'The Morton Smith I Knew' By George Wesley Buchanan, Professor Emeritus of New Testament, Wesley Theological Seminary, and Editorial Advisory Board of the Biblical Archaeology Review

As part of my effort to drum up donations for the Tselikas Project I asked Professor Buchanan if he had read Agamemnon Tselikas's recent article for BAR:

Tselikas sounds like he wants ONLY to prove that this is a forgery. I am sure it is not. Have you read the BAR article by Hershel Shanks that has already had this carefully checked by experts who confirm that it is genuine? Anyone who really knew Morton Smith knows that he could not waste his time with any forgery business.

I wish I had saved some of his precious letters. Most people never learned what a wonderful sense of humor Mortan had. It was in his personal letters that he felt free to express his wit. He had so many items at his instant disposal that he could find something funny in rabbinic literature and relate it to Victorian poetry and the current comic strips and show how they affected theology. Unfortunately I did not.