The Rampant Forgery of Written Documents in the Greek Monasteries

[Secret Alias]

I have attached this document in Greek which describes how rampant forgeries were in the Greek monasteries. https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/in ... /1433/1436 Of course Tselikas and the authorities in Jerusalem see themselves as protectors of the Greek Orthodox tradition. They'd rather blame a foreigner. But the reality is that it could have been a forgery through a number of different means. The idea that Morton Smith was a homosexual who lost his faith and decided to take revenge on Christianity is by far the least likely possibility. The more likely possibility, if it ever can be demonstrated to be a forgery, is that it was accomplished by a Greek for reasons that are difficult to divine. As I have said many times. Eliminating the Duke conspiracy theory is the first step towards having a reasonable discussion. Smith may have had homosexual inclinations. I am not saying he did. I see no evidence for any of these ridiculous claims but I am forced to bring them up because they are at the heart of the prevailing explanation. Anyone at this forum or in any forum may have these or have had these. Sabar spent over a year trying to track down an example of a homosexual relationship and could not find one. Sabar doesn't address the more interesting question of why Smith continued to renew his priestly status. He kept his card to the end. An odd thing for a man who supposedly "abandoned his faith." I would find it far more productive to stick to the document itself and determine whether the document is indeed a forgery rather than continuing to personally attack someone who might have simply happened to have found this text. I understand why the Greek Orthodox authorities in Jerusalem went along with the prevailing theories. We should still follow protocols. (1) determine that the text is a forgery (2) find a plausible reason for establishing who might have forged it.

[Peter Kirby]

Walter Stephens wrote:

A third-stage pseudonym entails the transfer of authorship to a historical personage, one whose name is usually known to the intended audience. In many cases, a third-stage pseudonym is the marker of texts reviled as forgeries. ...

Obviously, the attribution must be made by someone. This some-one, this attributor, can be referred to as the sponsor. The sponsor is the mirror-reversed image of the third-stage pseudonym. As we shall see below, it (or “he”) denies authorial responsibility by transferring it elsewhere, and assuming the pose of textual mediator. That is, the sponsor cannot present the text to the reader as the work of someone else without implicitly or explicitly presenting himself as non-author in the same act. The sponsor “espouses” the text, as it were, as not consanguineous to himself, and falsely professes a non-incestuous relation to it.

in "Complex Pseudonymity: Annius of Viterbo’s Multiple Persona Disorder" (pp. 690-691), MLN 126 (2011): 689–708.

This kind of relationship to the text is natural to consider.

[Secret Alias]

I still say, look at the genre. Matthew is undoubtedly a pseudepigraphon and a forgery. Luke is a pseudepigraphon and a forgery. John is a pseudepigraphon and a forgery. Acts is a pseudepigraphon and a forgery. The some of the letters of Paul are Catholic forgeries others are largely falsified. It's the authentic texts which are rare in this field. What is everyone hung up on Secret Mark? You know. Stones. Glasshouses. Don't Throw. Eusebius argues, essentially, that Origen's writings were so heretical sounding because a heretic or heretics got a hold of his manuscripts and "added all these heretical ideas" to them. Seriously. But what does that say about the scriptoriums that this sort of nonsense could be suggested? It was the opposite. People were routinely changing and inventing texts to suit whatever nonsense they were promoting about Jesus and Christianity. And these same people don't accept that. They believe in this imaginary "golden age" where the truth was being preserved by the "good guys." This whole debate sometimes feels like arguing with 10 year olds about whether time travel is possible. Even if you could get to proving that the text is a forgery there are a multitude of possibilities. But the one disprovable or at least most unlikely possibility that the discoverer of the text was a homosexual forged the text because he wanted to take revenge on Christianity for something or other, that's the one they hang their hats on. Why? I can only come up with Mark Goodacre's gravitas. I see no other explanation for the massive mistaking of opinion for fact in this particular theory. Carlson was acting like a groupie "excitedly" announcing Goodacre was coming to Duke back in 2005. Ken is basically an acolyte for many of Goodacre's anti-Q ideas. There is nothing wrong with that. But it does seem odd that the people who keep pounding the drum on the most easily discardable explanation for the origin of the MS all center around the man who just called Sabar's character assassination piece "brilliant." Why can't they just stand up to him and say, yeah after AT LEAST four years of exhaustive research by the author of a "hit piece" there is no evidence Morton Smith was gay, there is no evidence that he gave up the priesthood or that it is CERTAIN the letter to Theodore references homosexuality. Why would any intelligent person think that it is likely that "the truth" is going to rise up out of this murky swamp of maybes?