Craig Evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark: Exploring the Grounds for Doubt

5 Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark exploring the Grounds for Doubt Scott G. Brown and Allan J. Pantuck Craig Evans has produced a well-written and comprehensive explication of his latest grounds for doubting the authenticity of the Letter to heodore. In this reply, we examine each of his main arguments with the same degree of scepticism espoused by Evans and show that his grounds for doubt are themselves groundless. The AMuSInG AGrAPhon Evans’s case against the authenticity of the Letter to heodore begins with a look at a probable hoax by Paul R. Coleman-Norton consisting of a lost saying of Jesus that he published in an article titled “An Amusing Agraphon.”1 Allegedly a response to one of Jesus’ references to that place where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, the saying runs as follows: 1. Coleman-Norton, “An Amusing Agraphon.” 101 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? And, behold, a certain one of his disciples standing by said unto him: “Rabbi (which is to say, being interpreted, Master), how can these things be, if they be toothless?” And Jesus answered and said: “O thou of little faith, trouble not thyself; if haply they will be lacking any, teeth will be provided.”2 Although Coleman-Norton reported that he witnessed a manuscript that contains this humorous saying in a town in Morocco, ater his death, Bruce Metzger, one of his former students, claimed that Coleman-Norton told a form of this joke to his students at Princeton prior to the alleged discovery.3 Evans cites this incident as a case of knowing the discovery before inding it and uses it to illustrate the principle that forgery must be suspected whenever a discovery substantiates the ideas of its discoverer or relects that person’s interests. hat such was the case with Morton Smith and the Letter to heodore is a recurring theme of Evans’s paper. Before making this argument, Evans pauses to propose that James Hunter’s novel he Mystery of Mar Saba4 “may well have provided Coleman-Norton with the scenario needed to introduce his spurious agraphon to the public (at least to a public somewhat wider than his Princeton class room)” (p. 81). Evans acknowledges that Coleman-Norton’s alleged discovery occurred in a location that is very diferent from the setting of the manuscript discovery in Hunter’s book, but surmises, “Coleman-Norton chose North Africa, instead of Mar Saba, for the setting because that was where he was stationed in 1943. But the rest of the details are a match with the novel: Greek text, ofering new material relating to Jesus, found in an old book amongst rare books in a religious establishment” (p. 75). Evans elaborated this characterization of the similarities between the two inds a bit earlier, describing both texts as isolated leafs of Greek text found among old books: Princeton University Associate Professor of Latin Paul Coleman-Norton published a leaf of Greek text that he says he found sandwiched between pages of an old Arabic book in a mosque 2. As translated by Coleman-Norton, ibid., 443 n. 18. 3. Coleman-Norton himself noted the existence of a modern version of this joke (ibid., 444 n. 21). In its contemporary form, a preacher’s dire warning of weeping and gnashing of teeth elicits the inappropriately rational question, forcing the preposterously serious response “Teeth will be provided.” hat joke is at least as old as 1885. It appears in the magazine Our Corner 5 (1 February 1885) 120 (edited by Annie Besant and published in London by Freethought Pub. Co.). 4. Hunter, Mystery of Mar Saba. 102 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark in North Africa, where he was stationed in 1943 while serving in the US Army during World War II. (p. 78) To undermine the morale of the British Empire the Nazis plant a leaf of Greek text amongst the rare books in the Mar Saba Monastery’s collection, a text that an honest British scholar would subsequently discover. (p. 81) hese similarities in the discoveries are not very strong, but they are essential to Evans’s proposal, for without them there is nothing to suggest that Coleman-Norton read Hunter’s book. When you check that book itself, however, you ind that Evans’s description is mostly erroneous. Evans describes the ictional forgery, called the Shred of Nicodemus, as “a leaf of Greek text” that was “plant[ed] . . . amongst the rare books in the Mar Saba Monastery’s collection” for Sir William Bracebridge to “discover.” In Hunter’s story, however, a monk simply hands Bracebridge a stash of manuscripts that he himself pretended to discover “in an old chapel buried behind a movable stone.”5 his is how Hunter presents the situation. He irst describes the instructions that Heimworth, the mastermind behind the deception, gives to a monk: “Is everything in readiness?” “Ja.” “You have all the manuscripts?” he other nodded. “Put this one among them. You know your instructions. If Sir William asks any questions you know nothing except that the manuscripts have been here to the best of your knowledge since the monastery was built, and must have been overlooked when the others were removed.[”]6 Bracebridge’s time at the monastery is not narrated. Instead, Hunter later has Bracebridge recount the discovery to the chief of the Palestinian police, Colonel Alderson: He [Alderson] turned from the window and came back to his seat. “May we see the manuscript, Sir William?” he archaeologist nodded, and opened a brief case he had in his hand. “By the way,” said Alderson, “how did you discover it?” 5. Ibid., 281. 6. Ibid., 235. 103 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? “In almost the same way in which Tischendorf found the Sinaiticus. One of the monks found them in an old chapel buried behind a movable stone. hey took them out, and being unable to read them, and hearing I might be coming there, kept them for me. I am acting, as you know, for the British Museum, and I told them we would likely buy them from them.”7 Evans is correct that both accounts involve a single page of Greek containing new material about Jesus. Apart from that parallel, which itself resembles several real discoveries, the parallels are not real, so neither are the grounds for suggesting that Coleman-Norton was inspired by Hunter’s book. The ProFeSSor who knew Too MuCh Evans’s erroneous description of how Bracebridge inds the Shred of Nicodemus in he Mystery of Mar Saba is also important to Evans’s case against Smith, for Evans goes on to note that the story of discovery in Hunter’s novel is just like Smith’s account of his own discovery: My brief summation of the novel he Mystery of Mar Saba probably brought to the minds of most readers Morton Smith’s account of his discovery of three pages of Greek text penned in the back of an old book amongst a number of old and rare books and papers in a religious establishment, this time the very establishment and setting of the novel: the Mar Saba Monastery. (p. 81) It would not be surprising if Evans’s summation of Hunter’s novel reminds his readers of Smith’s account of his discovery, because Smith’s account appears to be the basis for Evans’s misrepresentation of Hunter’s book. Evans goes on to note that “In the real-life story the discovery is made by Professor Morton. In the novel the truth of the discovery is made by Scotland Yard inspector Lord Moreton” (p. 81). his alleged parallel is puzzling, for Professor Smith had the name Morton for twenty-ive years before Hunter published his novel. It is really only Evans’s utilization of parallel sentence structure, made possible by a sliding use of the word “discovery” and the substitution of Smith’s irst name for his last name, that creates the impression of a parallel. In any event, it is not Lord Moreton who discovers the truth about the manuscript. he hero Medhurst learns 7. Ibid., 281–82. 104 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark the true situation directly from the forger Yphantis sixty pages before Lord Moreton learns the news, which he merely receives from Alderson over the phone.8 here was no detective-like discovery, and Lord Moreton is not even an active inspector (note the title Lord) but “Chief of the Metropolitan Police.”9 Evans inds these parallels “interesting” and a bit “troubling” (p. 81). So do we. hese parallels lead up to Evans’s principal objection to the letter’s authenticity: “what I ind most troubling is that themes of interest to Professor Smith, as seen in his publications before the inding of the Clementine letter, are found in the Clementine letter. And these are not just themes of interest to Professor Smith; they are quite unusual themes and, apart from Professor Smith himself, they are themes advanced by no one else” (pp. 81–82). Evans speciies two such unusual themes, namely, “(1) he ‘mystery of the kingdom of God’ and prohibited sex, and (2) Markan materials omitted from Mark that exhibit Johannine traits” (pp. 87–87). At the conclusion of this section, however, he lists ive themes: Prior to the discovery of the Clementine letter at the Mar Saba Monastery Smith had published three studies (1951, 1955, 1958) in which he discusses (1) Mark 4:11 (“the mystery of the kingdom of God”), (2) secrecy and initiation, (3) forbidden sexual relationships, including union with a god, (4) omitted Markan material with Johannine traits, and (5) Clement of Alexandria (usually in reference to his Stromateis), who believed it was necessary to omit some of Jesus’ secret (potentially ofensive) teaching. (X-ref) Later on, Evans similarly refers to “the remarkable coincidence of the ive elements Smith brought together in earlier publications also appearing together in Smith’s Mar Saba ind” (p. 94). Since the reader is likely to be confused about what Evans is claiming to demonstrate in this section, we should explain that in the paper he presented at the symposium, he argued that Smith had “linked” together (not just “discuss[ed]”) points 1, 2, 3, and 5 in all three of these pre-ind publications, which is something that could indeed be described as “quite unusual” and even unique—were it in fact true. It is not, and Evans has since revised his argument in response to the concise reply that Pantuck delivered during the symposium, but some 8. Ibid., 344–45 (cf. 386–87), 404. Craig S. Keener borrows Evans’s error about Lord Moreton in Historical Jesus of the Gospels, 60. 9. Hunter, Mystery of Mar Saba, 303. 105 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? traces of the earlier thesis remain. he present, fuller reply now responds to the revised argument that Evans submitted for this book. Evans irst argues that “Smith linked Mark 4:11 (‘To you is given the mystery of the kingdom of God . . .’) with secrecy and forbidden sexual activity” (p. 82). For evidence he quotes part of a paragraph of Smith’s 1951 book Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels.10 In the reproduction of this passage below, the words in gray are ones that Evans omitted using ellipses: Further I think the passage in Sifre on Deut. to have been based on the fact that an important part of primitive Christianity was a secret doctrine which was revealed only to trusted members. Such a doctrine is suggested by the words put in the mouth of Jesus, speaking to his disciples: “To you is given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but to those outside all things are in parables, that they may surely see and not perceive,” etc. And Paul himself wrote in I Cor. 2.1–6 “And I, coming to you, brethren, came not proclaiming the testimony of God in loty words or wisdom . . . that your faith might not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. But we speak wisdom among the perfect, and a wisdom not of this age . . . but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery.” A similar distinction was recognized by the Tannaïm between material suitable for public teaching and that reserved for secret teaching, as we learn from Hagigah T 2.1 (233): “he (passages of the Old Testament dealing with) forbidden sexual relationships are not to be expounded to three (at a time,) but may be expounded to two; and the account of creation not to two, but it may be expounded to a single hearer; and (Ezekiel’s vision of) the chariot may not be expounded to a single hearer unless he be learned in the Law and of good understanding.” he paragraph continues beyond this quotation. On this passage Evans comments, “Smith’s linkage of the saying about the ‘mystery of the kingdom of God’ (Mark 4:11) to secrecy and teaching regarding forbidden sexual relationships is to the best of my knowledge unique. Gospel scholars agree that Mark 4:11 its awkwardly in its context and debate what the original meaning was. But only Smith links it to sex; I know of no commentator prior to the time of Smith (or ater, for that matter) who has done this” (p. 83). Although Evans does not explain what he means by the words “linkage” and “links,” he clearly intends his quotation to demonstrate that, in 10. Smith, Tannaitic Parallels, 155–56. 106 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark Smith’s mind, the mystery of the kingdom of God is somehow associated with forbidden sex. And certainly someone reading Evans’s abbreviated quotation might get that impression. But someone who sees the full quotation will be apt to form a diferent impression of what Smith is saying. Most notably, one sees that the reference to Toseta, tractate Hagigah 2.1 is not concerned speciically with the Torah’s regulations concerning forbidden sexual relations (i.e., incest, intercourse during menstruation, adultery, homosexuality, and bestiality) but with all the scriptures that the Tannaïm thought should be discussed in secret. If we follow Evans’s logic, then, we would have to infer that Smith “linked” the mystery of the kingdom of God to all of them. he unsuitability of that notion to Evans’s argument readily accounts for the abrupt end of his quotation.11 Smith’s actual point becomes apparent when all the omitted words are put back in. Smith is illustrating the fact that both the Christians and the Tannaïm drew a distinction between exoteric and esoteric teaching. Smith chose Mark 4:11 and 1 Cor 2:1–7 as familiar and explicit examples of the public/private distinction, without implying that Mark and Paul were talking about the same matters that the Tannaïm taught in private.12 he second pre-discovery paper that Evans cites is Smith’s 1955 review of Vincent Taylor’s commentary on the Gospel of Mark.13 Evans inds in this article evidence that Smith interpreted Mark 4:11 as a secret rite. Speciically, Evans states, “Smith vigorously challenges Taylor’s denial that Mark 4:11 envisioned secret rites” (p. 83). We ind no support for this statement in Smith’s article, but its actual source was not hard to locate. Evans’s argument in this section relies heavily on Quentin Quesnell’s characterizations of these pre-1958 articles, and on this subject Quesnell wrote, “He [Smith] insisted against Taylor that 11. Evans is making the same point as Carlson, Gospel Hoax, 71–72, with the same ellipses. he diference is that Evans also adds ellipses at the beginning and omits more words using the middle ellipses. Quesnell had similarly summarized this passage in “Mar Saba Clementine,” 60. Scott G. Brown already responded to this misrepresentation in “he More Spiritual Gospel,” 112–13; and Brown, “Factualizing the Folklore,” 322–25. Evans has added to the inal, published form of his paper a paragraph describing the parts that he omitted from the quotation, but this sequestering of the elements contained in the ellipses does not address our point that their unnecessary removal from the quotation is the very thing that creates the impression that Smith linked Mark 4:11 with sex. 12. Other scholars who have discussed this page of Smith’s Tannaitic Parallels have better understood his point. See Jónsson, Humour and Irony in the New Testament, 180–81; Nock, “Hellenistic Mysteries and Christian Sacraments,” 207. 13. Smith, “Comments on Taylor’s Commentary on Mark.” 107 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? the mysterion of Mk 4:11 could connote ‘secret rites’ as well as ‘esoteric knowledge communicated to “initiates.”’”14 he diference between the two statements is interesting. Quesnell pictures Smith insisting that the mystery of the kingdom of God could involve secret rites as well as esoteric knowledge, whereas Evans pictures Smith insisting that this mystery involves only secret rites. In any case, the present authors see no indication that Smith argued against Taylor that the mystery of the kingdom of God refers to secret rites. Smith’s three-page discussion is too long to reproduce here, so we will instead present a summary of Smith’s arguments and ask the reader to compare it against Smith’s discussion. Smith is responding to the following statements written by Taylor: In the NT, and especially in the Pauline Epp., it [μυστήριον] means an “open secret” made known by God, and is used of the Gospel, or the inclusion of the Gentiles. here is no case in which it connotes secret rites or esoteric knowledge communicated to “initiates.” In the present passage [Mark 4:11] and its parallels [in Matthew and Luke], it is used of a knowledge concerning the Kingdom of God which has been imparted to the disciples, but not to the people in general.15 Smith irst remarks that the second and third sentences appear contradictory. He conjectures that Taylor might have intended to use the word “Elsewhere” at the beginning of the irst sentence—that is, to state that although elsewhere in the New Testament μυστήριον means an open secret, here in Mark 4:11 it connotes secret rites or esoteric knowledge communicated to initiates. As an alternative explanation, Smith conjectures that Taylor is not equating the terms disciples and initiates, and therefore is presuming that the knowledge that Mark 4:11 reserves for disciples is not esoteric knowledge (like that of the mysteries) that is communicated to “initiates.” In other words, Smith does not know what Taylor means here. However, he is certain that Taylor’s irst statement that μυστήριον always denotes an open secret in the New Testament is incorrect, and he cites “1 Cor. 2.6 f. 14. Quesnell, “Question of Evidence,” 60. Evans does not cite Quesnell, nor does he mention what Smith wrote in reply to this statement in Smith, “On the Authenticity,” 198. Smith wrote, “Quesnell says (p. 60 and n. 28) that I ‘insisted against Taylor that the mystērion of Mk 4:11 could connote “secret rites.”’ his statement, too, is false. In the passage he cites—HTR 48 (1955) 29, contradicting Taylor’s claim that mystērion ‘in the NT . . . means an “open secret” . . . here is no case in which it connotes secret rites,’—I said nothing of secret rites, but merely insisted that traditions about Jesus’ secrecy may be partially accurate.” 15. Taylor, Gospel according to St. Mark, 255. 108 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark (cf. 3.1–3); Col. 2.2; Eph. 5.32” as passages that disprove the statement.16 He then adds, “In 1 Cor. Paul says plainly that there is a wisdom which he preaches among the ‘initiate’ (τελείοις), but which he cannot yet preach to the Corinthians because they are still ‘carnal.’ Paul, therefore, claimed to have a secret doctrine.”17 Smith does note that the word “initiate” exists in Paul’s statement, because this word contradicts Taylor’s second sentence, but he does not apply this observation to Mark 4:11 (which does not use the word). He is simply demonstrating that Taylor’s generalizations are contradicted by several passages in the Pauline writings. Smith then returns to the depiction of Jesus privately teaching his disciples a mystery in Mark 4:11. Smith notes that Mark depicts Jesus “as teaching in secret and commanding secrecy on many occasions” and that the reasons for this were likely more diverse than the umbrella motives proposed as solutions to the supposed “Messianic secret”: “Actually, the early Church had a wide variety of motives for attributing secret doctrine to Jesus, and among them may well have been the recollection that Jesus (also for a wide variety of motives) practiced secrecy. Every such attribution, therefore, must be judged individually.”18 To illustrate this point, Smith ofers his own interpretation of Mark 4:11–12. he saying reads, “And he said to them, ‘To you has been given the [mystery] of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven.’” Smith writes: Mk. 4.11–12 is probably an answer to Jewish polemic. he Jews are saying, “Jesus was not the Messiah, because if he had been he would have been recognized by our scholars. He was heard and rejected.” he Christian answer is, “hey never heard his true teaching. He revealed the mysteries of the Kingdom only to his disciples; for outsiders he had only parables. hus he fulilled God’s command to prevent the Jews from believing.”19 his is the point at which Smith starts to argue vigorously. He seems offended by what he sees as Taylor’s apologetic attempt to read 4:12 in a way that evades the implication that God intended the Jews not to believe. Smith’s interpretation of 4:11–12 is obviously important to the question of whether he thought that this saying refers to either sex or secret rites. And 16. 17. 18. 19. Smith, “Comments,” 29. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 29–30. 109 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? we learn some very important things here. First, the logic of Smith’s argument requires “the mysteries” (sic, pl.) to refer to “[Jesus’] true teaching” which, if the Jewish scholars had heard it, would have convinced them that he was the messiah. hus, Smith was thinking of the mysteries of the kingdom of God as teachings, not rites. Second, he thought that this saying emerged ater Jesus’ time, as a Christian answer to Jewish polemic. Smith likely already assumed as much when he wrote Tannaitic Parallels, for he introduced Mark 4:11–12 as “words put in the mouth of Jesus.”20 hird, Smith’s post-Easter origin for these two verses would disqualify “the mystery of the kingdom of God” as evidence pertaining to the life of the historical Jesus.21 Evans does not inform his reader that Smith actually interpreted “the mysteries of the kingdom of God” in his article. Instead, Evans proceeds to link this mystery with “prohibited sexual activities” by speculating about what sort of secrecy Smith was talking about: Jesus “practiced secrecy,” we are told, “for a wide variety of reasons.” What could Smith have had in mind? Could one of those reasons have had to do with teaching regarding prohibited sexual activities, as perhaps hinted at in his dissertation [Tannaitic Parallels]? And as hinted at in subsequent publications, not to mention his remarkable discovery at Mar Saba? (X-ref) his unnecessary speculation about what Smith might have meant evades what Smith actually wrote. Had Evans informed his readers that Smith read Mark 4:11–12 as post-Easter Christian apologetic and that the secrets it implies concern teachings that would have convinced the Jews of Jesus’ messiahship had they heard them, it would be clear to everyone that these secrets do not involve forbidden sexual behaviour. In fact, there is no need to speculate about what Smith might have had in mind, for he discussed Jesus’ secrecy in several places in this article: In [Mark] 4.11 f. the concern is to explain the rejection by the Jews, in 4.34, to discredit outside teachers and justify the disciples’ claim to a monopoly of the true, secret doctrine. (p. 31) Jesus’ failure to produce a sign of his Messiahship was evidently one of the strong points of Jewish polemic . . . it appears that 20. Smith, Tannaitic Parallels, 156 (the same passage from this book that was quoted earlier). 21. hat conclusion would imply that the reference back to 4:11 in the mystic gospel is also unhistorical and that the gospel story Smith discovered cannot be used to reconstruct a rite of the historical Jesus. Cf. Brown, “Factualizing the Folklore,” 324–25. 110 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark even for his followers Jesus did no “sign” during his lifetime. His opponents knew this and made the most of it. . . . His followers . . . may also have tried to contradict it by circulating a story that he gave his “sign” (the Transiguration) in secret to his three most intimate disciples, but forbade them to speak of it till ater his resurrection (Mk. 9.9). (pp. 39–40 n. 26) But it seems easier to explain the apparent distinction [between Jesus and “the Son of man” in Mark 8:38] as a product of one of the secrecy themes of Mk.’s sources (possibly relecting the behavior of Jesus himself). Certainly that is indicated by the structure of 8.27–9.1: Jesus reveals his rank to the disciples by treating Peter’s guess [that Jesus is the Messiah] as correct. He then begins to teach them further secrets about the Messiah, especially his destined sufering. Peter protests. Jesus rebukes him and shuts of any possible questions or objections by calling the crowd and teaching them the same thing, keeping concealed only the identity of the Messiah. (p. 43) In sum: hese two sorts of prediction were current in the early Church. Both were useful. (On the one hand: To us have been revealed the secret signs of the End. On the other: Do not despair, it may come any minute, better repent now.) So both were preserved. (p. 42) he only element of Jesus’ apocalyptic teaching which would certainly have had to be changed, “explained” or suppressed before 70 A.D. would have been a false prophecy of speciic events for a date prior to 70. (Can it be that Jesus’ unusually clear and emphatic refusal, in Mk., to set a date, contradicts some deliberately lost tradition of a date which he did set?). (p. 52 n. 43) herefore they had to explain the somewhat humiliating fact that Jesus had not revealed the exact date, even to his closest followers. hey passed on the humiliation to Jesus and made him explain in Mk. 13.32 that this is a secret kept by the Father to Himself. (pp. 53–54 n. 45) hese statements show us that Smith pictured a situation in which the church had to defend its belief in Jesus’ messiahship against counterarguments from unpersuaded Jews. In Smith’s view, Mark 4:11–12 explains Jewish disbelief in a general way and gives a scriptural rationale for it. he transiguration explains why the Jews did not witness any sign of Jesus’ messiahship and are only hearing about this sign now. Jesus’ rebuke of Peter explains that Jesus never announced his messiahship to the crowds 111 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? but taught them only the doctrine that the messiah would have to sufer. Hence only his disciples knew that Jesus was the messiah. Christians also had secret knowledge of the coming End and appealed to secrecy in order to account for their lack of a date for the End. hese messianic and eschatological secrets are the ones that Smith is actually writing about. Smith himself said as much when Quesnell originally asserted that Smith was talking about secret rites: “I said nothing of secret rites, but merely insisted that traditions about Jesus’ secrecy may be partially accurate. he other passages cited by Quesnell from the same article deal with eschatological and messianic secrets and have nothing to do with any secret rite.”22 So contrary to Evans’s claims, we have found no evidence that Smith thought that the mystery of the kingdom of God referred to either sex or secret rites before 1958, only clear evidence that he did not. At best we can airm that Smith linked the mystery of the kingdom of God to secret teachings here. his should not surprise anyone. Together with Mark 4:33–34, these verses indicate that Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables in order to prevent them from understanding what he was saying, but privately explained everything to his disciples. he notion of secret teachings that Jesus withheld from everyone but his disciples is explicit in the text. We now come to the third paper discussed by Evans, Smith’s essay “he Image of God,” which he wrote in 1955, updated in 1956, and published in 1958.23 Evans points out that Smith mentions both the Hagigah passage from the Toseta and Clement of Alexandria and his Stromateis as examples of esoteric teaching. Evans then devotes a paragraph to demonstrating that “Smith also talks about the initiate’s union with his god” (p. 84). By this Evans means to imply that this 1958 publication contains something resembling the interpretation that Smith later ofered of the mystery of the kingdom of God in the “secret” Gospel of Mark in terms of a rite that produces union with Jesus’ spirit and maybe involves physical union as well. he way Evans argues this point is worth relecting on, for this is one of the few original arguments in his paper and it typiies his use of evidence. First, Evans takes the word “initiate” for the person who unites with his “god” (lowercased, implying something like a pagan god, divine man, 22. Smith, “Authenticity,” 198. 23. Smith, “he Image of God.” he paragraph in question appears on pp. 144–45 of the Brill reprint. (Smith, Studies 1) 112 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark or a magician) from a paragraph on page 488 (of the original publication), which is nineteen pages before the footnote citation of Clement. Here Smith is describing Erwin R. Goodenough’s thesis in Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period24 that Jews in the Greco-Roman world borrowed the language of the mystery religions to describe their understanding of salvation. Smith writes, As to the signiicance of these [archaeological] remains [of Greco-Roman Judaism], Goodenough inds that most of the religious Jews in the Greco-Roman world (which for him includes, as it did in fact, Palestine) were primarily concerned about salvation, by which they meant spiritual peace in this life and the assurance of happiness hereater. To describe this salvation they certainly used the language of the mystery religions and to achieve it, he thinks, they may have adopted some of the mystery rites, particularly those involving a cup of wine which brought some special blessing. hey gave a mystic interpretation to the Sabbath and the festivals and called those who agreed with them “initiates,” as contrasted with those who did not. hat some Jews went further than this, Goodenough says, is possible, but unsubstantiated . . .25 his information illuminates the way Goodenough interpreted the symbolism contained in the archaeological remains of Greco-Roman Judaism. Reading these remains in the light of Philo’s mystical Judaism, Goodenough argued that a similar kind of Judaism existed throughout the Greco-Roman world. According to Smith’s description of Goodenough’s position, the adherents of this mostly hypothetical Judaism referred to themselves as “initiates.” here is no reference to union with a god, and Smith himself is not even endorsing Goodenough’s position. In fact, Smith very clearly pronounced this thesis a failure.26 Smith is not even 24. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, 13 vols. 25. Smith, “Image of God,” 128–29. 26. Smith, “Goodenough’s Jewish Symbols in Retrospect”; see particularly 58–59: “But with his [Goodenough’s] failure to demonstrate the prevalence of a belief in sacramental salvation the main structure of his argument was ruined. hat the Jews commonly took over pagan symbols for a mystic signiicance which those symbols did not commonly have, is incredible. So the borrowing of these symbols cannot commonly be evidence of a mystic Judaism. Individual mystics there doubtless were. Philo may have been one (though Goodenough’s interpretation of him is by no means certain; contrast Wolfson!). But the diiculties in the supposition of a widespread, uniform mystical Judaism are formidable. How did it happen that such a system and practice disappeared without leaving a trace in either Jewish or Christian polemics?” 113 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? responsible for the wording of this description of Goodenough’s position. A letter that Goodenough wrote to Smith reveals that Smith showed this paper to Goodenough prior to publication, and Goodenough edited precisely this paragraph so that it described his position in these exact words.27 So Evans’s citation of the word “initiate” in this context to prove that “Smith also talks about the initiate’s union with his god” in this article is illegitimate on many levels. Evans further notes that in a footnote twenty-seven pages prior to the reference to Clement, “Smith speaks of magical prayers and Jewish mystics, whose favorite prayer was the Qedushah, all of which suggests that ‘the recitation of the Qedushah was conceived as a means of invoking the deity or a result of union with him’” (p. 84). Evans neglects to note that Smith was summarizing the thesis and evidence in a paper by E. Peterson.28 In any event, we must recall that the union that Evans wishes us to picture is sexual (“forbidden sexual relationships, including union with a god”), and Peterson’s theory evidently refers to mystical union with the divine, a well-known spiritual state which does not involve a penis or render one guilty of sexual misconduct. Next, Evans states, “In another context Smith speaks of God uniting with the holy person” (pp. 84–85). In this instance the word “union” does indeed represent an idea that is undeniably Smith’s, but Smith was referring to religious symbols that can have more than one reference, and the word union here refers to a particular symbol that simultaneously represents God and the saint. It is the symbol that unites God and the holy person by representing both simultaneously, not God and the holy person that are united. By no stretch of the imagination could this use of the word union be construed as sexual. In the last of his examples, Evans plumbs another footnote for an indication that Smith associated Jesus with sex. he footnote in question develops the following argument: (1) A. D. Nock believes that a particular Jewish charm noted by Goodenough “cannot be Jewish, because it is part of a technique to obtain Eros as a familiar spirit,” but concedes that it might derive from “a Jew who had wholly or partly abandoned tradition.” (2) Smith objects, “If a Jew could be supposed to invoke Beelzebub, he could be supposed to invoke Eros.” (3) herefore, Smith concludes, the 27. Goodenough, letter to Morton Smith, 5 December 1955. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. 28. Smith, “Image of God,” 121–22 n. 29. 114 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark charm could be Jewish.29 About this argument Evans writes, “Smith’s ‘Jew’ here, of course, is Jesus, whose critics claimed that he had accessed the power of Beelzebul (cf. Matt 12:24; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15), while ‘Eros’ refers to the Greek god of sexual love” (p. 85). In this way Evans inds Smith connecting Jesus to a small-g god of sex. his is certainly the most plausible aspect of this particular argument. he problem with this reasoning, however, is that the two individuals are not the same. For while Jesus is certainly the example of the Jew who was thought by some to be possessed by Beelzebub, the person who “could be supposed to invoke Eros” is the unknown individual who composed the charm. Smith is not suggesting that Jesus authored this charm. He is suggesting that the author could be a Jew. Clearly, Evans’s demonstration that “Smith also talks about the initiate’s union with his god” is a fabrication produced by drawing together scattered, unrelated, and misrepresented words and phrases. Evans now turns to the second unexpected theme that he inds in Smith’s pre-ind writings. Relying on Francis Watson (who is relying on Stephen Carlson),30 Evans writes, he second unusual feature that Smith surmised was that the evangelist Mark may well have omitted materials that contained Johannine traits. In his 1955 review of Taylor’s commentary Smith speaks of the possibility that the evangelist Mark may have omitted material. his, of course, is the point at issue in Clement’s Mar Saba letter—material omitted from the Markan Gospel. Smith also discusses Mark’s use of a source with “Johannine traits.” his is precisely what the irst and long quotation of Secret Mark is—a passage with Johannine traits (cf. John 11, the raising of Lazarus) that had been omitted from public (i.e., canonical) Mark. Watson comments: “Clement’s letter conirms Smith’s surmise that Mark may have ‘deliberately censored’ his source-material, and that this source-material may have included proto-Johannine elements.” (pp. 85–86) here are two elements in this argument with which we agree. First, the Letter to heodore does refer to Mark omitting materials. Second, Smith did draw attention to Johannine qualities in the group of controversy stories in Mark 2:1—3:6 and suggest that at this point Mark may have 29. Ibid., 126 n. 46. 30. Watson, “Beyond Suspicion.” 115 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? used a source that contained “Johannine traits.”31 However, we believe that the rest of this argument is mistaken. Evans inds it suspicious that Smith’s discovery conirmed his conjecture about Mark’s use of a source with Johannine traits, but it actually does not. As Smith himself demonstrated, the long quotation from Secret Mark completely lacks Johannine traits. Brown conirmed this in Mark’s Other Gospel.32 he evidence in the letter suggests that we are dealing, not with a situation in which Mark uses a source with Johannine traits, but with a situation in which Mark and John work independently of each other. he Gospels of Mark and John relate many of the same incidents, and when they do, they lack each other’s distinctive traits. So the absence of Johannine traits in Secret Mark’s extant story is what we would expect if Mark himself wrote it and did not rely on a source that had Johannine elements.33 he issue of censorship is likewise confused. Following Watson, Evans cites this comment in Smith’s review of Taylor: Mk. was remote from the historical situation, his interests were those of the Church of his day, and whatever did not serve those interests—e.g., whatever historical framework his sources may have contained—was just what he would leave out as uninteresting, even if he did not deliberately censor it.34 Watson and Evans ind the words “deliberately censor” very interesting, but seem not to notice the word that precedes them. In order to understand this sentence, we need to read it in context. hese words conclude Smith’s remarks on Taylor’s reasoning that, since Mark’s account of Jesus sending out the twelve (6:7–13) displays no real knowledge about what they did, it is probably redactional. Smith irst notes that this conclusion does not sit well with Taylor’s opinion that Mark was Peter’s close associate. Smith then suggests that “the tradition which governed the ordering of events in this part of Mk. may have been more 31. Smith, “Comments,” 26. 32. Smith, Clement of Alexandria, 152–58; Smith, Secret Gospel, 53–56; Brown, Mark’s Other Gospel, 85–92. On a liberal estimate, roughly 41 of the 54 verses in John’s account (76%) contain features that are possibly secondary or Johannine (ibid., 86). None of these features appear in the mystic gospel’s account. Pantuck already addressed the issue Evans raises here in “Solving the Mysterion of Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark.” 33. See Brown, “Longer Gospel of Mark and the Synoptic Problem.” 34. Smith, “Comments,” 35. 116 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark reliable than T. believes.”35 Smith ofers the following reconstruction of its historical framework: Rejected at home [i.e., Nazareth in 6:1–6], Jesus might well send out the disciples to prospect for friendlier villages [6:7–13]. Such missionary activity would bring his name to Herod’s ears [6:14]. If Herod’s execution of John [6:15–29] was motivated, as Josephus says it was (Ant. 18.118), by fear of a rising, then the knowledge that a former disciple of John’s was sending preachers about the countryside would have been just the thing to touch it of. It would also have motivated Herod’s plan to kill Jesus [Luke 13:31]. Jesus’ reported courage [in Luke 13:32] may well have been sobered by the arrival of John’s followers [Matt 11:2–3?], from his obsequies (Mt. 14.12), and the return of the disciples with nothing much to report (Mk. 6.30). It would then be understandable that Jesus should take to the open country for a little rest (6.31). It is equally understandable that [as Taylor observes] “Mark himself does not represent the movements of Jesus as a light from Herod” (p. 308) [in contrast to Matt 14:13].36 he sentence that Evans and Watson quote directly follows. Seen in its context, it is clear that Smith is trying to account for the missing historical framework in Mark 6 that Mark’s sources seem to presuppose. Appealing to the common wisdom of his day, Smith explains that Mark’s interests were not historical but ecclesiastical, and those Church interests inluenced what Mark included or let out. Hence Mark was apt to omit such “uninteresting” things as “whatever historical framework his sources may have contained . . . even if he did not deliberately censor it.” his is not a conjecture about Mark deliberately censoring things that he inds problematic. It is an explanation for Mark’s lack of interest in the historical framework, in what his sources likely told him about why one event leads to the next. Smith made the same point about the narratives in the Hebrew Scriptures: Even when there is a historical framework, as in Kings, the interest of the author is not in this framework, but in the miracles of the prophets and, more generally, in the miraculous management by Yahweh, who used natural and supernatural events alike to punish Israel for its sins. To explain away a miracle by imagining some sequence of natural events which might have 35. Ibid., 34. 36. Ibid., 34–35. 117 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? produced the same efect is to misunderstand the genre of the story and to thwart the author’s purpose in telling it; his primary concern was not to report what happened, but to give glory to Yahweh.37 So how does this unexceptional appeal to the insights of redaction criticism turn into proof for a supposedly unusual belief about Mark censoring “problematic” materials? And how do those problematic materials come to include Johannine traits or proto-Johannine elements? he process is interesting to watch. Ater properly quoting Smith, Watson paraphrases Smith as suggesting that “reliable but irrelevant or problematic material in [Mark’s] sources may actually have been ‘censored.’”38 In the space of two sentences, Watson has reinterpreted the word “uninteresting” as meaning “irrelevant or problematic” and recast Smith’s “he did not deliberately censor it [the historical framework]” as “these sources may actually have been ‘censored’ [by Mark],” thus inverting Smith’s meaning. Further down the same page, Watson simply excises the word “irrelevant”: “Already in 1955, Smith envisages the possibility that Mark may have ‘deliberately censored’ material in his sources that he inds problematic, and that at least one of those sources is common to Mark and John.”39 In this statement Watson additionally juxtaposes the issue of Mark omitting details with the separate issue of Mark possibly knowing a source with Johannine traits. By the end of the paragraph these separate issues become a single “surmise”: “Clement’s letter conirms Smith’s surmise that Mark may have ‘deliberately censored’ his source-material, and that this source-material may have included proto-Johannine elements.”40 Again, a few pages later: “He [Smith] had already surmised that Mark may have omitted or censored material present in the older authentic tradition he inherited—tradition shared in part with the Fourth Evangelist.”41 Evans subsequently continues the trend by foregrounding Watson’s characterizations of Smith’s statement, relegating Smith’s original statement to a footnote, and explicitly conlating the separate issues: “he second unusual feature that Smith surmised was that the evangelist Mark may well have omitted materials that contained Johannine traits” (cf. “Markan materials omitted from Mark that exhibit Johannine traits”; “omitted Markan mate37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 118 Smith, “Present State of Old Testament Studies,” 20. Watson, “Beyond Suspicion,” 157. Ibid., 157–58. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 161. Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark rial with Johannine traits”; p. 85). If it were true that Secret Mark exhibits Johannine traits, the evidence could now it the theory. Smith’s further comment, cited by Evans, to the efect that “Jewish material has come down to us heavily censored” (p. 86)42 does not bring us any closer to demonstrating Smith’s prior knowledge of his discovery. We may now summarize what we believe Evans has successfully demonstrated with respect to Smith’s prior knowledge of his discovery: • Smith mentioned the mystery of the kingdom of God as an example of secret teaching in 1951 and 1955. • Smith mentioned Clement and his Stromateis as examples of secret teaching in 1958. he results are meagre. Yet we may still ask whether these particular themes are what Evans’s thesis requires them to be, namely, “quite unusual themes” that, “apart from Professor Smith himself, . . . are themes advanced by no one else” (p. 82). Clearly that is not the case. hese were not new and unusual ideas that lacked textual substantiation. Rather, to scholars of early Christianity and Judaism, they were simply common knowledge. Mark himself describes the mystery of the kingdom of God as a secret that Jesus expounded only to his closest disciples (4:10–12), and Clement’s secrecy is a prominent theme in the Stromateis. Clement himself used Mark 4:11 to justify his own secrecy (Strom. V.12.80.6), thereby implicating himself in Smith’s discovery. he standard nature of this knowledge is readily illustrated. As Brown had already noted,43 the third chapter of Joachim Jeremias’s he Eucharistic Words of Jesus (published in German in 1935 and signiicantly revised and enlarged in 1960)44 contains a subsection in which Jeremias illustrates how “he whole environment of primitive Christianity knows the element of the esoteric.” In the space of six pages (pp. 125–31) Jeremias discusses the examples of Clement and his Stromateis, Hagigah 2.1, the mystery of the kingdom of God, 1 Cor 2:6, and Paul’s use of the word τέλειοι. 42. Citing Smith, “Image of God,” 486–87 (repr. in Studies, 1:127–28). 43. Brown, “Factualizing the Folklore,” 323. 44. Jeremias, Abendmahlsworte Jesu, 3rd ed. (1960). I am referencing the 1966 English translation by Norman Perrin, which was based on the 1960 German edition and contains Jeremias’s additions up to 1964 (London: SCM). 119 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The CASe oF The MAr SABA MySTery Returning to the matter of he Mystery of Mar Saba, Evans discusses two parallels noted by Watson between Smith’s account of his discovery and Hunter’s novel. In the novel, Sir William Bracebridge observes that “most of [the manuscripts] were removed [from Mar Saba], but I have always had the feeling that some might have been overlooked and hidden away. My supposition proved correct.”45 In his popular book, Smith wrote: “I had not expected much from the Mar Saba manuscripts, since I knew that almost all of them had been carried of to Jerusalem . . . But there was always the chance that something had been missed.”46 Watson inds it remarkable that both Smith and Bracebridge should “visit the Mar Saba monastery with exactly the same expectation.”47 Furthermore, while Bracebridge reports that “I was prepared to leave Mar Saba, reconciled to the negative results of my search, when a monk told me he had certain manuscripts in his cell that had evidently been overlooked . . .” (italics added),48 Smith reports that he was “gradually reconciling myself to my worst expectations and repeating every day that I should discover nothing of importance. hen, one aternoon near the end of my stay, I found myself in my cell, staring incredulously at a text written in tiny scrawl . . .” (italics added).49 Evans joins Watson in airming that “Smith’s dependence on Hunter appears to be the unavoidable conclusion” (p. 91). While these similarities are interesting, one can imagine scenarios other than direct causation to explain them. Take for instance the realities of manuscript hunting. Smith “became interested in Greek manuscripts and manuscript hunting” “under the inluence of Professor Werner Jaeger,”50 and by 1958 he had already spent a lot of time scouring the holy lands for rare and unknown manuscripts. He spent a year from 1951 to 1952 visiting minor Greek monasteries to catalogue their manuscript holdings, several months in 1958 in Palestine and Turkey during which he visited Mar Saba, and some time in 1966 in Syria searching for Hebrew manuscripts. here is no need to appeal to a ictional book to explain Smith’s expectations of what he might ind when his real-life experiences 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 120 Hunter, Mystery of Mar Saba, 279. Smith, Secret Gospel, 11. Watson, “Beyond Suspicion,” 165. Hunter, Mystery of Mar Saba, 293. Smith, Secret Gospel, 12. Ibid., 8. Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark had taught him how much hunting is needed to ind anything of value. As he noted in 1959, “the Classical texts of the monasteries were systematically hunted out by both eastern and western European collectors or dealers” and accordingly “a great deal of comparatively worthless material must be gone through in the hope of inding a few things of value.”51 So it should not surprise us that when he came to Mar Saba he was not particularly hopeful and that his hope was waning with each passing day. Whereas Smith was a real manuscript hunter, Hunter’s character Bracebridge is a ictional one, an invention that Hunter consciously patterned ater one of Smith’s famous predecessors, Constantin von Tischendorf. his is clear when Bracebridge states that his discovery happened “In almost the same way in which Tischendorf found the Sinaiticus” and later states, “You will recall, gentlemen, that when Tischendorf visited the monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai on his last journey in 1859, he was on the point of leaving, disappointed at his failure to ind the remnant of the manuscript, some pages of which he had rescued from being burned some iteen years previously. On his last evening there a young monk showed him a Greek manuscript which turned out to be the famous Sinaiticus, of which you are now the custodians for the people of the Empire and the world. I recall these facts to show how history has repeated itself in my case.”52 he discovery in Hunter’s novel is a clear case of art imitating life. Smith lived that life and therefore had similar expectations. DISPuTeD SCIenCe In this section Evans retreats from his previous claims that the science of handwriting analysis has proved the letter to be a forgery. When Carlson’s book he Gospel Hoax came out, Evans promoted Carlson’s analysis of the manuscript’s handwriting as a triumph of science, even volunteering his own promotional blurb: With his expertise in the legal and forensic aspects of exposing forgeries . . . Carlson has shown persuasively, [that] the handwritten document is not written at all—it is drawn, as forgers 51. Smith, “Monasteries and heir Manuscripts,” 175, 177. 52. Hunter, Mystery of Mar Saba, 281, 293. 121 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? inevitably do when imitating a hand not their own. All of the usual indicators of forgery are present, including the “forger’s tremor.” . . . hese telling details and many more have been laid bare by Carlson, with the result that the controversy surrounding this unveriied discovery has inally been laid to rest. Scholars owe Stephen Carlson a word of thanks.53 Concerning the identity of the forger, Evans likewise declared, the recently published clear, color photographs of the document have given experts in the science of forgery detection the opportunity to analyze the document’s handwriting and compare it with samples of handwriting from the late Professor Smith. he evidence is compelling and conclusive: Smith wrote the text.54 Evans’s present contribution, however, presents the practice of questioned document examination as a fallible enterprise: “Had the matter [of the Hitler diaries] been let to handwriting ‘experts,’ it would have been necessary to rewrite history” (p. 93). he main reason for this extraordinary reversal is likely the fact that Venetia Anastasopoulou, a professional Greek questioned document examiner, has now ofered a thirty-six page analysis of the letter’s handwriting and found no evidence favouring forgery but did ind abundant evidence favouring authenticity (i.e., she believes that the handwriting was not imitated but was rendered quickly, naturally, and unconsciously). She also compared Smith’s Greek handwriting with that of the letter and concluded that he was very far from capable of imitating a hand of this calibre.55 Responding to this turn of events, Evans now suggests an uneven split: “Carlson and two handwriting experts, one English-speaking and one Greek-speaking, think Smith wrote the document in question. Another Greek-speaking handwriting expert thinks he did not” (p. 93). Here at least Evans tacitly acknowledges that Carlson himself is not a handwriting expert—or, as Evans would prefer to put it, that “Carlson does not regard himself as a handwriting expert per se” (p. 92). In actual fact, Carlson has no credentials, training, or even prior experience in this ield, and 53. Danny Zacharias, a student of Evans, posted this blurb on the internet 6 November 2005. It is presently available at “he Gospel Hoax.” 54. Evans and Tov, eds., Exploring the Origins of the Bible, 169. Cf. Evans, Fabricating Jesus, 95; Evans, “How Scholars Fabricate Jesus,” 144; Evans, interview in Strobel, Case for the Real Jesus, 49, 50. 55. Anastasopoulou, “Experts Report Handwriting Examination.” See also Shanks, “Handwriting Experts Weigh In on ‘Secret Mark.’” 122 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark the fundamental mistakes he made are a matter of public record.56 Still, Evans claims that the English-speaking questioned document examiner Julie Edison arrived at the same conclusions as Carlson through a joint investigation. But that is not so. Carlson implied that Edison validated his analysis, but when the authors contacted Edison directly, she indicated that she did not express “a professional opinion regarding Morton Smith’s Letter of Clement,”57 that she is in fact not qualiied to do so due to her unfamiliarity with Greek, and that she met with Carlson for only a few hours on a single aternoon,58 ater which she wrote a letter assessing his methods (not his competence in employing them) and never heard from him again. Carlson posted excerpts of that letter on the internet59 but omitted everything in it that was critical of his method or otherwise unhelpful, including her statement “Although my undergraduate degree is in history, my knowledge of ancient Greece, Rome, and early Christianity is basic at best. And I have a limited knowledge of the Greek alphabet.” It was this omission that allowed Evans and others to infer that she is qualiied to assess the document and in fact did so—an inference that Carlson has to date done nothing to correct. Edison’s letter, moreover, ofers no indication that she thought that “Smith wrote the document” (Evans’s words) or even examined Smith’s handwriting. Nor did she examine the colour photographs. Instead, she recalls, “We only looked at a book containing writings attributed to Clement; and possibly a sheet containing symbols of the 18th century Greek alphabet.”60 Presumably the book that Edison saw was Smith’s Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, which contains the haltone reproductions of Smith’s own black-and-white photographs that Carlson 56. See Brown, “Factualizing the Folklore,” 293–306; Pantuck and Brown, “Morton Smith as M. Madiotes”; Viklund, “Tremors, or Just an Optical Illusion?; Brown and Pantuck, “Stephen Carlson’s Questionable Questioned Document Examination”; Brown, “My houghts on the Reports by Venetia Anastasopoulou” (see the last ive pages). 57. Julie Edison, e-mails to Allan J. Pantuck, 2 and 3 March 2010. 58. Ibid., 3 and 7 March 2010. 59. Carlson posted Edison’s letter on the Yahoo Group Textual Criticism (http:// groups.yahoo.com/group/textualcriticism/message/1224) and on his blog: Carlson, “Some Initial Reviews and a Second Opinion.” 60. Edison, e-mail to Pantuck, 5 March 2010. Carlson never borrowed the colour photographs from their owner, Charles W. Hedrick, nor asked Hedrick to provide him with prints or scans (Hedrick, e-mail to Scott G. Brown, 25 June 2005). Smith’s own black-and-white photographs of the manuscript were then still unavailable inside Smith’s archive at the Jewish heological Seminary, which had not yet been catalogued. 123 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? based his handwriting igures on. he diference between haltone reproductions and actual photographs is very signiicant. Haltone reproductions of the kind used in Smith’s book modify the information that exists in a photograph, reducing the full tonal range to a grid of dots that difer from each other only in size and shape (the largest dots ill their section of the grid and become squares). At an ordinary viewing distance, these dots merge in our perception with the white space around them (the paper) to produce the illusion of continuous tone (grayscale). he illusion of seeing shades between white and black disappears as soon as one magniies the image to the point that the dots become visible. At that point, one is looking at the binary haltone apparatus, which is not at all an accurate representation of the illusion it creates. As we noted in an earlier study: What up close appears as a jagged line [in a haltone image] might appear as a smooth gray line in the original photo. Curved lines and straight lines angled away from the orientation of the screen have a stepped appearance that resembles a halting pen movement. he result is phantom tremors and blobs and disconnections that do not exist in the original photographs.61 Accordingly, haltone reproductions have long been deemed unacceptable as the basis for questioned document examination.62 But this is precisely what Carlson and Edison based their observations on. In any event, despite viewing unreliable evidence, Edison never claimed to see a forger’s tremor in the handwriting, again contrary to Evans’s statement. Evans’s narrative about Carlson studying “large color photographs of the text” and “bringing in handwriting experts [sic, pl.]” who “examined the magniied photos” and discovered “what they call ‘forger’s tremor’” is apologetic iction.63 his leaves Agamemnon Tselikas as a handwriting expert who is on Evans’s side.64 Tselikas is certainly a well-respected expert in Greek palaeography. Like Anastasopoulou, he had scans of the original photographs (both black-and-white and colour) at his disposal. he fundamental problem, however, is that palaeographers are not questioned document examiners. As Tom Davis notes, “Palaeographers and document analysts have curiously little in common. . . . Palaeographers and forensic scientists 61. Brown and Pantuck, “Stephen Carlson’s Questionable Questioned Document Examination,” 3. 62. Hilton, Scientiic Examination, 282–83. 63. Evans, interview in Strobel, Case for the Real Jesus, 49–50. 64. Tselikas, “Agamemnon Tselikas’ Handwriting Analysis Report.” 124 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark read and write for diferent journals, attend diferent conferences, work in diferent environments, and do not communicate with each other.”65 Questioned document examiners spend most of their time attempting to answer the two questions that most interest us: Is this disputed document (or amendment, or signature) a forgery? And could this suspect have written this document? By contrast, palaeographers study the history of a form of handwriting, oten with the goal of deciphering old documents and bringing their contents to light. Palaeographers do not normally encounter imitated handwriting in the course of their work, so their training does not extend to the detection of forged handwriting. Moreover, according to Davis, “nowhere in the literature of their subjects [is] there an agreed and established methodology for testing the hypothesis of common authorship by examining handwriting.”66 It is the questioned document examiners who have well-established methods for identifying authors and forged handwriting. Anastasopoulou followed these methods when she looked for signs of both forgery and authenticity in the manuscript’s handwriting and when she systematically compared how Smith and the writer of Mar Saba 65 form each letter. Tselikas did not. In our opinion, only one properly qualiied expert in questioned document examination has thus far studied suitable images of Mar Saba 65 and rendered a knowledgeable opinion on the matters of whether this writing is imitated and whether Smith could have produced it. his expert’s observations indicate that the manuscript most likely contains someone’s natural handwriting, which in turn implies that it is from the eighteenth century (or possibly a bit earlier).67 The CrITerIon oF knowInG The FInD BeFore MAkInG The FInD Ater ofering a summary of his previous arguments pertaining to prior knowledge and some advice for “scholars who remain unconvinced,” (p. 94) Evans, again following Carlson, now suggests that “Smith knew perfectly well that the Mar Saba ind was not authentic and therefore did not make use of the ind in his later, serious work” (X-ref). Setting aside the notion that Smith’s eight years of research on the letter difers from his other research in not being serious, we think the reason Smith relied little 65. Davis, “Practice of Handwriting Identiication,” 251. 66. Ibid., 252. 67. See Brown, “My houghts on the Reports by Venetia Anastasopoulou.” 125 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? on his discovery in his later research is implied in a letter that he wrote to John Dart on September 24, 1977. Replying to Dart’s observation (in a letter of September 19) that many of Smith’s arguments about Jesus in his books on the secret gospel could have been supported by gnostic texts, Smith wrote: I’m happy that you’ve noticed the many similarities between my picture of Jesus and the traditions of early gnosticism, and I think you’re quite right in supposing that you’re onto something signiicant. I deliberately kept gnostic parallels out of my book on the secret gospel because I was trying to defend my opinion that this gospel tradition went back to the practice and teaching of Jesus himself. For this purpose the later parallels would not have been useful, and they would have given aid and comfort to the obscurantists who were sure to try to dismiss the new material as “gnostic and apocryphal.” So the case for the contrary had to be made as far as possible from canonical material. But the gnostic parallels are undeniably there and I think they indicate that the gnostics were not late ofshoots from the main stem of orthodox Christianity (as the Church fathers represented them), but were survivals of independent lines of early Christian tradition, and in some important aspects preserved the teaching and practice of Jesus more faithfully than did the orthodox (whose “orthodoxy,” of course, came to them as a result of their victory in the contest for adherents, and before that victory—i.e., before the third century—was merely a claim they had in common with all other groups). I tried to demonstrate this fact of survival for the one gnostic I had to deal with in some detail—Carpocrates, see Clement, pp. 266–278—but of course the new gospel and the material about Jesus got all the attention, so nobody nobody [sic] noticed the question of survivals in gnosticism.68 his explanation for his avoidance of gnostic gospels may be compared to an observation Smith made to A. D. Nock in a letter from the winter of 1961: “Of course . . . [some of those] working on the [secret] Gospel text take it for granted that anything similar to the canonical gospels is derivative, and anything not similar, secondary. hus they cover the ield completely with only two false assumptions.”69 hese remarks show that Smith was ever cognisant of the fact that his peers generally do not place non-canonical gospel evidence on a par with canonical gospel evidence. 68. Smith, letter to John Dart, 24 September 1977. 69. Smith, Secret Gospel, 67. he irst pair of brackets is Smith’s clariication, the second ours. 126 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark If he was going to convince his peers about anything related to Jesus, “the case . . . had to be made as far as possible from canonical material.” We can see this approach in Smith’s book Jesus the Magician, which relies mainly on the canonical gospels for its Christian (“insiders”) evidence about Jesus.70 his explanation might not satisfy Evans, however, who in a footnote remarks with astonishment that Smith neglected to mention the secret gospel on pages 122–23, 146, and 152 of this book, where “Smith speaks of the believer who ‘will be united with’ Jesus ‘in love’ and of Christians who ‘adapted his magical rite of union so as to make it also a ritual expression of libertine teaching’” (p. 95 n. 73). Evans protests, “Here one would expect some discussion of the Mar Saba Clementine and the passage quoted from Secret Mark. Yet, strangely, there is no discussion and not even a reference in the footnotes” (p. 95 n. 73). he reason for this will be apparent to anyone who checks Evans’s documentation. On those pages Smith was discussing the Eucharist, a diferent rite of union with Jesus than the one that Smith thought the “secret” gospel incident depicts (baptism). He discussed the secret gospel on pages 134–35 and 138 of that book in relation to the mystery of the kingdom of God, and he juxtaposed this presumed rite of union with the Eucharist on page 138. CurIouS FeATureS ABouT The FInD ITSelF In this section Evans reshules various arguments from Carlson, Watson, Bart Ehrman, and Charles E. Murgia in an efort to demonstrate that Mar Saba 65 is odd in itself.71 70. Smith, Jesus the Magician. 71. his section originally began with the observation that “the book is speckled with mildew and mold spots, which is not what one would expect in a book preserved in a monastery in the arid Judean desert.” Evans removed this point from the inal paper, but since he has made this point elsewhere, and we took the time to research it, we will take the opportunity to respond. Here we have a deduction based on commonsense, but commonsense cannot tell us anything about the actual conditions in which this book was kept between its publication in Amsterdam in 1646 and Smith’s arrival at Mar Saba 312 years later. Fortunately, various irsthand descriptions of Mar Saba exist from this period, some of which refer to dampness. he account by Henry Martyn Field, published in 1884, described this monastery as “dark, dingy, and musty” (On the Desert, 257). Henry Octavius Coxe’s 1858 report on its manuscripts noted that the staircase leading up to the other library (the one attached to the chapel) seemed “admirably calculated to preserve its contents from damp and plunder,” which likewise implies a problem with dampness in some parts of the monastery (Report to Her Majesty’s Government on the Greek Manuscripts Yet Remaining in Libraries of the Levant, 11–12). he extensive water damage revealed in Smith’s photograph of handwriting 127 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? Evans begins by amplifying Carlson’s arguments concerning the printed book into which Mar Saba 65 was written. Evans writes, First, Isaac Voss’s 1646 edition of the genuine epistles of Ignatius stands out among the old books at the Mar Saba monastery. Smith lists ten old printed books, ranging in date from 1628 to 1805. Nine of these books were published in Venice and in the Greek language. But Voss’s book was published in Amsterdam and in the Latin language. As Carlson remarks, it “sticks out like a sore thumb.” Smith too apparently sensed this problem, ofering wholly gratuitous speculations, none of them convincing, that attempt in one way or another to link the book to Venice. Why did he do that? Perhaps because he recognized the nonGreek, non-Venetian publication of the book as a problem, a problem that needed to be mitigated in some way. Would an authentic ind occasion this kind of embarrassment? (p. 97) Evans describes three grounds for suspicions here: the book’s origin in Amsterdam, Smith’s excessive embarrassment over this non-Venetian origin, and its Latin and “non-Greek” text. As to the irst point, it is necessary to note that the ten books Smith lists comprise only the few printed books in the tower library that contained manuscript additions. hese appear in his published catalogue precisely because they contained manuscripts. Smith actually came across at least 489 books in this library. So the 2 percent of the library’s books that we happen to know about cannot tell us what the other 98 percent should look like (not to mention the books in Mar Saba’s other library, which Smith did not catalogue). We actually do know of one other book that Smith found in the tower library. His Mar Saba notes in his archive at the Jewish heological Seminary mention a book published in Leipzig in 1768.72 And Agamemnon Tselikas’s report for Biblical Archaeology Review notes a 1715 Oxford edition of Clement’s works. his particular book might actually be a Paris reprint of that Oxford edition. In any case, Tselikas found it listed in a catalogue of “263 old printed books that patriarch Nicodemus sent to the monastery of St. Sabba in 1887.”73 Tselikas included a photograph of the irst page of this catalogue, where this book appears in another printed book from the tower library (Mar Saba 22) is consistent with these observations. See the image in Pantuck and Brown, “Morton Smith as M. Madiotes,” 117, 118. 72. Pantuck and Brown, “Morton Smith as M. Madiotes,” 116 n. 28. 73. Tselikas, “Handwriting Analysis Report,” sections “D. Textological observations” and “G. Anexe 4. List of books 2.” On the place of publication, see n. 75. 128 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark as no. 6. he titles of eleven other books appear on this page. he list does not include the details of publication, but based on the titles and the date of the catalogue, we can determine that ive of these books were published in Paris (nos. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8), one was published in Moscow (no. 9), and one in Jerusalem (no. 11).74 So a “non-Venetian publication” is not unusual. Nevertheless, Evans points to psychological evidence that Smith knew that this book was out of place, speciically, Smith’s “wholly gratuitous speculations, none of them convincing, that attempt in one way or another to link the book to Venice” (p. 97). Reportedly, the speculations in question appear on page 1 of Smith’s book Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark. Here is the irst paragraph: he pages on which the text is written are reproduced in actual size on Plates I–III. he book in which they are found is an exemplar of Isaac Voss’s edition of the Epistulae genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris (Amsterdam: J. Blaeu, 1646). Its front cover and title page have been lost, but Voss’s name is given at the end of the dedication; I was able to identify the edition by photographing the irst preserved page (p. 2) and the last numbered page (p. 318) and comparing these photographs with the corresponding pages of complete copies. he manuscript was written over both sides of the last page (which was blank) of the original book and over half the recto of a sheet of binder’s paper. he binding was of that heavy, white paperboard so oten found on books bound in Venice during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the remains of it, I should guess that it was approximately contemporary with the book itself. herefore the date of the book, plus about iteen or twenty years (1660 or 1665), may be taken as the date ater which the manuscript insertion was probably made. he next paragraph on this page describes various experts’ opinions on the date of the manuscript’s handwriting, and the inal line on that page introduces a paragraph outlining Smith’s reasons for thinking that the scribe was a scholar. So where is Smith’s embarrassment over the book’s origin in Amsterdam? Where are the painful rationalizations of this fact? he answer lies in Evans’s footnote documentation for this statement, which simply cites pages 38–39 of he Gospel Hoax. Here is what Carlson wrote: 74. he titles that we cannot place with certainty are nos. 4 (Ἑρμηνεία εἰς τ[ὴ]ν Ἰερ[ὰ]ν Ἀποκάλυψιν Ἰωάννου τοῦ θεολόγου), 7 (Συναγωγ[ὴ] τῶν Θεοφθόγων ῥημάτων τῶν θεοφόρων Πατέρων ήτοι Εὐεργετινός), 10 (Συμεών Ἀρχιεπισκόπου Θεσσαλονίκης), and 12 (Εὐθυμίου τοῦ Ζιγα[β]ηνού Ἐρμηνεία εἰς τούς Ψαλμούς), although no. 10 could be vol. 155 in the series Patrologiæ Græcæ (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1866). 129 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? he book containing Secret Mark, no. 65, sticks out like a sore thumb. It is the only book printed in Amsterdam; all the others were published in Venice. he most that Smith could do to link the book to Venice is to suggest that its ‘heavy, white paperboard’ binding was common in Venice (Clement 1), but paperboard binding was also common throughout Europe in the seventeenth century. he mystery quickly unravels. Smith wrote nothing that indicates that he thought that the book’s city of publication posed a problem. Instead, Carlson chose to bolster the impression that the book “sticks out like a sore thumb” by matter-of-factly characterizing Smith’s reference to the book’s binding as a dubious response to this supposed problem. Evans then accepted Carlson’s unlikely inference as a fact—quite naturally since Carlson presented it as one—and then appears mistakenly to have inferred from Carlson’s phrase “the most that Smith could do” that Smith made several other even less plausible speculations, the dubiousness of which Evans proceeds to describe for us as if he had actually read them. he result of this two-part invention is a new fallacious reason to doubt Smith’s integrity. Evans’s statement that the Voss book is “non-Greek” is inaccurate. he book’s critical text of Ignatius’s letters is in Greek, and the translation and analysis are in Latin. It is an academic work, and Latin was the preferred language of scholarship at that time. More to the point, the edition of Clement noted by Tselikas is precisely this kind of book. he photograph that he provided shows it listed as Κλήμεντος Ἀλεξανδρέως τὰ εὑρισκόμενα πάντα, which is the Greek title to John Potter’s critical edition of Clement’s works, Clementis Alexandrini Opera quæ exstant.75 Like the Voss book, it presents printed Greek text (with ligatures and abbreviations) and Latin translation in parallel columns, with academic analysis and commentary in Latin. he same applies to the aforementioned books published in Paris, which belong to the series Patrologiæ Græcæ by the Catholic publisher J.-P. Migne. Like Voss’s edition of Ignatius and Potter’s edition of Clement, these are critical editions of church fathers set out in parallel Latin and Greek columns (their Latin titles begin with Sancti Patris Nostri); these particular books present the extant works of Basil of Caesarea, John of 75. he information that this is the 1715 Oxford edition comes from Tselikas and is not in the list itself. hat Oxford edition, however, lacked the word πάντα in the title, which was added to the J.-P. Migne reprint of Potter’s book in 1857. If this book is in fact the reprint, the place of publication would then be Paris, and the book would be part of the series Patrologiæ Græcæ. 130 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark Damascus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Justin Martyr, and Athanasius. So Carlson’s reasoning that the Voss edition would be an oddity at Mar Saba because a book with a “facing Latin translation of the Greek would not have been useful for the Greek Orthodox monks” is confuted by the facts, as is his claim that “the presence of any Latin text at Mar Saba would have been remarkable.”76 Evans continues: “Second, there is no evidence that the book was at Mar Saba prior to Smith’s visit in 1958. It is not listed in the monastery’s 1910 catalogue of books” (p. 97). It is true that the 1910 catalogue containing 191 entries does not list the Voss book. But it is also true that Smith found nearly ive hundred books when he arrived; so the “catalogue” was largely incomplete. “hird,” Evans asks, “Why did Smith make no efort to subject the book to scientiic analysis?” (p. 97). We do not actually know whether or not he attempted to do this. But one thing we do know is that the normal procedure in questioned document examination is for the person alleging forgery to arrange and pay for the analysis, not for the accused to prove him- or herself innocent. Quesnell was the irst to cast suspicion upon Smith and to assert the necessity of forensic examination, so it was incumbent upon Quesnell to arrange for the testing. And that is something he attempted to do. His irst written request to the Patriarch to see the manuscript, mailed on November 21, 1973, received no reply.77 Eventually, in the summer of 1983, he was permitted to examine the manuscript in Jerusalem, but was refused permission to arrange for any tests.78 Guy Stroumsa likewise raised the issue of testing in 1976 and was turned down.79 As far as the authors know, the librarians at the Patriarchal library have refused even to show the manuscript to everyone else who has asked about it; for years they ofered diferent excuses for its unavailability and 76. Carlson, Gospel Hoax, 39. 77. Quesnell, “Question of Evidence,” 49 n. 4. 78. Peter M. Head informed Timo Paananen that Quesnell wrote the following statement to Head in 1987: “As to the availability of Smith’s document: it was retrieved from Mar Saba about 1976[.] (I printed a note to that efect in CBQ at the time . . .) It is now in the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem. Several scholars have reported being turned away when they asked to see it, but in the summer of ’83 I was allowed to examine it. I was not allowed to have any of the basic scientiic [tests] done on the ink.” See Paananen and Viklund, “Per Beskow and the Elusive MS”; and Paananen, “Short Interview with Quentin Quesnell.” 79. Stroumsa, “Comments on Charles Hedrick’s Article,” 148. 131 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? inally claimed that they do not know where it is.80 So the likelihood is that if Smith did try to arrange for tests, he received the same treatment. For his last “curious feature,” Evans, now relying on Ehrman, notes that the book by Voss into which the manuscript was written is concerned with interpolations into the letters of Ignatius while the Letter to heodore is concerned with interpolations into the Gospel of Mark. Evans considers this coincidence suspicious and even “humorous,” but is aware that it is such only “on the assumption that Smith forged the Clementine letter” (p. 97). In other words, the agreement is suspicious only if one chooses to interpret it that way. Other interpretations are possible, and the correct one is impossible to know. One can imagine, for instance, a Greek manuscript hunter inding the exemplar of the letter at the monastery and, wishing to take the manuscript away with him, selecting the endpapers of a book with similar contents as an appropriate place to leave a copy for the monks. Evans turns now to “internal oddities” about the contents of the letter. he present authors and others have responded to all but one of these alleged oddities elsewhere, so we direct the readers to the discussions listed in this footnote.81 he remaining argument that requires a reply is Watson’s hypothesis that the author inexplicably depends “on the language and syntax of the Papias fragments concerned with the authorship of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew” (p. 98).82 he letter states that Mark wrote an account of “the Lord’s doings” (τὰς πράξεις τοῦ κυρίου, I.16). Watson considers this an obvious echo of Papias’s phrase “the things either said or done by the Lord” (τὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ κυρίου ἢ λεχθέντα ἢ πραχθέντα). Knowledge of Papias’s phrase is certainly possible: there are enough similarities between one of Clement’s accounts of Mark’s activities in the Hypotyposeis 80. Brown, Mark’s Other Gospel, 25; Paananen and Viklund, “Per Beskow and the Elusive MS.” 81. On the notion that “secret” Mark is too Markan and the letter too Clementine, see the paper by Hedrick in this volume as well as Brown, Mark’s Other Gospel, 54–57, 105–11, and the observations of Pantuck reported in Brown, Review of he Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled; and Brown, “he Letter to heodore,” 536–37. On Charles Murgia’s opinion that the “Mar Saba document reads as an autograph, not as a copy,” see Brown, Mark’s Other Gospel, 32–33. On Ehrman’s contention that “the Mar Saba letter at points actually contradicts the authentic Clement,” see Brown, “More Spiritual Gospel,” 89–91, 99 n. 101; Brown, Mark’s Other Gospel, 30–31, 67–69; and Burgess, “‘Whatever Makes for Progress Towards Gnosis.’” 82. Watson, “Beyond Suspicion,” 148–51. 132 Brown and Pantuck—Craig evans and the Secret Gospel of Mark and Papias’s account to suggest that Clement might have known Papias’s account or an oral tradition that derives from it.83 What Watson deems most surprising is a “structural” similarity in the syntax. Both traditions about Mark have sentences that contain “not . . . nor . . . but.” Watson represents the Greek parallels so: heodore: οὐ μέντοι . . . οὐδὲ μήν . . . ἀλ᾽ . . . Papias: οὐ μέντοι . . . οὔτε γάρ . . . οὔτε . . . ὕστερον δέ . . . hey need to be seen in context: Letter to heodore: Mark . . . wrote an account of the Lord’s doings, not, however, declaring all of them, nor yet hinting at the mystic ones, but . . .84 Papias: Mark . . . as many things as he remembered accurately wrote—not, however, in order—the things by the Lord which were either said or done. For neither had he heard the Lord, nor had he followed him, but later . . .85 Watson interprets this structural similarity as evidence that the letter’s author needed help from Papias in order to construct his own account, which Watson cannot picture the real Clement requiring. It should be apparent, however, that the actual verbal agreements here are limited to οὐ μέντοι and that a compelling case for inexplicable literary reliance cannot be built on such a small foundation. It should also be apparent that the words οὐ . . . οὐδέ in the letter (“not . . . nor”) are part of the same syntactical construction, unlike the words οὐ . . . οὔτε γάρ in Papias (“not. . . . For neither”), which belong to diferent clauses. Although similar, the “neither . . . nor” construction in the Papias passage (οὔτε . . . οὔτε) is not the construction used in the letter. How, then, could the author of the letter have borrowed from Papias a construction that Papias was not using? And how does the premise of 83. Both accounts are cited by Eusebius in Hist. eccl. 3.39.15; 6.14.6. See Hill, “What Papias Said about John (and Luke),” 592. He outlines the parallels in 586 n. 11. 84. As translated by Smith (except the word “mystic,” which he translated as “secret”). 85. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.15: Μάρκος μὲν ἑρμηνευτὴς Πέτρου γενόμενος, ὅσα ἐμνημόνευσεν, ἀκριβῶς ἔγραψεν, οὐ μέντοι τάξει, τὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ κυρίου ἢ λεχθέντα ἢ πραχθέντα. οὔτε γὰρ ἤκουσεν τοῦ κυρίου οὔτε παρηκολούθησεν αὐτῷ, ὕστερον δὲ, ὡς ἔφην, Πέτρῳ· Our very awkward translation attempts to preserve the syntax and word order. 133 Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? dependence account for the fact that the letter uses diferent words ater οὐ μέντοι (οὔτε is not the same word as οὐδέ)? One might detect an echo of Papias in the letter’s sequence describing what Mark did write followed by “not, however” and a description of what Mark did not do, but the syntax οὐ . . . οὐδὲ . . . ἀλά is a diferent syntactical construction. It is one that Clement himself used in Protr. 1.2.4: What my Eunomos sings is not the measure of Terpander nor that of Capito nor the Phrygian or Lydian or Dorian, but the immortal measure of the new harmony which bears God’s name— the new, the Levitical song. Αἴδει δέ γε ὁ Εὔνομος ὁ ἐμὸς οὐ τὸν Τερπάνδρου νόμον οὐδὲ τὸν Κηπίωνος, οὐδὲ μὴν Φρύγιον ἢ Λύδιον ἢ Δώριον, ἀλλὰ τῆς καινῆς ἁρμονίας τὸν ἀίδιον νόμον, τὸν φερώνυμον τοῦ θεοῦ, τὸ ᾆσμα τὸ καινόν, τὸ Λευιτικόν[.] here seems to us little justiication in alleging that the ordinary Greek construction found in the letter depends on a text that does not use it. Watson’s repeated censuring of Smith for concealing the letter’s dependence on Papias is quite unjustiied.86 ConCluSIon We agree with Evans that the Letter to heodore potentially “represents a signiicant contribution to New Testament and Patristic studies” (p. 76). And we fully appreciate the need to vet important discoveries with a hermeneutics of suspicion. For his part, Evans has scrutinized the secondary literature of the last half century and brought together what he considers to be the best reasons for doubting the letter’s authenticity, adding some new arguments in the process. In response, we have applied the same scepticism to Evans’s arguments, systematically compared them to the facts, and found these arguments sorely wanting. It is one thing to be provisionally skeptical about a discovery for the purpose of ensuring its authenticity. It is another thing to manufacture doubt through a cavalcade of invention, innuendo, and pretext. 86. Watson, “Beyond Suspicion,” 149 n. 56, 150 n. 57, 151–52 nn. 61, 62, 64. 134