The Official End of the 'Forger's Tremor' Argument With Respect to 'Secret Mark' and Mar Saba 65

When Stephen Carlson changed a lot of people's mind about Mar Saba 65 - the Letter to Theodore (= Secret Mark) he did so principally because he argued that he found a smoking gun, a 'forger's tremor' in the handwriting. The fact that Carlson was a patent lawyer at the time rather than a professional document examiner didn't seem to bother anyone. More strikingly, neither did the question of how Carlson was 'found' these 'forger's tremors.'   Now at long last Roger Viklund and Timo S. Paananen have published Roger's initial findings that Carlson used low resolution images of the manuscript from Smith's printed 1973 book to 'find' the 'forger's tremor.'

The peer reviewed article on the handwriting in Clement’s Letter to Theodore has just been published in Vigiliae Christianae - “R. Viklund, T.S. Paananen, Distortion of the Scribal Hand in the Images of Clement’s Letter to Theodore, Vigiliae Christianae 67 (2013), 235-247”.

This article discusses Morton Smith’s famous manuscript find, Clement’s Letter to Theodore (including the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark), and critically assesses Stephen C. Carlson’s study of its handwriting (2005). Carlson’s analysis is found to be wanting due to line screen distortion introduced by the halftone reproduction process in the images he used. We conclude that the script in the manuscript of Clement’s Letter to Theodore lacks all and any kind of “signs of forgery”

If anything demonstrates how modern scholarship is utterly subjective and has very little interest in truth the fact that so many top notch scholars got sucked into this nonsense about Mar Saba 65 'being forged.' Just because you don't like the news you shoot the newsman - or try and prove he forged the news!

Congratulations to the two young Scandinavians for arguing for truth. Yet this will still not change the minds of the convinced. They already 'know' that its a forgery because - well - they don't like what it says about early Christianity.  We live in a corrupt age where the wicked can accuse the innocent of evil and get away with it merely because they are no longer with us.  There never was any evidence of forgery and there never will be.  Just a lot of wishful thinking among the pious ...