that (a) Quesnell and Carlson DIDN'T RAISE THE EXPECTATION that handling the MS would settle the question of authenticity or (b) that regardless of those expectations raised by Quesnell and Carlson no one should expect that an examination of any MS allegedly written 25 years ago wouldn't reveal that it was written 25 years ago? If you say that they were looking for obvious signs of forgery doesn't the fact that they or he didn't find any obvious signs of forgery when the document was examined shouldn't that suggest authenticity - or again are all investigations into the text driven by the foreknowledge that it is a forgery and make the facts fit the conclusion? It seems to be that document examination was a critical part of both of their arguments for forgery. Quesnell first and then Carlson citing Quesnell. The business about 'modern homosexuality' was never convincing especially given the fact that Carlson nor Quesnell were recognized experts on homosexuality - modern or ancient. But surely you must admit that either Quesnell and Carlson raised false expectations initially or the fact that Quesnell didn't find anything worthy of reporting or publishing weakens the overall arguments raised about forgery.

[Ken Olson]

Jumping back to the OP, Secret Alias wrote:

It's such a basic point but it was so pointed and obvious I couldn't say it explicitly in my paper. But having gone through my parents things from the 1970 and 80s I find it patently obvious that a 25 year old MS would have been obvious to spot. To be honest, if it was up to me I would have written this one line in the place of the article I published in VC:

It is impossible to believe that a 25 year old manuscript could pretend to be ancient especially to a hostile, unsympathetic witness like Quesnell.

Then you owe your co-author and editors a great debt for the fact that your work was able to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, because academic journals don't generally publish arguments from personal incredulity, and particularly not when they are made without supporting argument. The paper they actually published is quite worth reading. Your single sentence assertion would not have been a significant contribution to the study of the issue.

I have documents from 25 years ago. I have handwriting samples from my grandparents, great grandparents. I've held manuscripts from libraries that date centuries ago. There is no way that a manuscript from 25 years ago would be mistaken from something written in the 17th or 18th centuries.

Unless I am profoundly misunderstanding your claim, you are saying that your personal experience in dealing with recently created documents and antique documents suggests that a recently created document could not be mistaken for an antique document.

This is a non-sequitur. The fact that people can often, or even usually, distinguish between recent and antique documents does not mean that this can be expected in all cases, and especially not in cases dealing with an intentional forgery created by someone with some degree of expertise.

We know of cases in which experts have failed to detect signs of forgery in recently manufactured forgeries, or even endorsed them as authentic, and we know that this can occur even when the examiners' expertise and experience was much greater than that of the forger. The recent incident of The Gospel of Jesus' Wife (GJW), which Andrew has already mentioned in this thread, is one such case.

In the first paragraph of the relatively brief paleographical analysis of GJW he wrote following his autopsy (i.e., direct examination) of the fragment, Malcolm Choat of Macquarie University says:

It is the simple truth that paleographical analysis alone is sometimes not sufficient to settle questions of authenticity. In the present case, while further conversation is required for final judgment on some issues, I have not found a “smoking gun” that indicates beyond doubt that the text was not written in antiquity, but nor can such an examination prove that it is genuine. I do, however, believe that the present case is less straightforward than some proponents of forgery have assumed. Malcolm Choat, “The Gospel of Jesus's Wife: A Preliminary Paleographical Assessment,” HTR 107.2 (2014) 160-171.

Choat now includes P.Coll.Fritz. s.n. (i.e., The Gospel of Jesus' Wife or GJW) on his list of known forgeries:

http://www.forgingantiquity.com/forgeries

While Choat carefully expressed that he had failed to find evidence that would show that GJW was not an ancient document, rather than asserting that it was authentic, there were other competent scholars that did assert its authenticity, most notably Karen King.

King's relatively lengthy article on GJW [Karen L. King, “Jesus said to them, 'My wife … '”: A New Coptic Papyrus Fragment, The Harvard Theological Review 107.2 (2014) 131-159] includes sections dedicated to Papyrological Description (133-135) and Paleography (136-137), including observations from Luijendijk and Bagnall, whom King subsequently makes clear were able to make direct examination of the fragment:

In March 2012, the GJW fragment was examined at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York by the Institute's director Roger Bagnall and by AnneMarie Luijendijk (Princeton University). (154)

In the section on the date of the document, King writes:

The initial estimation of a fourth-century C.E. date for the extant manuscript of GJW was based on paleography, but this method has significant limitations given the current state of the field. A later date is indicated by the age of the papyrus. (156).

So paleography is apparently not an exact science, and paleographical conclusions might need to be be overturned based on other evidence. This did not keep King from concluding that all the evidence supports the theory that the fragment was an authentic ancient document:

On the side of a date in antiquity, all the evidence can be marshaled: the placement of the ink, its chemical composition, the age of the papyrus, and patterns of aging and damage support ancient manufacture and inscription. The inexperienced handwriting and linguistic features fit a poorly trained scribe (with a poor pen?) who is a native speaker. The genre and literary comparands (including Gos. Thom.) are a fit for ancient Christianity, as are the topics of discussion (157)

Following the publication of Ariel Sabar's exposure of Walter Fritz as the owner/forger of the fragment in The Atlantic in 2016:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... fe/485573/

King admitted that the balance had tipped decidedly in favor of the fragment being a modern forgery.

Roger Bagnall, who had examined the fragment and contributed his observations to King's paper, was apparently taken in. In a publisher's release in advance of the publication, he is quoted as saying that it is “hard to construct a scenario that is at all plausible in which somebody fakes something like this,” and, “The world is not really crawling with crooked papyrologists.”

https://blog.press.umich.edu/2012/09/wa ... d-papyrus/

We are now aware of at least two crooked papyrologists active in recent years. Bagnall, an experienced papyrologist, appears to have been taken in by Walter Fritz, who had apparently once been a graduate student in Egyptology at Berlin's Free University with at least one academic publication to his name.

Back to the claim made in the OP:

It is impossible to believe that a 25 year old manuscript could pretend to be ancient especially to a hostile, unsympathetic witness like Quesnell.

No, it's not. We are forced to believe that a recently produced manuscript could fool an expert (a moderately qualified one in Quesnell's case) because we know of examples where this happened.

And in the second post:

He would have simply came back to the US and A and said "I saw the MS and it was obviously written 25 years ago."

It's unlikely that he would do that, because he was a scholar and understood that such a claim would have to be supported with evidence, and he didn't have a “smoking gun.” But failure to find a smoking gun is not proof of authenticity, as the example of Choat shows.

Similarly, the library and the librarian would have recognized a recently manufactured handwriting rather than arguing for its authenticity.

This is a non sequitur. The examples of Choat, King, Bagnall, and Luijendijk prove that experts sometimes fail to recognize recently manufactured handwriting in the case of intentional forgery.

It's so stupid. I can't believe that scholars (who are supposed to be so smart) can even attempt to argue with what was discovered in Quesnell's notes. It's the end of the forgery argument.

You have not demonstrated this. You've made hyperbolic (to use the term loosely and generously) claims that you have not supported with evidence. I don't have that kind of confidence in your unsupported assertions. I don't think anyone else does either (with the possible exception of you).

Best,

Ken

[Secret Alias]

Obviously I am sitting at home during a pandemic writing complete nonsense between listening to Hands Up Give Me Your Heart on repeat. But my secondary point is that Carlson brings up two main issues as the basis to questioning the authenticity of the MS (1) Quesnell's demand to examine the manuscript and (2) entirely subjective arguments allegedly showing modernity in an ancient document. (1) was the "meat" of the thesis and (2) only worked if you wanted the text to be a forgery. I guess a more respectable reworking of the OP would be - if you cited Quesnell's demand for a document examination and then it turns out that by the time you write your silly document analysis using blurry black and white prints how much damage does that do your overarching claim that in fact Quesnell couldn't find any problems with the MS worth publishing.

[Secret Alias]

And with respect to the Jesus Wife fragment anomalies or difficulties were found without document analysis. In the case of to Theodore Quesnell paid for photographs of the MS and then refused to share them with the academic community. They were sitting in his personal files until his death and would probably have been destroyed if I hadn't contacted Trobisch to contact the lawyer managing his estate. Yes Hedrick rescued a copy that the Patriarchate had made from the negatives paid for by Quesnell. But I am wondering whether Quesnell had an obligation to publish or retell his experiences especially after Hedrick published photos made from negatives he commissioned in 2000

[Secret Alias]

I guess if I was to rephrase the OP - given that Quesnell eventually records that it just looked like a 18th century MS when he carried out his (ultimately secret) analysis at what point do we just hit reset and say it's an 18th century MS? Doesn't carrying out the examination which was the basis to Quesnell's and Carlson's hyperbole effectively "reset" the pause on acknowledging the text as what it appears to be? It's like the Richard Jewell case. Once the initial concerns are addressed at what point do we exonerate the "person" or 'object of interest"? To follow the analogy, does Richard Jewell live under a perpetual cloud of suspicion merely because of the ill will of mean spirited or ambitious adversaries?

[Secret Alias]

And how seriously do I have to take the forgery arguments now that their original architect Quesnell behaved in what I and many others consider to be an entirely inappropriate manner? If Quesnell had told the world "I saw the MS ignore much of what I wrote before. This is going to be difficult to prove" would the Gospel Hoax have been ever published (given that Quesnell's pre-1983 concerns are one of the most powerful arguments for engaging in the nonsensical speculation of Carlson's work regarding salt, modern vs ancient homosexuality etc). Secret Mark and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife are not interchangeable. While my initial OP was silly so were most if not all of these forger arguments.

[Ken Olson]

This is a long post, but it's responding to four posts. I hope I have actually completed the various sections, but I may have missed something.

Secret Alias wrote:

Obviously I am sitting at home during a pandemic writing complete nonsense between listening to Hands Up Give Me Your Heart on repeat.

I am glad that you can admit that. I wasn't at all sure you could tell the nonsense you wrote was nonsense. If I weren't stuck at home too, I probably would not have responded to it. As an experiment, I sat through one playing of “Hands Up Give Me Your Heart.” I can only imagine the effect that repeated listening would have on one's brain.

But my secondary point is that Carlson brings up two main issues as the basis to questioning the authenticity of the MS (1) Quesnell's demand to examine the manuscript and (2) entirely subjective arguments allegedly showing modernity in an ancient document. (1) was the "meat" of the thesis and (2) only worked if you wanted the text to be a forgery. I guess a more respectable reworking of the OP would be - if you cited Quesnell's demand for a document examination and then it turns out that by the time you write your silly document analysis using blurry black and white prints

I'm going to break in here to comment that I do not accept your claim that, with the exception of the demand to examine the manuscript, the basis for questioning the manuscript was entirely subjective. I think that both sides have made inferences that are perhaps suggestive but not probative. (I'm talking about some of the arguments here – I allow that some of the claims people have made, such as the claim the R. Morton Smith was homosexual are without foundation. I could dig up some foundationless or false claims on the other side too if I you want me to).

how much damage does that do your overarching claim that in fact Quesnell couldn't find any problems with the MS worth publishing.

Lots and none at all. Lots because it reflects pretty poorly on Quesnell that he kept it to himself.

None at all because: (1) scholars are generally agreed it would be better if we had the manuscript available for examination by any scholar that wanted to, and that it's very possible might still tell us a lot, (2) Quesnell, as you and Daniel Gullotta wrote in the published paper, was not especially well qualified (and Carlson did not consider himself well qualified to perform such an examination in 2005; I don't know if he would consider himself well qualified now, but he has much more experience working with manuscripts now), (3) despite the way you frame the question, it is reasonable to think a forged text could escape detection, because we know of cases where this has happened. Some people ascribe like to ascribe papyrology and paleography (and archaeology) as having the status of objective sciences, while considering literary criticism a subjective field (mostly when it serves their purposes for a particular case). The truth is much muddier than that.

And with respect to the Jesus Wife fragment anomalies or difficulties were found without document analysis.

And they were dismissed as insubstantial and unpersuasive by proponents of authenticity. Some of them may have been, others probably were not. See especially Karen L.King, “Response to Leo Depuydt, 'The Alleged Gospel of Jesus's Wife: Assessment and Authenticity.'” HTR 107.2 2014 190-193. Her conclusion may be worth quoting:

King: In conclusion, Depuydt's essay does not offer any substantial evidence or persuasive argument, let alone unequivocal surety, that the GJW fragment is a modern fabrication (forgery). Should the fragment be proved on other grounds to be such, a few these observations may, however, be useful in hypothesizing how it may have been done.

And it wasn't the document analysis that finally persuaded everyone (?) that GJW was a fake. It was Ariel Sabar's investigation into the origins of the fragment and its mysterious owner. That's the kind of thing that gives me hope that more conclusive evidence relevant to To Theodore may yet turn up if people keep digging. I don't know what form that evidence might take or which direction it will point.

Secret Alias again:

In the case of To Theodore, Quesnell paid for photographs of the MS and then refused to share them with the academic community. They were sitting in his personal files until his death and would probably have been destroyed if I hadn't contacted Trobisch to contact the lawyer managing his estate. Yes Hedrick rescued a copy that the Patriarchate had made from the negatives paid for by Quesnell.

Kudos to you and Hedrick on those particular issues.

But I am wondering whether Quesnell had an obligation to publish or retell his experiences especially after Hedrick published photos made from negatives he commissioned in 2000.

Maybe. I don't know if scholarly ethics include a “duty to correct” or “duty to update.” Perhaps they should. It would have reflected well on Quesnell if he had.

I

guess if I was to rephrase the OP - given that Quesnell eventually records that it just looked like a 18th century MS when he carried out his (ultimately secret) analysis at what point do we just hit reset and say it's an 18th century MS? Doesn't carrying out the examination which was the basis to Quesnell's and Carlson's hyperbole effectively "reset" the pause on acknowledging the text as what it appears to be?

When you say we should acknowledge the text is 'what it appears to be,' do you mean mean we should acknowledge it to be an 18th century MS or that it is a portion of a letter by Clement of Alexandria which provides quotations of a gospel written by Mark the Evangelist?

I

t's like the Richard Jewell case. Once the initial concerns are addressed at what point do we exonerate the "person" or 'object of interest"? To follow the analogy, does Richard Jewell live under a perpetual cloud of suspicion merely because of the ill will of mean spirited or ambitious adversaries?

Or the case with President Trump, whom the fake news media and the liberals continue to say misused his office in dealing with Ukraine, even after he's been acquitted, merely because they suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

But seriously, no one ever needs to take analogies like those seriously. You presuppose the conclusion for which you are supposed to be providing evidence when you dismiss other people's arguments as “merely … the ill-will of mean spirited or ambitious adversaries.” You are nowhere near having shown that that is the only reason, or even a major reason of a major proponent of the forgery thesis. You have not answered all their arguments, and the fact that they may not have met their burden of proof on Morton Smith's possible motivations does not excuse you from meeting your burden of proof on their possible motivations, or that none of their arguments carry any weight.

I know Stephen Carlson fairly well and spoke to him while he was writing The Gospel Hoax (I'm thanked in the acknowledgments). He thought Morton Smith actually wanted his hoax to be uncovered by someone who diligently looked at the evidence. He didn't have any apparent animosity toward Smith, and I believe he thought of himself as working out a puzzle Smith had left to be solved. Carlson may have been utterly mistaken on that, but his motives were not the ones you and others ascribe to him, or at least I think I have better evidence for his motivations than you do.

Richard Jewell is an interesting case because, to begin with, he was an obvious suspect and the FBI was right to investigate him. Then problems arose when someone leaked the fact that he was under investigation by the FBI to the press, and the FBI tried to trick him into signing a confession by lying to him. These things reflect poorly on the media and the FBI, but they are not what actually clears Jewell. He passed a polygraph test, but polygraph tests are highly unreliable. His lawyer then argued that the FBI theory of the case was wrong because he could not have been the anonymous caller and been where witnesses placed him at the time, and that is an important fact. The FBI subsequently sent him a letter saying he was not a suspect, but without specifying why that was. Further investigation showed Eric Rudolph committed the bombing, and he plead guilty to it, though later claiming he was coerced into confessing and does not recognize the government's authority to judge his guilt (which is a weird sort of non-denial).

And how seriously do I have to take the forgery arguments now that their original architect Quesnell behaved in what I and many others consider to be an entirely inappropriate manner?

Conclusions are not rejected just because they have bad arguments made for them (otherwise we'd have to disqualify your conclusion based on your OP in this thread), or because the people advocating them have acted inappropriately (I think that's called an ad hominem). They are rejected because they have no good arguments made for them (which I realize is what you are claiming), or because there are better arguments for a different conclusion, or they are demonstrated to be wrong. (See my recap of the Richard Jewell case above).

If Quesnell had told the world "I saw the MS ignore much of what I wrote before. This is going to be difficult to prove" would the Gospel Hoax have been ever published (given that Quesnell's pre-1983 concerns are one of the most powerful arguments for engaging in the nonsensical speculation of Carlson's work regarding salt, modern vs ancient homosexuality etc).

I don't know, but I think it might. Quesnell certainly relied heavily on it in his article, but Carlson had other evidence (whether it was good or not) when he published Gospel Hoax. Possibly he would not have published his book if he had known about Quesnell's examination, bit I don't know that and I don't see how you could.

Secret Mark and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife are not interchangeable.

No, but they have far closer and more numerous points of comparison than the Richard Jewell case or Republican accusations of voter fraud analogies you chose.

While my initial OP was silly so were most if not all of these forger argument.

I think some of them are not silly (I mean the arguments for forgery, not your OP, which was silly). It might save time if you just told us which ones you don't consider silly. I suspect the list would be short.

I should clarify that in my case, I am primarily concerned about whether I can use Secret Mark or the Letter to Theodore as evidence for reconstructing early Christian history. I originally became interested in Secret Mark because I was working on the relationship between John and the Synoptics. If Secret Mark were an authentic work of the author of Mark, I thought I could make a very strong case for the Lazarus story in John story being dependent on Secret Mark. One of my professors at the time made me aware of the case that Secret Mark was a forgery. I realized that I could not distinguish between a story that was source and form-critically earlier than John and one that a modern scholar familiar with source and form criticism constructed to look like it was, so I gave up on the argument. I think I have good reason to be suspicious of the text's self-representation.

One of the things that frequently gets lost in the debate over the Letter to Theodore is that the question of where the burden of proof lies changes according to what issue is being examined or what claim is being made. Charlie Hedrick rightly acknowledges this in his summary article in Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate (2013) edited by Tony Burke. (Parenthetically, I have serious reservations about other aspects of Hedrick's chapter, but it would require another post to address them). I think it's fair to say that if anyone wants to accuse Morton Smith of forging the text, the burden of proof is on the person making the accusation (and I would agree that much of Carlson's case has been shown to be uncertain or mistaken), but I also think anyone who wants to use it as an ancient document carries a burden of proof to show that it is. A lot of the arguments tend to be over what the default position ought to be, which seems to suggest that the person making the argument has not found conclusive evidence pointing one way or the other. I continue to hope that continued investigation might yet produce such conclusive evidence.

Best,

Ken

P.S. Happy birthday to forum owner Peter Kirby!

[Secret Alias]

I do not accept your claim that, with the exception of the demand to examine the manuscript, the basis for questioning the manuscript was entirely subjective

But it was there. It was at the monastery with no restrictions placed on seeing the text until after 1983. Why is that Smith's fault? The fact that it costs money to go to Jerusalem doesn't mean that Smith was a forger. I guess because I wasn't born in this country I don't accuse someone of something until I check it out myself. I can understand that if Carlson didn't know that Quesnell - the guy he takes his initiative from - actually DID carry out an examination in 1983 it makes sense from a crass typically American arrogance to accuse another scholar of forgery based on the fact that gospel's don't usually reference homosexuality or something of that sort. But for the rest of the world it's a bridge too far.