Greek Monks Who Thought the Letter to Theodore was in the Mar Saba Monastery Before Morton Smith Arrives

[Secret Alias]

For the other members. When I share photos of Seraphim's handwriting in a few weeks I have to confront the possibility of a match. Would that mean that Smith is the forger and Seraphim was his assistant? Not sure what that would mean.

[Secret Alias]

I have already established that Scholem was not the first person that Morton Smith mentioned the discovery OF A LETTER OF CLEMENT:

I remember we all went to dinner after he came back from Mar Saba. He was very excited about his discovery. He went on forever about how he came across this letter of the Church Father Clement. Yet at the same time he couldn't stop complaining about the monastery. He was very sick. He never got any sleep. The monks were singing all the time. It drove him crazy. He swore he would never go back."

"He talked about how bad the food was and we all kept eating. It was quite funny in a way. Mentioning soup with the octopus at the monastery and then we were in New York having a wonderful meal at a wonderful restaurant with great service."

"The bad news for my mother was that once Smith came back with this big discovery that became the focus of his whole life. He was consulting with this professor and that. My mother and he just drifted apart. Maybe it was too soon after my father died. I don't know. I think there was some real compatibility between her and Smith. My father wasn't Jewish. He was Episcopalian so marriage wouldn't have been an issue. If he hadn't have found the manuscript, who knows."

Were there other people Morton Smith mentioned his discovery to in 1958? This is just as obvious as this https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christ ... l-of-mark/ being the limit of scholarly engagements on the subject of the Letter of Theodore.

[Secret Alias]

Smith and Landau's account of Smith's activities in 1958:

The Find

Some of Mar Saba’s holdings occasionally ended up in the surrounding caves. A story is told of a monk and his assistant who, upon receiving news of an impending raid on the monastery by local Bedouins, relocated the monastery’s most prized manuscripts to a nearby cave. Unfortunately, the monk and his assistant died during the attack and the manuscripts were never found.45 Monks also reported finding fragments of manuscripts in caves, likely the remains of books that hermits checked out from the monastery’s library but never returned—at least not completely.46 However, the monastery’s holdings dwindled significantly beginning in the early eighteenth century, when a fire ripped through the complex and destroyed numerous ancient volumes. In the 1860s most of the writings that survived the blaze were transferred to Jerusalem by order of the patriarch for safekeeping, leaving only “scraps” and “printed books” for Smith to sort through and catalogue.47 Well aware when he arrived that the collection had diminished over the past century, Smith didn’t expect to find anything revolutionary among the library’s current holdings, now largely stashed in the tower library. Nonetheless, he remained hopeful. “There was always the chance that something had been missed,” he recalled years later, “or that other manuscripts had been brought in by monks coming from other monasteries.”48 And so he began his survey of the collection. Smith got to work and soon settled into a routine. With a monk by his side—chaperones are often required when looking at manuscripts at Greek Orthodox libraries—each morning except Sunday Smith would ascend a series of stairs that led from his quarters to the old tower. His escort would unlock the door, then wait patiently as he sifted through stacks of books packed onto bookshelves and strewn across the floor. Smith was not primarily looking for ancient manuscripts—these had been destroyed or removed from the monastery years earlier. Instead, he spent most of his time leafing through modern printed editions in search of “manuscript material”—that is, notes, passages, or annotations written in margins and on flyleaves by monks studying these volumes. When Smith found an inscribed book, he would set it aside. After he had located three or four of these, the monk would lock the door, they would descend the stairs, and Smith would retreat to his quarters to examine the manuscripts he had found. Smith located a surprising number of handwritten passages in printed books, particularly in books from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, leading him to speculate that paper may not have been abundant at the monastery during that period.49 In total, Smith was able to conduct a detailed inspection of approximately seventy manuscripts. Still, he did not have time to study an additional twenty manuscripts nor examine two large folders of fragments. Smith’s notes on the collection were published, in modern Greek translation, in 1960.50 Most of Smith’s discoveries were unsurprising. He reports finding “prayer books and hymns and sermons and lives of saints and anthologies from the Church fathers”—in other words, “the proper and predictable reading of a monastic community.”51 Occasionally he’d find bits and pieces of older manuscripts that had been recycled, used to stiffen the covers and bindings of newer books. But Smith chose not to investigate further, since his “permission to study the volumes did not include permission to take them apart.”52 Yet one manuscript was unlike the rest—it was remarkable, perhaps even revolutionary. Near the end of his stay, Smith found himself again in his quarters examining the day’s haul, when one manuscript caught his eye. The handwriting of the text was so inscrutable that he hadn’t even attempted to read it in the tower. But now in the quiet of his room, he worked to decipher the challenging Greek script. As Smith squinted at the first few words of the difficult cursive hand, he became astonished at what he was seeing. With some effort the opening lines became clear: “From the letters of the most holy Clement, the author of the Stromateis. To Theodore.” Smith did not recognize the recipient of the letter (Theodore was a name as common in the ancient world as it is today), but as a scholar well versed in early Christian literature, he immediately identified Clement as Clement of Alexandria, a brilliant and prolific church father who composed, among other theological writings, the Stromateis or Miscellanies. But as the opening sentence made clear, this text was not from the Stromateis, nor from any of Clement’s other surviving writings, but seemingly from a collection of his letters that had since vanished. A few words later, Smith recognized another name, the Carpocratians, an early Christian heretical group known for their adventurous sexual practices. What long lost treasure had he discovered? Confident that he’d happened upon something of great significance, Smith photographed the manuscript (fig. 4–5)—“three times for good measure”53—and then set his sights on identifying the print book within which the Letter to Theodore was copied. As with many of the other manuscripts Smith catalogued, the Letter to Theodore was copied by hand onto blank pages at the end of a printed book. The title of the print volume was not immediately apparent since the book had lost its front cover and title page after years of use. But eventually Smith was able to identify the volume as Isaac Voss’s seventeenth-century edition of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, a Christian author and predecessor of Clement of Alexandria. Perhaps it’s no surprise that a monk who pored over the letters of Ignatius would also have had an interest in a letter of Clement! By identifying the volume, Smith was able to secure a date after which—a terminus post quem—the scribe copied the Letter to Theodore onto the back pages of the volume: 1646. Smith somehow resisted the urge to decipher more of the text, opting instead to spend his time in residence hunting for more treasures among the library’s holdings. He reasoned that “a library that had yielded one such text might yield another.”54 So he returned the book to the tower library, where he found it, and resumed his inventory. In his remaining days at Mar Saba, Smith discovered an interesting fifteenth-century manuscript attributed to Macarius of Egypt—a well-known Coptic hermit—but nothing to rival Clement’s Letter to Theodore. He set off for Jerusalem, where he told his former mentor, Gershom Scholem, about the discovery. Smith then entrusted his film to a skilled developer who could process the blackand-white images he had taken. Smith worried that if he made the discovery public before figuring out precisely what he had discovered, he could ruin his academic reputation. So he decided to keep it under wraps until he could determine what he’d found, and for the time being he would not discuss it with anyone beyond Scholem. Despite his caution, the manuscript would soon ignite decades of controversy in the scholarly world and beyond, and even threaten to ruin his career and reputation.

Goranson makes the case that Smith's testimony limits the conversations that Morton Smith had about "a discovery the letter of Clement" to the one with Scholem. I think it is entirely possible - and indeed likely - that when he made the discovery he might have asked one of the monks, likely Seraphim, if he had ever seen this book or this manuscript before. I don't know that he did. I am not suggesting it is a fact that he did. I am only saying that Scholem was the first academic with whom Morton Smith discussed the manuscript. There might have been other Untermenschen with whom Morton Smith could have made made a reference or a passing reference to the manuscript that went unrecorded. It is entirely possible that Morton Smith didn't reference the discovery to Seraphim and Seraphim knew about the manuscript before 1958. It is also possible that Seraphim did not know about the letter but knew the book when Morton Smith did or didn't mention the discovery to him. There is entire spectrum of possibilities here.

Because Goranson is consumed by an all encompassing hatred of Morton Smith because he was told Goranson he needed to take a course on logic (no comment) he sees only one possibility. But he is merely trying to pin forgery on someone who once insulted his intelligence. The reality is that there is a range of possibilities he hasn't considered. I don't know how friendly Morton Smith was with his "old friend" Seraphim. I am trying to figure that out by ordering a published copy of his journal from 70 years of residing at Mar Saba and asking Tselikas to get me a copy of the original manuscript of 70 years of material. The idea that we know that Morton Smith didn't speak to Seraphim is again only the product of a one of kind all consuming hatred against Smith because Smith once said that Goranson is stupid.

[Secret Alias]

The first documented conversation that Morton Smith had with a scholar was Scholem. This has been confirmed by the guy who knows everything about Morton Smith a second ago. Smith spoke to other people besides scholars about his discovery. In the very same way these are the 850 times the discovery was referenced in scholarly literature https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christ ... l-of-mark/. This forum's discussions of the discovery are not referenced and are IMHO superior and more valuable these most of these papers.

[StephenGoranson]

Smith told Scholem, in Israel, about "Secret Mark" before he returned to New York.

Smith later commented on two of my draft essays.
One he called a hodgepodge, and he was right.
The other he was more complimentary about.
Both, revised, were later published, peer-reviewed.

[Secret Alias]

Thanks for the clarification. The example of his girlfriend was to demonstrate Smith had conversations with people who were not scholars. The context of the reference to his girlfriend. I said:

"The idea that Smith didn't talk about the letter outside of recorded academic discussions."

I have consistently made the point that there two subsets (a) the academic discussions of the manuscript and (b) the extra-academic discussions of the manuscript of which discussions on this forum are used as an illustration (when compared with the list from NASCAL). Smith had both (a) and (b). His proposed conversation with Seraphim which I acknowledge may not have happened would be (b) so would not have been recorded.

[Secret Alias]

I find this an intriguing line of reasoning from Smith and Landau:

The Skeptic

In this long litany of “things a responsible scholar should have done,” Quesnell ignores two crucial and intertwined extenuating circumstances: Smith’s stated timeline for when he was able to transcribe and translate the Clement manuscript, and the capabilities (or lack thereof) of a desert monastery like Mar Saba to perform rigorous and specialized scientific tests on its manuscripts. Regarding Smith’s timeline, he makes it clear in Secret Gospel that he only had enough time to read the first few lines of the manuscript while he was at Mar Saba, identifying the document as a letter of Clement of Alexandria to a certain Theodore concerning a dispute with the Carpocratians. As intriguing as this was, it would have been irresponsible of Smith to abandon his project of cataloguing the remaining manuscripts at Mar Saba, and not because of some abstract sense of duty to finish the task he had started. No, if Smith focused exclusively on the Clementine manuscript in his limited amount of time left in the tower library, he would run the risk of missing out on an even more spectacular discovery. Moreover, even if Smith had been given permission to stay at Mar Saba indefinitely and had possessed the resources of time and money to be able to do so (which he did not), the monastery lacked the scientific equipment needed to conduct the tests and analyses that Quesnell faulted Smith for not performing. Nor would it have been an option to take the manuscript to Jerusalem for testing: Smith knew that the monks at Mar Saba were unlikely to permit their cultural heritage to be removed from the monastery, and making such a request might have potentially damaged his relationship with the patriarchate. To complicate matters further, Mar Saba and East Jerusalem were under Jordanian control in 1958, and any scientific testing would most likely have required bringing the manuscript into Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem. It would only be after Smith had crossed over into Israel, in West Jerusalem, that he was able to have his photographs of the Clementine manuscript and others from Mar Saba developed and printed so that he could then transcribe and translate the text in its entirety. Thus, Smith did not in any clear sense “know what he had” until he had already departed from Mar Saba and the Jordanian controlled West Bank.

I don't know where Smith and Landau got this idea but it seems to mirror Seraphim's behavior in 1976 hence, if anything other than Smith and Landau's conjecture, is suggestive of the possibility of familiarity with the document. Again I don't know where Smith and Landau get this.

This too on page 59:

Smith therefore expressed to Quesnell some optimism that further scientific study was now possible: “Now that Israel has de facto control over the territory, the trained personnel and equipment could, I suppose, easily be got out to Mar Saba, even if the monks would not consent to have the MS removed.”

Seems to suggest (if you don't already "know" Smith was the forger) that Smith was aware of the possessiveness, a familiarity of the monks with the manuscript in 1958 that mirrors what Flusser witnessed in 1976 or at least a discussion of removing the manuscript.

Smith and Landau on pg 22:

Smith was not primarily looking for ancient manuscripts—these had been destroyed or removed from the monastery years earlier.

How would Smith know about the monks possessiveness regarding books and manuscripts taken as their cultural heritage if (a) there were no manuscripts of value any longer at the monastery and (b) if Smith never brought up the subject with the monks in 1958? What examples was Smith drawing from?

If there were no valuable manuscripts at Mar Saba what was Smith basing his understanding that the monks were possessive with their valuable manuscripts? There were no valuable manuscripts in the library in 1958 right BESIDES THE LETTER TO THEODORE? Seems to infer that the subject of removing THIS manuscript was at least floated by Smith with one of the monks, likely Seraphim. The diary of Seraphim will be invaluable here as it dates back to 1932.

[Secret Alias]

This Seraphim is a big deal in the Eastern Orthodox Church. His death is listed as one of the key events in the religion and as I've already mentioned he is on the fast track to becoming a saint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_ ... te_ref-164

[Secret Alias]

Morton Smith respected by the Greek Orthodox Church. https://ir.lib.uth.gr/xmlui/bitstream/h ... sAllowed=y Is he in that picture?

[Secret Alias]

One translator asked me for 500 Euros to translate that letter. I found a Greek speaking Jewish translator who is willing to do it for free. Doesn't want to go into the Patriarchate to request the manuscript. Still have to find that.