Tselikas Research Project - € 3000 to Finally Solve the Mar Saba Mystery

I have been have an ongoing but ultimately indirect dialogue with Agamemnon Tselikas, one of the leading Greek expert in paleography for over two weeks now. I have published a few of our emails here at this blog. Today I called up my friend Harry Tzalas in order to see if Tselikas was annoyed with my recent effort to actually go through the thousands of manuscripts he has personally arranged to be digitally scanned and stored in Athens. Harry laughed and said, quite to the contrary, that Tselikas admired my 'stubbornness' with respect to investigating the topic of Mar Saba 65 and only wished he had more time to fully execute the kind of inquiry I was suggesting.

In fact, Harry said, Tselikas said that if I could round up € 3000 he would personally arrange for three of his graduate students to go through the over 10,000 manuscripts in Athens. Tselikas estimated that it would take them about a month to carry out the project to completion. He also said that he thought that there were at least 300 manuscripts there whose handwriting resembled or matched that of Mar Saba 65. As I got off the phone I immediately told my friend Harry that I would start fundraising.

The way I see it, I have over a hundred regular readers of this blog each day. If only half would agree to seriously consider donating € 100 and then half of those fifty people actually forked over the dough, we'd basically have enough money to pay Tselikas to find the matching handwriting samples - or conversely - prove that no matching handwriting samples exist.

Either way, I think it is a great advance over the utterly useless 'deadlock' that the current debate finds itself in - i.e. Stephen Carlson vs. Scott Brown. Let's just pick up where Morton Smith's book left off in 1973 - let's find whether or not a matching handwriting sample exists and let that determine the question of authenticity.

I am counting on at least ten people today to put up a pledge of  € 100.  Come on, people.  This is more important than a bag of groceries.  We're all going to die at some point.  Let's end up making leaving an impression on this place.  There is no better way to spend € 100.