Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

But on the next point, how many monks were there bringing books back and forth to Morton Smith. When he says "hey I found something." If there were only 100 books in the library, surely if the same monk stuck around to 1976, he'd have some inkling of whether or not Morton Smith really foun...

If you were a monk went to your monastery and claimed to find a copy of the Marquis de Sade's 120 days of Sodom and you had only 100 books in your library and you lived in the middle of the desert with nothing to do, I don't think you'd be fighting over keeping this copy of 120 days of Sodom. 1. the...

Did you know that the official librarian of the Jerusalem Patriarchate from 1973 - 1990 considered the Letter to Theodore to have been written before Morton Smith got there? It is only because I preserved Quesnell's papers that we know that. Today I discovered that Seraphim, the monk who tried to re...

Had I not made this thread I wouldn't have known now would anyone know that the monk who was demanding the book reside at Mar Saba alongside the 100 books scattered on the floor and what must have been the empty shelves of the library was also there the day Morton Smith discovered the manuscript and...

There's many lines of argument. One the list of books was ignored by everyone associated with Mar Saba. The list is obviously irrelevant because neither Kallistos nor Seraphim were troubled by the lack of presence of the book on the list. But it's worth noting that from 1958 - 1990 the book was rega...

If the list of books was authoritative someone would have consulted the list of books and realized the book didn't belong in the library. They didn't worry about the book not being on the list because they knew list wasn't authoritative. Morton Smith catalogued 489 books. There are about 100 books o...

Kallistos believed the book and the manuscript were in the library before Morton Smith. Seraphim acted as if the book and the manuscript were in the library before the discovery of Morton Smith.

The title of the thread is " Greek Monks Who Thought the Letter to Theodore was in the Mar Saba Monastery Before Morton Smith Arrives"

Compare Kallistos's testimony about the Patriarchate Library before 1986: The Patriarchal Library was well organized during the time when such intellectuals as Chrysos- tomos Papadopoulos (early 1900s) took special interest in the library. However, according to Father Kallistos, for over seventy yea...

What is clear from the evidence is that no one until today had any clue that Seraphim, the monk who struggled to keep the book and the manuscript at Mar Saba, was a resident of Mar Saba on the day Morton Smith found the book and the manuscript.