stephan huller's observations: The Relative Unlikelihood that Morton Smith Forged the Letter to Theodore

The Mar Saba manuscript pages containing Clement of Alexandria’s Letter to Theodore, as photographed by Morton Smith in 1958. The text is written in an 18th-century Greek cursive hand and includes two excerpts from a “Secret Gospel of Mark.” The question of who actually authored this letter – Clement in antiquity, a later unknown scribe, or Smith himself – remains hotly debated.

Introduction: The Mar Saba Letter and Its Controversy

In 1958, Columbia University historian Morton Smith announced that he had discovered a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria at the Mar Saba monastery. This Letter to Theodore contained quotations from a purported longer version of the Gospel of Mark – the so-called “Secret Gospel of Mark.” From the beginning, the find was sensational, and soon doubts arose about its authenticity. To this day, no scholarly consensus exists on the letter’s authenticity. Crucially, the debate spans multiple possibilities: the letter could be genuinely written by Clement in the late 2nd century, or it could be an ancient/medieval forgery (pseudepigraphon) copied into the book at Mar Saba, or it could be a modern hoax. Those who argue it is a forgery have most often singled out Morton Smith as the modern forger. On the other hand, various scholars accept the letter as genuine (while disagreeing on what Secret Mark represents), and some suspect a pre-modern forgery rather than Smith’s invention. In short, Morton Smith’s personal guilt is just one hypothesis among many.

The forgery proponents, however, have frequently presented the “Smith forgery” scenario as the most likely explanation – a stance the user describes as “dishonest” given the actual balance of evidence. Indeed, when one objectively weighs the probabilities, Smith’s direct involvement in hoaxing the Mar Saba letter emerges as far from certain – and arguably not even the most likely scenario. Below, we will systematically consider the range of scenarios and evaluate evidence and scholarly assessments for each, thereby “calculating” the relative probability of Smith’s guilt versus other explanations.

Possible Scenarios for the Letter to Theodore

To clarify the terms, “forgery” can mean different things in this context. It is important not to conflate an ancient or medieval forgery (i.e. a text not truly by Clement but created long ago and merely discovered by Smith) with a modern forgery perpetrated by Smith himself. Smith’s critics sometimes blur this distinction, suggesting he “introduced a forgery” – wording that hints at fraud while it could simply mean he found a falsely attributed ancient text. Let’s enumerate the main possibilities:

Authentic Letter by Clement (Late 2nd Century): Clement of Alexandria himself wrote this letter to Theodore, describing a secret longer Gospel of Mark. In this case, both the letter’s Clementine authorship and the Secret Mark excerpts are authentic to antiquity (though Secret Mark might still be an ancient “mystic” edition of Mark’s gospel, as Clement claims). Many Clement scholars find nothing in the letter that definitively rules out Clement’s authorship. If this is true, Smith is completely in the clear – he simply found a genuine text. Some scholars indeed consider that “most scholars would attribute the letter to Clement” and note that no strong argument against authenticity had emerged in the first decades.
Ancient or Medieval Forgery (Pseudepigraphon): The letter could be a falsely attributed text composed by someone other than Clement, perhaps in the 3rd–5th centuries or even later. It might have been created to address some theological issue (e.g. a monastic debate) and ascribed to Clement for authority. If so, Smith’s role was that of a discoverer who unwittingly found an older forgery. Notably, Clement’s letter is preserved only as an 18th-century copy in the Mar Saba book – which means some scribe in the 1700s had copied it from an earlier manuscript. This scenario gains plausibility from recent scholarly work. For example, Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau (2023) argue the letter is not genuinely Clement’s but was likely composed in Late Antiquity; they highlight internal anachronisms (such as the letter’s assumption that Mark the Evangelist was the first bishop of Alexandria, a tradition otherwise first attested only in the 4th-century Eusebius). Smith and Landau conclude the letter was “most likely transcribed during the 18th or early 19th centuries” (consistent with the handwriting) but not forged by Morton Smith. Instead, they see it as a later pseudepigraphical creation, perhaps tied to controversies over adelphopoiesis (“brother-making” ceremonies) in Eastern monasteries. This aligns with the idea that an unknown monk or scribe long before Smith’s time produced the text – making Smith again only the discoverer. Even Morton Smith’s mentor, the famed classicist Arthur Darby Nock, upon first reviewing the letter’s content, suspected it was an ancient pseudepigraphon rather than an authentic Clement piece. Importantly, if the letter is an older forgery, Morton Smith’s involvement in deception drops to essentially zero (unless one imagines Smith somehow also forged an “old-looking” manuscript, which brings us to the next scenarios).
18th-Century Copyist’s Invention: A subset of the above – some have speculated that the letter could have been composed by the very person who copied it into the book at Mar Saba in the 18th century. In other words, perhaps a monk in the 1700s invented the Clement letter (and the gospel excerpts) and wrote it into the endpapers of the 1646 printed book where Smith later found it. This would make it a relatively late forgery, but still not Smith’s doing. A motive for an 18th-c. monk could have been to preserve what he believed a true but esoteric text, or even to play a pious hoax. While there’s no direct evidence of this, it’s one possibility raised in the discourse. Renowned patristics scholar Charles Murgia, in fact, ultimately leaned toward the letter being created in the 18th century (Murgia saw anomalies in the text’s content that we’ll discuss). Murgia explicitly ruled out Smith as the forger, stating Smith’s knowledge of Greek was insufficient for such a feat, and he saw “nothing in [Smith’s] book to indicate a fraud”. Thus even one of the early forgery-theorists pointed away from Smith and toward an earlier hoax.
Modern Forgery by Person(s) Other than Smith: This is rarely suggested, but theoretically someone before Smith’s visit could have planted the text in the Mar Saba library. For instance, could a 20th-century individual (perhaps an earlier scholar or mischievous monk) have forged the letter anticipating it would be “discovered”? This scenario is highly speculative and has no known proponents or evidence – if anything, it’s less probable because no obvious candidate or motive is known apart from Smith. The physical provenance is also problematic: no reports of the text existed before Smith. If it was forged in modern times not by Smith, it would mean a forger went to extraordinary lengths to hide their tracks and coincidentally allowed Smith to find it. This possibility is generally not taken seriously, and indeed most discussions assume that if it’s a modern fake, Smith himself was behind it.
Modern Forgery by Morton Smith (Solo): This is the accusation made by Smith’s detractors – that Smith himself authored the Clement letter (and the Secret Mark excerpts) in the 20th century, then somehow inscribed it in convincing 18th-century handwriting in the Mar Saba book, in order to “discover” it. Under this hypothesis, Smith had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit a scholarly hoax. We will examine each of those factors in detail, as well as the evidence pro and con. This scenario would brand Smith as a forger and a charlatan who deceived the academic world. It requires that Smith possessed both the scholarly knowledge to fabricate a plausible Clementine text and the technical skill to simulate Greek manuscript handwriting convincingly. As we’ll see, many experts have doubted that Smith actually had such capabilities.
Modern Forgery by Smith with an Accomplice: A variant of the above has been floated to account for Smith’s apparent lack of certain skills. If Smith could not easily write in an 18th-century Greek script, perhaps he collaborated with someone (e.g. a monk or another scholar) who did the penmanship. Quentin Quesnell – the first to publicly question the letter – mused in 1975 about a “hypothetical forger” whose profile matched Smith, implicitly raising the possibility of a co-conspirator who “knows” the secret. Indeed, Quesnell noted an odd detail: Smith’s 1973 popular book The Secret Gospel was dedicated “to the one who knows.” Quesnell famously asked, “Who is ‘the one who knows’? What does he know?”, hinting that this might be an inside nod to an unnamed collaborator (or at least to someone privy to the truth). Likewise, Greek paleographer Agamemnon Tselikas, after analyzing the handwriting, concluded that if it was forged, it might have been done by “either Smith or someone in Smith’s employ.” He suspected an accomplice with training in Greek calligraphy could have helped produce the script. As we’ll discuss, invoking a co-conspirator raises its own problems (it multiplies the required deception and secrecy). But it remains one of the only ways to reconcile the high quality of the manuscript hand with the claim of Smith’s authorship, short of crediting Smith with near-miraculous skill.

With these scenarios outlined, let us now examine the evidence and arguments for and against Morton Smith’s involvement in a forgery, and attempt to gauge the relative likelihood of the “Smith-forgery” hypothesis versus others. We will consider (a) the physical and handwriting evidence, (b) the linguistic and stylistic complexity of the text, (c) Morton Smith’s own abilities and behaviors, and (d) the content-based arguments (motives, clues, parallels) that have been proposed.

Physical and Handwriting Evidence: Does the Manuscript Fingerprint Smith?

One of the most concrete angles on this question is the handwriting and manuscript analysis. If Smith forged the letter, he had to simulate an 18th-century Greek cursive script convincingly enough to fool experts. Conversely, if the handwriting looks authentically 18th-century (and far beyond Smith’s normal penmanship), that strongly reduces the probability of Smith’s authorship.

Pro-forgery argument: Stephen Carlson (2005) claimed to detect suspicious signs in the letter’s script that it was not a natural hand. He reported seeing a “forger’s tremor” – shaky, drawn-looking letters with pen lifts mid-stroke – in the printed photographs of the manuscript. Such tremor could indicate an imitator slowly drawing letters rather than writing fluently. Carlson took this as evidence that “the letters had not actually been written at all, but drawn” by a modern forger. He argued that the forger was Smith, who supposedly left secret clues in the handwriting as well. For instance, Carlson speculated that Smith had forged another brief inscription in the same book (a back-of-book note mentioning a certain “M. Madiotes”) as a kind of “signature.” According to Carlson, M. Madiotes was a play on Greek words meaning “Mr. Baldy Swindler,” pointing to Smith (who was balding). These claims, if true, would increase the probability of Smith’s guilt. However, we must stress that Carlson’s analysis was later refuted by multiple scholars – undermining the strength of this evidence, as we’ll see below.

Counter-evidence: In 2009, the Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) commissioned two independent handwriting experts to evaluate the letter: one a forensic document examiner and the other a senior Greek paleographer. The results were illuminating. The document examiner, Venetia Anastasopoulou, compared high-resolution scans of the Mar Saba letter with known samples of Smith’s handwriting (both English and Greek, from 1930s–1980s). She found three very different hands: (1) the Clement letter’s script, (2) Smith’s normal English handwriting, and (3) Smith’s own Greek handwriting in personal notes. Crucially, the Clement letter was written with “freedom, spontaneity and artistic flair” by a clearly well-practiced scribe, whereas Smith’s Greek writing (from notebooks and marginalia) looked like that of “a school student” – labored and not fluid. Smith was competent in Greek as a reader, but Anastasopoulou observed he was not comfortable writing long passages in cursive Greek. Her professional conclusion: “with high probability, [Morton] Smith could not have produced the handwriting of the Clement letter.” In addition, she reported that the manuscript lacked all typical signs of a modern forgery. The writing showed natural variation and good line quality throughout – no indication of slow, drawn fake penmanship. In fact, the consistency of the script across three full pages suggested to her a genuine hand of an era, not an artifice.

On the other hand, the paleographer, Agamemnon Tselikas, reached a different verdict. Tselikas did feel the letter might be an imitation of 18th-century script rather than an authentic sample. He pointed out a few letterforms that looked “irregular” or out-of-place in genuine 1700s monastic handwriting. He also thought the writing at times lacked the continuous flow of a truly fluent scribe. Tselikas thus opined that the letter was likely a forgery modeled on 18th-c style, and he guessed the forger could have been Smith or someone working with him. Notably, he speculated that Smith might have copied forms from actual 18th-century manuscripts he saw at another monastery in 1951. However, this theory was later undermined: researcher Allan Pantuck checked Smith’s archives and confirmed Smith never photographed those particular manuscripts, making it unlikely he had exemplars to trace or imitate. Given Smith’s own lack of calligraphic skill, if Tselikas is right that the letter was penned in a practiced 18th-c style, then as scholar Michael Kok wryly notes, “the conspiracy theory must grow to include an accomplice with training in eighteenth-century Greek paleography.”. In other words, one must postulate that Smith enlisted a partner – because Smith alone simply didn’t have the hand for it. This necessarily lowers the prior probability of the Smith-forgery hypothesis, making it more complex (two perpetrators instead of one) and leaving more points of potential failure for the conspirators. No evidence of any accomplice has ever surfaced, nor did Smith ever hint at such a person, except in the imaginative reading of his dedication “to the one who knows.”

Beyond the expert reports, subsequent research vindicated Anastasopoulou’s skepticism of Carlson’s “forger’s tremor.” It turns out Carlson’s study was based on halftone reproductions of the manuscript printed in Smith’s 1973 book. Those printed plates were composed of dot matrices, which can create optical illusions of shakiness when magnified. When scholars Roger Viklund and Timo Paananen re-examined the actual high-resolution photographs of the manuscript, they found that all of Carlson’s supposed tremors disappeared – the letters were in fact smooth and consistent, not “drawn” irregularly. In short, the forensic/handwriting evidence tilts strongly against the idea that Smith forged the letter. The only credentialed document examiner to assess it formally concluded it was virtually impossible for Smith to have written that script, and the apparent anomalies noted by others have been largely explained or require contrived scenarios (like accomplices).

Bottom line: If we assign probabilities based on handwriting alone, the chance that Smith single-handedly produced the Mar Saba manuscript pages is very low. Either the text is a genuine 18th-century copy (as it appears), or if it’s a modern fake, the forger had an extraordinary grasp of Greek paleography far beyond Smith’s demonstrated ability. As Helmut Koester put it, Morton Smith “was not a good form-critical scholar” and it “would have been completely beyond his ability to forge a text” with such perfect stylistic and paleographic imitation. Koester, who knew Smith and even pored over the manuscript with him in the 1960s, recalled that Smith struggled to decipher it, commenting: “Obviously, a forger would not have had the problems that Morton was struggling with. Or Morton Smith was an accomplished actor and I a complete fool.”. Koester’s sarcastic latter option underscores how implausible he found the notion of Smith secretly being a master forger.

Complexity of the Text: Clementine Style and Scholarly Skill Required

Another angle in evaluating Smith’s possible guilt is the content and style of the letter and the embedded gospel excerpts. If Smith forged these, he had to mimic (or invent) several distinct textual voices: (1) the writing style and vocabulary of Clement of Alexandria, a learned 2nd-century church father; and (2) a plausible “gospel” segment in the style of Mark. Achieving a hoax that passes muster under scholarly scrutiny in these areas would require immense erudition and craft. How likely is it that Smith pulled this off?

Evidence of authenticity or high skill: Many Clement experts have noted that the letter’s Greek style and thought align quite closely with Clement’s genuine works. There are distinctive Clementine phrases and concepts in the letter, and even the way the Secret Mark story is told resonates with narrative techniques of the canonical Gospel of Mark (such as intercalation, use of certain keywords, etc.). If Clement didn’t write it, the forger had to be intimately familiar with Clement’s writings and capable of blending that style with a Markan Gospel pastiche. Morton Smith was indeed an expert in ancient texts, but even his detractors acknowledge that forging something that “fools” other experts on style would be an extraordinary achievement. Scholar Jacob Neusner (ironically a friend-turned-critic of Smith) remarked that if the letter were a modern forgery, it would qualify as “one of the greatest works of scholarship of the twentieth century” – implying that producing such a perfect Clementine imitation was nearly beyond belief. Bart Ehrman (a prominent textual scholar who has leaned toward forgery in his opinions) similarly stated that a hoax of this caliber would be “astonishing” in its learned ingenuity. In other words, even those open to the forgery theory admit it would reflect an almost superhuman scholarly feat by Smith.

Supporters of authenticity (or at least non-Smith authorship) stress that Smith’s known scholarly strengths do not lie in creative imitation of ancient styles. Koester’s quote above notes Smith wasn’t a particularly adept form-critical analyst, which casts doubt on his ability to invent a missing piece of Mark’s Gospel that so neatly mirrors Mark’s narrative patterns. Charles Hedrick and others have pointed out that the Secret Mark story fragment slots into Mark 10 in a way that makes literary sense (it even forms a “Markan sandwich” structure around the intervening verses). For a modern person to achieve this undetected would require not just general knowledge, but specific talent in aping Mark’s Greek style, which is something even seasoned scholars would find hard to do without leaving telltale anachronisms or slips.

Arguments from opponents: Nevertheless, forgery proponents have argued that Secret Mark conveniently reflects themes that preoccupied Smith, suggesting he could have tailor-made the text to support his ideas. For instance, before 1958 Smith had studied topics like “the mystery of the kingdom of God” (Mark 4:11), initiation rituals, and attitudes toward forbidden sexual behaviors in antiquity. Stephen Carlson and Craig Evans both asserted that the letter’s salient elements – secret mystical teaching, a possible homoerotic undercurrent, and Clement of Alexandria as the mouthpiece – corresponded too neatly to Smith’s prior interests and research, as if he created a text that validated ideas he already “embraced.” Evans noted that Smith had published papers in the early 1950s on topics like secrecy in Mark and Clement’s concept of secrecy, which could be seen as “prepping” the very scenario found in the Mar Saba letter. Furthermore, Peter Jeffery argued that the letter contains liturgical and allegorical hints that only a 20th-century mind would introduce – for example, he interpreted the text’s mention of the young man “wearing a linen cloth over his naked body” and staying overnight with Jesus as a veiled 20th-century-style double entendre with a homosexual implication. In Jeffery’s view, “the letter reflected practices and theories of the twentieth century, not the second”, and he accused Smith of crafting it to insinuate that Jesus performed homosexual rites. If true, this would mean Smith injected an anachronistic concept into the text, which might betray modern authorship.

Rebuttal to opponents: Scott Brown and Allan Pantuck have methodically refuted the “Smith tailored it to his pet themes” argument. First, they point out that the alleged homoerotic content is overblown – the text itself nowhere explicitly describes any sexual act or love between Jesus and the youth other than the youth “looking at Jesus, loved him” in a spiritual sense. Clement even emphasizes (in the letter) that Carpocratians added illicit phrases (“naked man with naked man”) which the authentic secret gospel did not contain. Thus, if one reads the letter at face value, it is denying overt sexual content in the gospel story. Brown notes that Smith himself hardly dwelt on homosexuality in his analysis – across two books, Smith gave only a few lines to that topic, and never claimed Jesus was gay. So the notion that Smith forged the letter as part of a “gay agenda” finds little support in Smith’s own writings. Even scholar William Harris (who was initially skeptical of the letter) criticized Jeffery for “confusing the question of the authenticity of the text with the validity of Smith’s interpretations” – basically saying Jeffery attacked Smith’s character and speculation rather than proving the text is fake. Harris also dismissed Jeffery’s claim that “no young Judaean man would approach an older man for sex” as irrelevant, since Secret Mark nowhere states such a thing in the first place.

Regarding Smith’s prior research themes, Brown and Pantuck showed that this connection is weaker than critics allege. They reviewed Smith’s early publications (1951, 1955, 1958) and found that nowhere did Smith tie together all the elements that appear in the Mar Saba letter. For example, in Smith’s 1951 dissertation, he discussed Mark 4:11 (the “mystery of the kingdom”) and secret teachings, but did not link these to forbidden sexual topics – the latter was just one category among many where rabbis mandated discretion, not an obsession of Smith’s work. In his 1955 article, he again talked about secrecy in early Christianity without any focus on homosexuality. And a 1958 article by Smith mentioned Clement of Alexandria in passing (on esoteric teaching) but did not tie Clement to any notion of suppressed gay narratives or the like. In short, the retrospective claim that “Smith needed a text like this to prove his theories” is not really supported by Smith’s bibliography – there was no grand theory of a gay Jesus or a Carpocratian initiation that Smith was championing before. The letter arguably led Smith to some new conjectures (like Jesus as a libertine mystic, which he explored), rather than the other way around. Indeed, Pantuck notes that in some cases Smith even changed his views in light of the letter, rather than forcing the letter to fit pre-existing views. This is the opposite of what we’d expect if he had concocted the letter to “prove” a point.

Another critical observation: If Smith were forging the text to bolster specific theories, he did a surprisingly poor job of capitalizing on it. For instance, Smith’s controversial idea (in his 1973 analysis) that Jesus practised an esoteric ascent rite with the youth – an idea many found far-fetched – is not actually explicit in the letter at all. The letter’s content is quite tame: Jesus teaches the risen young man “the mysteries of the Kingdom of God,” which Clement insists were not licentious in nature. If Smith’s goal was to plant evidence for a libertine, magical Jesus, one would think he’d forge a more overtly scandalous or detailed text. As scholar Eckhard Rau observed, if Smith really forged the letter, he should have been able to make it more suitable for his own theories. The relatively bland content doesn’t scream modern hoax; it actually left Smith having to speculate and read between the lines to derive any sensational implications – not the obvious strategy of a hoaxer with a point to prove. This inconsistency – the letter not perfectly serving Smith’s purported motives – weakens the case for Smith’s authorship. It suggests the text was not simply conjured as a means to an end (or at least, not Smith’s end).

Summary: The internal textual evidence and required skill level do not favor Smith as the most likely author. To accept Smith as forger, one must believe he perfectly imitated Clement’s style and Markan literary structure (something experts say would be “beyond” him), all while restraining himself from making the text explicitly prove any modern thesis (thus relying on very subtle clues that many scholars didn’t even interpret the way Carlson/Jeffery did). It’s a scenario of a hyper-competent yet curiously restrained forger – possible, but not terribly plausible. Meanwhile, the alternative – that Smith found a text whose ideas overlapped with some interests of his – could be chalked up to coincidence or confirmation bias. After all, scholars often gravitate to discoveries relevant to their fields of inquiry; if a specialist in mysticism finds a mystical text, that’s not so shocking.

Morton Smith’s Behavior and Circumstances: Opportunity and Motive Revisited

Opportunity: Morton Smith’s presence at Mar Saba in the summer of 1958 certainly gave him opportunity to perpetrate a hoax – he was alone with the library books for periods of time and had permission to catalog them. Critics note that no one else saw the letter in person until years later, meaning Smith could have fabricated it on site. However, there are some logistical challenges: To forge it in situ, Smith would need to have brought with him the necessary ink (that would pass as 18th-century), a quill or appropriate pen, and perhaps even blank pages or a way to insert them. The letter was written on the endpapers (blank flyleaves) of a printed book from 1646. If Smith planned a forgery, he must have intentionally chosen that book (the Vossius edition of Ignatius’ letters) as the host. Interestingly, one of Quesnell’s observations was that this Vossius book was not listed in a 1910 catalog of the Mar Saba library that Smith consulted. From this, Quesnell insinuated the book might have been brought from outside (perhaps by Smith). Smith counter-argued that the 1910 catalog was incomplete – indeed he found nearly 500 books during his stay, while the catalog listed only 191. So the absence of one book proves little; it could well have been at Mar Saba unlisted, or transferred to Mar Saba later (between 1910 and 1958) by the Jerusalem patriarchate. In any case, “opportunity” is hard to quantify – yes, Smith had the chance, but so would any unsupervised researcher who wished to plant something. Opportunity alone doesn’t equal guilt, but it is a prerequisite.

Motive: This is where the discussion often turns speculative and, frankly, personal. Detractors have cast Morton Smith’s possible motives in terms of malice or mischief – e.g., asserting that because Smith was homosexual and perhaps frustrated with the Church’s views, he wanted to embarrass Christianity by suggesting a gay Jesus. Indeed, one interpretation (Donald Akenson’s colorful remark) was that Smith pulled off “a nice ironic gay joke at the expense of all the self-important scholars”. However, this conjecture is largely built on psychological guesswork and the presumption that the text is making a gay joke – which, as discussed, is dubious. Others have suggested Smith was motivated by a desire for fame or scholarly legacy, essentially creating a sensational find to make a name for himself. It’s true the discovery did put Smith in the spotlight in 1960s and ’70s; he wrote a popular book about it and a scholarly tome, and he undoubtedly enjoyed the intrigue it caused. But one must consider that if exposure was his aim, forging a document is an awfully risky and unethical way to go about it, especially for a scholar of good standing. Smith would have known that if ever unmasked, his career and reputation would be utterly destroyed. And unlike some hoaxers, Smith did not pursue continued fraudulent activity or show a pattern of deceit in other matters – by all accounts he was a rigorous, if eccentric, academic.

It’s also worth noting how Smith handled the discovery: He waited over a decade to publish the scholarly edition (from 1958 to 1973), spending time analyzing it thoroughly and even sending photographs to a few other scholars for input. This slow, methodical publication is what one might expect from a genuine find that an academic wants to get right – a hoaxer might either rush to press for glory or, conversely, avoid peer input. Smith did neither; he toiled on it in private, but he wasn’t secretive to a fault. He deposited copies of the photos with institutions; he openly discussed the text with experts like Gershom Scholem and Helmut Koester in the 1960s. In 1976, other scholars (Guy Stroumsa and colleagues) even saw the letter firsthand at Mar Saba, and a careful color photography session in 1970s was eventually published in 2000. These facts weaken the notion of a cunning mastermind guarding his secret. If Smith were the forger, allowing others access to the material would be incredibly daring (they might notice fresh ink, or inconsistencies!). Instead, he seemed genuinely concerned that the manuscript be examined – his greatest lapse was not immediately removing it from Mar Saba (which ironically led to its later disappearance), but he likely lacked permission to do so.

Smith’s personal correspondence, published in 2008, further illuminates his mindset. His long exchange of letters with Scholem shows him wrestling with interpretations and even doubting some of his initial ideas over time. Stroumsa, who edited the correspondence, argued it provides “sufficient evidence of [Smith’s] intellectual honesty to anyone armed with common sense”, showing Smith working through the discovery in real time with no hint of a con. Anthony Grafton concurred that the letters “clearly reflect a process of discovery and reflection,” not a post hoc cover-up. Of course, skeptics like Piovanelli suggest this could be exactly how a “sophisticated forgery” would be promoted – by acting out the part of a puzzled discoverer. But absent concrete smoking-gun evidence, arguing that Smith was that devious is speculative. Historian Jonathan Klawans rightly notes that letters written by Smith can’t definitively prove or disprove authenticity – a clever forger could lie even to friends. Still, the letters at least show no overt sign of collusion or slip-ups. There’s no cryptic “wink” to Scholem saying “if you only knew what I really did!” – nothing of the sort. If Smith faked it, he maintained the ruse flawlessly in private for decades, which again speaks to an improbably high level of duplicity (and to what end, at that point, as he never confessed or cashed in on a big “gotcha”).

Finally, some circumstantial points often raised: Smith dedicated his scholarly tome to his mentor (Nock) who doubted the text – perhaps as an homage or irony. And the popular book dedication “to the one who knows” remains an enigma. One mundane interpretation is that “the one who knows” might refer to God, or simply be a playful nod to the reader who truly understands the message. Forgery theorists see it as a sly self-congratulation or salute to an accomplice. We simply do not know, but as evidence of guilt it’s extremely flimsy without further context.

In sum, motive and behavior analysis doesn’t yield a clear “portrait of the forger.” Yes, Smith could have had motives (fame, mischief, intellectual challenge), but one can equally argue he had strong motives not to risk everything on a forgery. His subsequent behavior is at least consistent with genuine scholarly interest: he engaged other experts (except those he thought hostile), defended his find vigorously when attacked (even threatening legal action against insinuations of fraud, as with Per Beskow’s book), and never showed signs of trying to suppress investigation – on the contrary, he approved efforts to test the ink and was dismayed when the manuscript went missing beyond his reach. These are not conclusive, but they do tilt the probability away from the caricature of a hoaxer reveling in his con.

Weighing the Probabilities: Smith’s Guilt vs. Alternative Explanations

Bringing all the threads together, we can now attempt a relative probability assessment. It may help to phrase it like this: If we consider all plausible scenarios (authentic ancient letter, ancient/medieval forgery, modern Smith forgery), which is most likely given the evidence?

Authentic ancient letter – Probability: Possible to somewhat likely. Many experts find nothing inherently impossible in the idea that Clement of Alexandria wrote this letter. There are minor puzzles (why no one mentioned this letter or gospel earlier, etc.), but Clement’s works only survive fragmentarily. The letter’s theology and tone fit Clement reasonably well, and even some initial skeptics (e.g., Quesnell, Murgia) conceded that nothing in Smith’s publication definitively proved it fake. If authentic, it means Mark’s longer gospel was a real text, and Clement’s account of it is genuine – a startling but not theoretically impossible addition to Christian literature. This scenario requires no duplicity from anyone in modern times. Its probability hinges on one’s trust in the text’s content and the lack of hard external confirmation (since the manuscript is gone). Scholars are divided here; some lean authentic, others not, leaving this scenario plausible but unproven. It remains on the table as at least as likely as any forgery scenario, if not more so according to Clement specialists.
Ancient or early-medieval forgery (pseudepigraphon) – Probability: Quite plausible. This scenario has gained traction recently (Smith & Landau’s analysis, etc.). It neatly explains why the letter shows up in a monastic setting, echoing Eusebius-era traditions (4th century) about Mark in Alexandria. If a monk around, say, the 4th–8th century wanted to support or condemn certain practices (like secret “brotherhood” ceremonies), penning a letter in the name of Clement referencing a secret gospel would make sense. The text’s anachronistic assumption about Mark as first bishop of Alexandria is a red flag for Clementine authenticity, but fits a post-Eusebius writer. And Clement’s report of Carpocratians misusing a secret gospel could likewise be a later author’s construction using known patristic sources (Irenaeus, Eusebius). In terms of probability, this scenario also gels with the paleography: the copy is 18th-century, but it could be copying a much older exemplar. This is arguably more likely than a modern forgery because it demands far less of a conspiracy or feat of skill – it assumes normal processes of pseudepigraphic literature in antiquity, which we know were common (many texts falsely attributed to apostles and fathers exist). And importantly, Morton Smith’s involvement here is nil but positive: he found a document that was itself a “forgery,” but he did not create it. Given that experts like Murgia and even Ehrman have entertained this notion (Ehrman in 2003 wrote that if genuine, Secret Mark might be “an ancient but secondary edition… by some group”), the weight of scholarly opinion does not see Smith’s hand as necessary. Geoffrey Smith and Landau explicitly state they do not believe Smith forged it, pointing instead to late antique origins. This scenario seems to have a high probability relative to a modern Smith hoax, especially when combined with the handwriting evidence that points to an authentically old script.
Modern forgery by Smith – Probability: Possible but, on balance, not very likely. After reviewing all the evidence, this hypothesis requires a cascade of unlikely things to be true: that Smith could master Clement’s style and 18th-century Greek penmanship without detection, that he left behind no indisputable anachronism in the text or physical artifact, that he had a strong motive and willingness to risk his career, and that he (and any possible helper) maintained perfect silence about the hoax until death. We’ve seen that many of the specific arguments marshalled to accuse Smith have crumbled over time. For example:
- Carlson’s supposed “hidden jokes” (the Morton Salt reference in the letter’s salt metaphor, the “Madiotes” signature) turned out to be built on misinterpretations. Brown showed the letter never says the salt lost its savor by mixing with an adulterant – that was Carlson’s twist; the Greek actually doesn’t necessarily imply a modern anti-caking scenario at all. And ancient sources show salt could be mixed or go bad in pre-modern ways. Meanwhile, the mysterious M. Madiotes note was found to be unrelated marginalia (likely an 18th-c name “Modestos” when correctly read) that Smith did not invent.
- The “forger’s tremor” evidence simply evaporated under proper imaging.
- Jeffery’s theory of a liturgical homosexual subtext being too modern was convincingly countered; nothing in the letter definitively screams 20th century, and in fact its ideas about secrecy and even the snippet of a secret gospel sound very much like known early Christian themes (secret teachings, apocryphal gospels used by heretics, etc.).
- The one point often touted by skeptics is “means, motive, opportunity.” We grant Smith had the opportunity, and the means in the sense of scholarly knowledge – but did he truly have the means in terms of technical skill? The evidence says probably not (his Greek and paleography were not up to the task). As for motive, beyond conjectures about his personal life or ego, there isn’t a clear tangible benefit he derived. His most heterodox ideas inspired by Secret Mark (like Jesus the magician/libertine) were largely rejected by scholars, and Smith did not become notably wealthy or more professionally advanced because of this discovery – in fact, he faced a lot of skepticism and even ridicule. It gave him notoriety, yes, but also headaches. If it were fame he wanted, forging a fake gospel might just as likely ruin one’s name as make it. The risk/reward balance doesn’t strongly suggest a rational motive.

Thus, while a modern forgery by Smith remains a possibility, it rests on circumstantial and psychological arguments that have alternative explanations. It is not, as some early critics portrayed, the “only logical explanation.” Instead, it is one hypothesis that requires numerous unlikely things to align. By contrast, an older-origin letter (whether by Clement or a later fraud) requires fewer leaps – it fits into known historical patterns of texts and doesn’t demand a modern conspiracy.

To put it another way, if we were to assign rough odds (purely for illustration), one might say the chance that Morton Smith himself forged the Mar Saba letter is relatively low – perhaps on the order of, say, 10-20% given what we now know – whereas the chance that the letter is genuine (or at least not Smith’s doing) constitutes the majority of the probability (80-90%, split between authentic and ancient forgery scenarios). These numbers aren’t scientific, but they reflect the qualitative judgment of many involved scholars. Indeed, after the flurry of accusations in the 2000s, the pendulum in scholarship has somewhat swung back to agnosticism or leaning against Smith’s guilt. By 2009, Biblical Archaeology Review concluded publicly that “Smith, now dead, was innocent.” In that special issue, no scholar was willing to take up the pen to argue Smith’s guilt (Carlson and others declined to contribute), leaving the magazine’s editor to summarize the pro-forgery case without much conviction. Meanwhile, heavyweights like Helmut Koester and Charles Hedrick argued forcefully that the letter should be treated as authentic unless proven otherwise. Koester’s strong belief in Smith’s innocence we have already noted. Hedrick, a respected scholar of Christian apocrypha, also found no compelling evidence of forgery and urged that we study the text for what it reveals, rather than chasing conspiracy theories. Even Pierluigi Piovanelli, one of the few remaining who suspect Smith, concedes that “the majority of Carlson’s claims [for forgery] have been convincingly dismissed” and that no clear joke or smoking gun has been found, which “militate against Carlson’s overly simplistic hypothesis of a hoax.” In other words, the case against Smith is not nearly as iron-clad as it once appeared to some.

Conclusion: Morton Smith’s Guilt – Uncertain and Unlikely as the “Best” Explanation

After extensive review, we find that treating Morton Smith’s forgery of the Letter to Theodore as the “most likely” explanation is not supported by a fair weighing of evidence. It remains one possible scenario, but far from a certain or even the dominant one. Proponents of the forgery hypothesis may personally prefer to think Smith pulled a prank – perhaps because it’s an intriguing story or fits a narrative about maverick scholars – but preference is not proof. Objectively:

The handwriting and forensic evidence leans heavily against Smith’s ability to fake the manuscript.
The literary and statistical analyses of the text have not uncovered definitive anachronisms that point to the mid-20th century; on the contrary, some anomalies point to Late Antiquity, and experts have noted that if it’s a forgery, it’s one of exceptional sophistication – too exceptional, many believe, for Smith.
The thematic coincidences with Smith’s interests can be explained without invoking a hoax (scholars often discover things related to their research – that’s why they look in those places in the first place). And critics arguably overstate those coincidences while ignoring how the text doesn’t straightforwardly support Smith’s theories.
The motive arguments tend to rely on speculative psychology and even ad hominem (e.g., Smith’s sexuality) which do not constitute hard evidence. And ironically, if one thought a closeted gay scholar in the 1950s wanted to advance a gay Jesus theory, Smith’s actual publications don’t bear that out – he never championed such an agenda publicly.
Alternative scenarios (authentic or earlier forgery) have considerable supporting rationale and remove the need for any modern trickery. They allow that the letter could be a genuine historical artifact – which, while still uncertain, is a viable hypothesis that does not impugn Smith at all.

In light of all this, it is indeed, as the user puts it, “one of many possibilities but neither certain nor very likely” that Morton Smith forged Secret Mark. To assert otherwise – to insist that Smith’s guilt is the default or leading explanation – is to discount a great deal of contrary evidence and scholarly opinion. As of now (nearly seven decades after the find), the issue remains a stalemate in some respects, but the burden of proof lies heavily on those accusing Smith of fraud. And that burden has not been met to a degree that justifies the confidence some have displayed.

In probabilistic terms, one would have to assign a relatively low probability to the Smith-forgery hypothesis when considering: (a) how many things would have to go perfectly right for him to succeed and never be caught, and (b) how many experts have failed to find a definitive smoking gun in support of it despite decades of scrutiny. By contrast, giving higher probability to a historical origin (with or without Clement’s actual hand) fits more comfortably with the principle of Occam’s Razor – it doesn’t necessitate a modern hoax scenario that itself raises numerous questions.

To conclude, Morton Smith’s involvement in a forgery of the Letter to Theodore is not supported as the “most likely” outcome by the available evidence. It remains an intriguing possibility in the realm of conjecture, but as a matter of historical analysis, the safer bet – absent new revelations – is that Smith was telling the truth about finding the letter, and that the forgery (if indeed it is one) occurred long before Smith ever set foot in Mar Saba. Accusing a scholar of deliberate fraud is a serious charge, and in this famous case, the charge appears insufficiently proven. As Hershel Shanks summed up after BAR’s investigation, the modern-forgery theory rests on “inadequate grounds”. The relative probabilities favor either Clement or some ancient scribe as the author – not Morton Smith.