Why are so many older members of religious academia willing to believe that one of the most respected scholars of the twentieth century was capable of producing a seventeenth-century “fake” of a letter supposedly written by Clement of Alexandria to a certain Theodore?
That question has fascinated me more than anything else during the twenty years I have spent studying this controversy.
My basic assumption about life is not especially charitable: people lie. People exaggerate. People routinely represent their abilities as being far greater than they actually are. So, in theory, I should be predisposed to accept the idea that Morton Smith lied about his 1958 discovery of a seventeenth-century copy of what purported to be a second-century letter of Clement.
And yet I don’t.
What interests me is why so many leading scholars of the generation immediately following Smith’s death in 1991 became attracted to such an extraordinary theory.
I think part of the answer is that it allows them to avoid looking in the mirror.
Turning Morton Smith into an all-powerful scholarly supervillain creates the comforting possibility that the people who supposedly exposed him must themselves possess extraordinary powers. They become something more than mere philologists—people who study ancient words, manuscripts, and texts.
Consider Bart Ehrman. I have read his dissertation on Didymus the Blind. It is detailed, serious, and nuanced. It is also light-years away from anything that would interest most people. Ehrman subsequently built an enormously successful career by extracting interesting questions from what can otherwise be the rather dry landscape of early Christian studies.
But nothing he discovered during his career remotely compares, in historical importance, with what Morton Smith claimed to have found at Mar Saba: the Letter to Theodore.
There are at least two ways someone in Ehrman’s position might confront that fact. He could simply say: “I never made a discovery comparable to Morton Smith’s.” Or he could take the sour-grapes approach of Aesop’s fox: what cannot be attained must somehow be worthless.
In my view, Ehrman chose something closer to the second approach.
Do I think everyone who rejects the authenticity of To Theodore is simply reenacting Aesop’s fox, deciding that whatever he or she could never attain must therefore be sour? No. Not necessarily.
Indeed, in one respect I would distinguish Ehrman from some of his peers. I do not see his position as being driven by the kind of hostility toward homosexuality that, in my view, contaminated parts of the discussion after Smith’s death. Some scholars were willing to entertain arguments in which Smith’s sexuality became entangled with allegations of forgery in ways that I have always found deeply troubling.
But what, then, binds Ehrman to the broader forgery camp?
I think it is the transformation of Morton Smith into a “supervillain.” Once Smith becomes a scholar capable of constructing an astonishingly sophisticated historical hoax, the people who detect that hoax acquire a corresponding aura of scholarly brilliance. The adjective super migrates from the villain to the detectives pursuing him.
That dynamic matters even more now, with the advent of AI.
Many of the techniques that once made academic writing appear forbiddingly sophisticated can now be examined rapidly by people outside the guild. Arguments can be broken down, sources compared, methodological sleights of hand identified, and mountains of scholarly prose reduced to their actual claims. Quite often, what remains is considerably less impressive than the original performance suggested. As Wieland Willker once memorably put it, a great deal of scholarship amounts to “hot air.”
And this is where Morton Smith becomes genuinely dangerous—not as a forger, but as an example.
Suppose Smith really did discover the Letter to Theodore but fundamentally misinterpreted it.
That possibility is far more unsettling than forgery.
Because if Morton Smith—one of the most formidable scholars of his generation—could completely fuck up his analysis of To Theodore, what does that imply about the other ten thousand studies devoted to far less consequential questions in the same field?
That, I think, is why some advocates of the forgery hypothesis are so reluctant to allow any daylight between Smith’s discovery and Smith’s interpretation of it. If the text is authentic but Smith’s exegesis was wrong, then the lesson is not that one uniquely devious scholar fooled everybody.
The lesson is that great scholars can be spectacularly wrong.
And once you admit that, a much more uncomfortable possibility appears: perhaps a considerable portion of the field consists not of accumulated certainty, but of confident interpretations built upon other confident interpretations—many of which may ultimately be little more than hot air.
The forgery theory offers a cleaner story. Smith forged the document; the detectives exposed him; scholarship triumphs.
The alternative is much messier.
Morton Smith made an extraordinary discovery—and then fucked up what it meant.
