Was the Length of Time that Morton Smith Waited to Publish the Mar Saba Letter Really That Extraordinary?

A lot of people have insinuated that there is 'something fishy' about Morton Smith waiting until 1971 to publish the letter he found in 1958 in the Mar Saba monastery. Most of us have no frame of reference here. But I happened to be flipping through the English translation of Hennecke-Schneemelcher's New Testament Apocrypha and noticed something in Jeremias' treatment of the Epistle of the Apostle's text. Here is what he writes:

This unusual apocryphon is nowhere mentioned in the literature of early Christianity. Nothing was known of its existence until 1895, when Carl Schmidt discovered fifteen leaves with the Coptic text of the work in the Institut de la Mission Archaeologique in Cairo. He reported his find the same year, but twenty four years passed before he was able to bring out an edition of the work.[Volume 2 p. 159]

So it took EVEN MORE time to publish the Epistle of the Apostles than Smith's text. Yet there were never any hints of Schmidt 'forging' this text. I would even argue that the Epistula Apostolorum was EVEN MORE challenging to the established orthodoxy given that it witnesses a hitherto unknown order of the narrative to the gospel.

Notice also that there is no reference to the Epistle of the Apostles anywhere in the Patristic literature. More to follow ...