Did Morton Smith Forge "Secret Mark"?
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The controversial text that Smith discovered was a Greek manuscript written on the endpages of a 17th-century book. The apparently 18th-century handwriting recorded a copy of a previously unknown letter from Clement of Alexandria to someone named Theodore.
What Venetia Anastasopoulou has concluded is that the manuscript was penned by someone who was comfortable with Greek cursive handwriting. This could not have been Morton Smith, she believes, on the basis of apples-to-oranges comparison with Smith’s typically western use of block letters modeled on printed Greek (see my response to her original report). Now she adds that the writing also lacks the telltale signs of hesitation, uncertainty, or mechanical copying that she would expect to see in the work of a forger. In short, it is the hand of someone who wrote with the fluency of a native Greek; she does not know who or when. Nor does she know if this Greek was the text’s author, or was perhaps copying it from another source, such as an earlier manuscript or a draft by Morton Smith. The earliest this person could have lived would have been the seventeenth century, when the paper was manufactured. If Anastasopoulou is right, therefore, we are left with a text that was transcribed by a Greek at some unknown time in the last 350 years, which presents itself as a work of the second century, but is easiest to interpret as a work of the twentieth. If those who think the text was composed in the twentieth century have not explained how the manuscript was created, those who think the text was composed in the second century have not explained what it says. That state of affairs will satisfy no one, which is why neither side is ready to capitulate.
Peter Jeffery is the Scheide Professor of Music History Emeritus, Princeton University.
Michael P. Grace II is the Professor of Medieval Studies, University of Notre Dame.
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