Steven Avery
Administrator
The dependence on Origen and on Eusebius Ecclesiastical History show that this was not a writing by Clement of Alexandria.
Thus it was a forgery.
However, many scholars want to cover and shill for Morton Smith. So they claim he discovered a forgery.
===========================
Go through Tony Burke book
True Forgery Position
Peter Jeffery
Pierluigi Piovanelli
Stephen Carlson - hoax ? Piovanelli rips this
Francis Watson (beyond reasonable doubt) perhaps supported by Craig Evans) - uses Hunter Mar Saba book
BCHF
Stephen Gorenson and perhaps Andrew Criddle ?
================
De Facto Forgery but tries to get Morton Smith off the hook
Annick Martin and French writers
Origen
Zeddies
www.cambridge.org
Abstract
The Letter to Theodore may need to be reattributed to Origen of Alexandria. Many of its features seem demonstrably Origenian, and its language aligns with early Christian and Origenian usage. Two noncanonical gospel fragments in the letter do not betray a modern author, but rather evoke early Christian symbolism and narrative structure. The single garment worn by a character in the first fragment reflects Christian symbolism and resembles the philosopher’s garment, which many early Christians adopted and portrayed in material artifacts. Origen’s intellectual interests can explain the letter’s preparation for philosophical exegesis, and its language reflects his text-critical practice. Nevertheless, Origen’s circumstances indicate the text of the noncanonical gospel fragments is unreliable. The letter also echoes Papias in the manner that Origen does. Morton Smith’s account of its discovery does not betray a forgery or hoax, but plausibly depends on other nonfiction works of manuscript discoveries written during the 1960s. Further work may be needed to secure attribution, but Origenian authorship is a simpler explanation of the evidence than modern forgery.
post-Eusebius theories - (roughly the 5th to 7th centuries)
Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau
and see AI post below
(e.g., Jacob Lebovitch or similar modern analysts of the text's dependence on Eusebian geography)
??
================
Still Forgery but Less Important
Agamemnon Tselikas
Francis Watson - emphasizes James Hogg Hunter book as template
The Mystery of Mar Saba
back and forth described here
https://scalar.usc.edu/works/gospel-thrillers/1940-jh-hunter-the-mystery-of-mar-saba
book is here
http://archive.org/details/bwb_O8-BQC-033
This novel recently entered into academic conversation in relation to the ongoing debate about Morton Smith and the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark: see Stephan Huller's blogpost on Hunter; an essay by Craig Evans, which refers to this [PAYWALLED] article by Francis Watson; for a direct refutation of Watson's argument, see this essay by Allan Pantuck
(PDF) and response by Watson
(PDF).
Bart Ehrman and Agnes Sudbrack/other modern critics have tended to analyze the text as a 20th-century creation
AI
====================
Supporters
Stephan Huller
Timo Paananen
James Tabor
Scott Brown and Allan Pantuck have strongly criticized and challenged several of Carlson's specific linguistic and historical claims.
========================
Michael T. Zeddies on Origen.
https://purebibleforum.com/index.ph...references-testaments-of-time-leo-deuel.4526/
https://purebibleforum.com/index.php?threads/secret-mark-origen-dependence-indicates-forgery.6377/
Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau on Eusebius
2023 book, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity,
============================
Annick Martin
Attila Jakab, Alain Le Boulluec, and Annick Martin
AD 400 -
"L'Évangile selon Thomas et les textes de Nag Hammadi": colloque
http://books.google.com/books?id=wWsyAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA26
https://www.google.com/books/editio...s+de+Nag+Hammadi"&pg=PA46&printsec=frontcover
Tony Burke
https://www.google.com/books/editio...+de+Nag+Hammadi"&pg=PA327&printsec=frontcover
andrewcriddle » Sun Sep 21, 2025 10:06 am
https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14289&start=190
IF this thread is about published papers questioning the authenticity of Secret Mark then one should note:
ADD the new Craig Evans position below
==========================
Halfway Between Sabbatai Tzevi and Aleister Crowley: Morton Smith’s “Own Concept of What Jesus ‘Must’ Have Been” and, Once Again, the Questions of Evidence and Motive*
Pierluigi Piovanelli
https://www.academia.edu/2449339/Piovanelli_Secret_Mark_2012
The second problematic fact is that, in the opinion of some of the most qualified specialists, the information provided by the Letter to Theodore does not fit very well with what we presently know about Clement of Alexandria and the history of the Egyptian Church. I am referring here to the doubts recently expressed by Attila Jakab, Alain Le Boulluec, and Annick Martin, three French (or French-speaking) historians of early Christianity in Egypt who have been involved, at different times and to varying degrees, with the Association pour l’étude de la littérature apocryphe chrétienne (AELAC). 15 Thus, Jakab points out that the author of the letter seems to know the Carpocratians much better than Clement, who apparently thought that Epiphanes, Carpocrates’ son, was the true founder of the school (Strom. III.2.5). 16 In the same vein but in a more articulated manner, Martin argues that, 1) the revised chronology of Athanasius’s Festal letters does not confirm Thomas Talley’s reconstruction of a “primitive” Alexandrian liturgy for the baptism of the catechumens that would have been based on the chronology suggested by the initiation rite (“after six days”) described in the first episode of Secret Mark quoted in the Letter to Theodore (III.6–7); 2) for Clement the baptism seems to be the only way to obtain illumination, sonship, perfection, and immortality (Paed. I.6), without the need for more advanced initiatory stages that would have been devoted to the specific study of a single, more mystical gospel; and 3) moreover, even the eventual presence of Carpocratians in Alexandria—at least at the end of the second century—is doubtful, since Clement does not mention either Carpocrates or Epiphanes among the founders—Marcion, Basilides, and Valentinus—of the main heretical sects of the day (Strom. VII.17). 17
Jakab and Martin also note that the Letter to Theodore gives a description of the earliest Christian community in Alexandria as already being in existence and having diversified prior to the arrival of Mark. This report is at odds not only with Clement’s silence on Mark’s involvement with Alexandria, but also with the account of Eusebius, who accepts the tradition (“some say”) that attributes the first conversions in Alexandria to the evangelist (Hist. eccl. II.16). 18 Concerning the origins of the church in Alexandria, the real question is not to determine which of the two versions of the story is more ancient and historically plausible, but to explain why Eusebius, who constantly relies on the work of Clement, seems to ignore useful information found in one of Clement’s letters that he could have consulted easily in bishop Alexander’s library in Jerusalem (Hist. eccl. VI.20) 19 —at least if any manuscripts containing Clement’s correspondence existed and were kept there. This is the final and most fatal blow to the house of cards making up the connection between a postulated collection of Clementine letters and Mar Saba. Actually, as Martin makes perfectly clear, on the one hand John of Damascus lived and worked, until 742, in Jerusalem and not, as his later biographers claimed, at Mar Saba; on the other hand, it is not certain that Clement was the author of the three citations attributed to him, in the midst of other biblical and truly Clementine excerpts, in the Sacra parallela anthologies made, in the ninth century or later, from John of Damascus’s presently lost Hiera. In other words, the existence of a corpus of letters of Clement could be but the result of an erroneous medieval attribution. 20 Thus, in spite of the remote possibility of a late antique falsification, Martin is compelled to acknowledge that “the hypothesis of a modern forgery starts again with renewed vigor” and that “the scientific reliability” of the Letter to Theodore “should be called into question,” at least, until it is possible to recover the original document and analyze the ink used by its scribe 21 —a judgment also shared by Jakab and Le Boulluec 22 with such agreement that it makes any previous statements about a growing consensus among Clementine scholars concerning the authenticity of the Mar Saba letter look obsolete. 23
. . . Discovered by the Wrong Person!
The publication of Smith’s letters adds decisively to the aforementioned difficulties, specifically because the author of the discovery was already familiar with, and well trained, prior to 1958, in the main fields of research, topics, and methods that he would later find inextricably intertwined in the study of the Letter to Theodore. Thus, we learn that in 1948 he devoted the first six months of the year to the study of Gregory of Nyssa’s “background—giving half of [his] time to classical literature and half to the early Fathers, especially Clement of Alexandria.” 24 In 1951– 1952, thanks to a Fulbright grant, he spent an entire year in Greece exploring monastic libraries in search of new manuscripts of the epistles of Isidore of Pelusium—the initial topic of his Harvard doctoral dissertation—and “brought back about 5,000 photographs of manuscripts (i.e. about 10,000 pages)” from “places like Patmos and Mount Athos” with the hope of putting them to use for his “Th.D. thesis on St. Isidore of Pelusium, an edition of St. Maximus’s Centuries on Love, and some studies of patristic catenae.” 25 According to the title of the unpublished catalogue that Smith compiled and deposited in the Brown University Library in 1952, the passages he had selected were taken “from Greek manuscripts of the tenth to nineteenth centuries found mainly in monastic libraries” 26 —a chronological span that should betray Smith’s familiarity, at that time, not only with medieval, but also with modern Greek handwritten materials. 2
Among the various publication projects that he undertook in 1947 were, “a book, two big articles, and a book review which should be almost an article, on strictly New Testament subjects,” 28 a “book on the lives of Jesus;” 29 “a book on Mark,” which he had almost finished in 1955–1956; 30 and a new anthology of Jewish Pseudepigrapha in translation for 1957–1958. 31 If such announcements were not the result of a vague desire to explore ever new avenues of research—and a few works published in those years seem to demonstrate that this was not the case 32 —, we should conclude that Smith was, from an intellectual point of view, perfectly equipped to deal with both the content and the form of the amazing Clementine fragment that he was later to discover at Mar Saba. 33 In this regard, we should also remember that, from the first steps of the historico-critical school in nineteenth-century German universities, one of the most sensitive cases in the debate about the differences between the Gospel of John and the Synoptics was the absence in the latter of any mention of “Jesus’ greatest miracle,” the raising of his friend Lazarus of Bethany as narrated in John 11. Since the uncompromising analysis of David Friedrich Strauss, this episode has become a locus classicus for discussions of the Johannine question and the reliability of the Fourth Gospel’s evidence for the reconstruction of Jesus’ deeds. 34 Now, what Smith was going to discover in the first passage of Secret Mark quoted in the Letter to Theodore (II.23–III.11) was precisely the missing link between the Synoptics—in this case, an Urmark—and the Gospel of John that a good number of exegetes had dreamt of for more than a century. A scholar as meticulous and well-prepared as Smith, already conversant in New Testament criticism, would hardly have ignored this. 35
In the Beginning, a Hoax?
Smith’s correspondence with Scholem also sheds a new light on the circumstances that compelled him to interrupt his collaboration with Brown University sooner than he had expected. In 1953 Smith was apparently doing well at Brown, where he was even planning to have Scholem invited as a guest professor with the help of some faithful friends such as William G. Braude, the well-known specialist of rabbinic literature. Unhappily, in spite of the prospect of tenure that they had used to lure him two years earlier, 36 another candidate received the position left vacant at the Department of Biblical Literature and History of Religions. As a result, at the beginning of 1954 Smith was informed that his contract was not going to be renewed:
......
(Pierluigi Piovanelli)
the cumulative amount of circumstantial evidence mentioned above—the wrong document, at the wrong place, discovered by the wrong person, who was, moreover, in need of exactly that kind of new evidence to promote new, unconventional ideas—raises the worst suspicions about the authenticity of Smith’s finding.
....
Therefore, at this point we should agree that, in the case of a text as dubious as the Letter to Theodore, the only possible scholarly attitude to adopt is simply not to use it in any reconstruction of the history of early Christian traditions, texts, individuals, and groups, be they the Gospel of Mark, the historical Jesus, Alexandrian Christians, the Carpocratians, or Clement of Alexandria. Paraphrasing legal terminology, the recommendation I would give to my students is, “You shall not rely on any information, materials, opinions or content found on or delivered through the so- called Letter to Theodore.”
=================================
BEYOND SUSPICION: ON THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE MAR SABA LETTER AND THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK, by Francis Watson, in The Journal of Theological Studies NEW SERIES, Vol. 61, No. 1 (APRIL 2010), pp. 128-170 Published By: Oxford University Press
Annick Martin “À propos de la lettre attribuée à Clément d’Alexandrie sur l’Évangile secret de Marc.” Pages 277–300 in Colloque international “L’Évangile selon Thomas et les textes de Nag Hammadi” (Québec, 29–31 mai 2003).
There is a relevant bibliography here
This article enquires whether the long-standing suspicion of forgery—occasioned largely by the circumstances of the text’s discovery—can be put beyond reasonable doubt. It proceeds by way of a close scrutiny of the letter itself against the double background of the undisputed writings of Clement of Alexandria on the one hand, and the published work of Morton Smith on the other. It is argued that the letter’s internal anomalies are incompatible with Clementine authorship, as are certain compositional techniques; and that it is the product of interests and influences that predate its supposed discovery at the Mar Saba monastery.
Thus it was a forgery.
However, many scholars want to cover and shill for Morton Smith. So they claim he discovered a forgery.
===========================
Go through Tony Burke book
True Forgery Position
Peter Jeffery
Pierluigi Piovanelli
Stephen Carlson - hoax ? Piovanelli rips this
Francis Watson (beyond reasonable doubt) perhaps supported by Craig Evans) - uses Hunter Mar Saba book
BCHF
Stephen Gorenson and perhaps Andrew Criddle ?
================
De Facto Forgery but tries to get Morton Smith off the hook
Annick Martin and French writers
Origen
Zeddies
An Origenian Background for the Letter to Theodore | Harvard Theological Review | Cambridge Core
An Origenian Background for the Letter to Theodore - Volume 112 Issue 3
Secret Mark - Origen dependence indicates forgery
Pure Bible Forum Michael Zeddies paper on Secret Mark - Sinaiticus analogy references - Testaments of Time - Leo Deuel https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php?threads/michael-zeddies-paper-on-secret-mark-sinaiticus-analogy-references.4526/ Secret Mark - Origen dependence indicates forgery...
purebibleforum.com
The Letter to Theodore may need to be reattributed to Origen of Alexandria. Many of its features seem demonstrably Origenian, and its language aligns with early Christian and Origenian usage. Two noncanonical gospel fragments in the letter do not betray a modern author, but rather evoke early Christian symbolism and narrative structure. The single garment worn by a character in the first fragment reflects Christian symbolism and resembles the philosopher’s garment, which many early Christians adopted and portrayed in material artifacts. Origen’s intellectual interests can explain the letter’s preparation for philosophical exegesis, and its language reflects his text-critical practice. Nevertheless, Origen’s circumstances indicate the text of the noncanonical gospel fragments is unreliable. The letter also echoes Papias in the manner that Origen does. Morton Smith’s account of its discovery does not betray a forgery or hoax, but plausibly depends on other nonfiction works of manuscript discoveries written during the 1960s. Further work may be needed to secure attribution, but Origenian authorship is a simpler explanation of the evidence than modern forgery.
post-Eusebius theories - (roughly the 5th to 7th centuries)
Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau
(e.g., Jacob Lebovitch or similar modern analysts of the text's dependence on Eusebian geography)
??
================
Still Forgery but Less Important
Agamemnon Tselikas
Francis Watson - emphasizes James Hogg Hunter book as template
The Mystery of Mar Saba
back and forth described here
https://scalar.usc.edu/works/gospel-thrillers/1940-jh-hunter-the-mystery-of-mar-saba
book is here
http://archive.org/details/bwb_O8-BQC-033
This novel recently entered into academic conversation in relation to the ongoing debate about Morton Smith and the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark: see Stephan Huller's blogpost on Hunter; an essay by Craig Evans, which refers to this [PAYWALLED] article by Francis Watson; for a direct refutation of Watson's argument, see this essay by Allan Pantuck
(PDF) and response by Watson
(PDF).Bart Ehrman and Agnes Sudbrack/other modern critics have tended to analyze the text as a 20th-century creation
AI
- Quentin Quesnell: A Jesuit theologian who published the first major challenge in 1975. He suggested Smith fabricated the text as a controlled experiment. [1, 2, 3]
- Birger Pearson: A professor from the University of California who shifted to the forgery camp. He argued the text is a twentieth-century fake. [1]
- Adela Yarbro Collins: A professor from Yale University who concluded that Smith was the most likely forger.
- Bart Ehrman: A professor from the University of North Carolina who supports the modern forgery hypothesis. [1]
- Craig A. Evans: A New Testament scholar who has argued in favor of the text being a modern creation. [1]
====================
Supporters
Stephan Huller
Timo Paananen
James Tabor
Scott Brown and Allan Pantuck have strongly criticized and challenged several of Carlson's specific linguistic and historical claims.
========================
Michael T. Zeddies on Origen.
https://purebibleforum.com/index.ph...references-testaments-of-time-leo-deuel.4526/
https://purebibleforum.com/index.php?threads/secret-mark-origen-dependence-indicates-forgery.6377/
Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau on Eusebius
2023 book, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate Over Its Authenticity,
============================
Annick Martin
Attila Jakab, Alain Le Boulluec, and Annick Martin
AD 400 -
"L'Évangile selon Thomas et les textes de Nag Hammadi": colloque
http://books.google.com/books?id=wWsyAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA26
https://www.google.com/books/editio...s+de+Nag+Hammadi"&pg=PA46&printsec=frontcover
Tony Burke
https://www.google.com/books/editio...+de+Nag+Hammadi"&pg=PA327&printsec=frontcover
andrewcriddle » Sun Sep 21, 2025 10:06 am
https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14289&start=190
IF this thread is about published papers questioning the authenticity of Secret Mark then one should note:
ADD the new Craig Evans position below
==========================
Halfway Between Sabbatai Tzevi and Aleister Crowley: Morton Smith’s “Own Concept of What Jesus ‘Must’ Have Been” and, Once Again, the Questions of Evidence and Motive*
Pierluigi Piovanelli
https://www.academia.edu/2449339/Piovanelli_Secret_Mark_2012
The second problematic fact is that, in the opinion of some of the most qualified specialists, the information provided by the Letter to Theodore does not fit very well with what we presently know about Clement of Alexandria and the history of the Egyptian Church. I am referring here to the doubts recently expressed by Attila Jakab, Alain Le Boulluec, and Annick Martin, three French (or French-speaking) historians of early Christianity in Egypt who have been involved, at different times and to varying degrees, with the Association pour l’étude de la littérature apocryphe chrétienne (AELAC). 15 Thus, Jakab points out that the author of the letter seems to know the Carpocratians much better than Clement, who apparently thought that Epiphanes, Carpocrates’ son, was the true founder of the school (Strom. III.2.5). 16 In the same vein but in a more articulated manner, Martin argues that, 1) the revised chronology of Athanasius’s Festal letters does not confirm Thomas Talley’s reconstruction of a “primitive” Alexandrian liturgy for the baptism of the catechumens that would have been based on the chronology suggested by the initiation rite (“after six days”) described in the first episode of Secret Mark quoted in the Letter to Theodore (III.6–7); 2) for Clement the baptism seems to be the only way to obtain illumination, sonship, perfection, and immortality (Paed. I.6), without the need for more advanced initiatory stages that would have been devoted to the specific study of a single, more mystical gospel; and 3) moreover, even the eventual presence of Carpocratians in Alexandria—at least at the end of the second century—is doubtful, since Clement does not mention either Carpocrates or Epiphanes among the founders—Marcion, Basilides, and Valentinus—of the main heretical sects of the day (Strom. VII.17). 17
Jakab and Martin also note that the Letter to Theodore gives a description of the earliest Christian community in Alexandria as already being in existence and having diversified prior to the arrival of Mark. This report is at odds not only with Clement’s silence on Mark’s involvement with Alexandria, but also with the account of Eusebius, who accepts the tradition (“some say”) that attributes the first conversions in Alexandria to the evangelist (Hist. eccl. II.16). 18 Concerning the origins of the church in Alexandria, the real question is not to determine which of the two versions of the story is more ancient and historically plausible, but to explain why Eusebius, who constantly relies on the work of Clement, seems to ignore useful information found in one of Clement’s letters that he could have consulted easily in bishop Alexander’s library in Jerusalem (Hist. eccl. VI.20) 19 —at least if any manuscripts containing Clement’s correspondence existed and were kept there. This is the final and most fatal blow to the house of cards making up the connection between a postulated collection of Clementine letters and Mar Saba. Actually, as Martin makes perfectly clear, on the one hand John of Damascus lived and worked, until 742, in Jerusalem and not, as his later biographers claimed, at Mar Saba; on the other hand, it is not certain that Clement was the author of the three citations attributed to him, in the midst of other biblical and truly Clementine excerpts, in the Sacra parallela anthologies made, in the ninth century or later, from John of Damascus’s presently lost Hiera. In other words, the existence of a corpus of letters of Clement could be but the result of an erroneous medieval attribution. 20 Thus, in spite of the remote possibility of a late antique falsification, Martin is compelled to acknowledge that “the hypothesis of a modern forgery starts again with renewed vigor” and that “the scientific reliability” of the Letter to Theodore “should be called into question,” at least, until it is possible to recover the original document and analyze the ink used by its scribe 21 —a judgment also shared by Jakab and Le Boulluec 22 with such agreement that it makes any previous statements about a growing consensus among Clementine scholars concerning the authenticity of the Mar Saba letter look obsolete. 23
. . . Discovered by the Wrong Person!
The publication of Smith’s letters adds decisively to the aforementioned difficulties, specifically because the author of the discovery was already familiar with, and well trained, prior to 1958, in the main fields of research, topics, and methods that he would later find inextricably intertwined in the study of the Letter to Theodore. Thus, we learn that in 1948 he devoted the first six months of the year to the study of Gregory of Nyssa’s “background—giving half of [his] time to classical literature and half to the early Fathers, especially Clement of Alexandria.” 24 In 1951– 1952, thanks to a Fulbright grant, he spent an entire year in Greece exploring monastic libraries in search of new manuscripts of the epistles of Isidore of Pelusium—the initial topic of his Harvard doctoral dissertation—and “brought back about 5,000 photographs of manuscripts (i.e. about 10,000 pages)” from “places like Patmos and Mount Athos” with the hope of putting them to use for his “Th.D. thesis on St. Isidore of Pelusium, an edition of St. Maximus’s Centuries on Love, and some studies of patristic catenae.” 25 According to the title of the unpublished catalogue that Smith compiled and deposited in the Brown University Library in 1952, the passages he had selected were taken “from Greek manuscripts of the tenth to nineteenth centuries found mainly in monastic libraries” 26 —a chronological span that should betray Smith’s familiarity, at that time, not only with medieval, but also with modern Greek handwritten materials. 2
Among the various publication projects that he undertook in 1947 were, “a book, two big articles, and a book review which should be almost an article, on strictly New Testament subjects,” 28 a “book on the lives of Jesus;” 29 “a book on Mark,” which he had almost finished in 1955–1956; 30 and a new anthology of Jewish Pseudepigrapha in translation for 1957–1958. 31 If such announcements were not the result of a vague desire to explore ever new avenues of research—and a few works published in those years seem to demonstrate that this was not the case 32 —, we should conclude that Smith was, from an intellectual point of view, perfectly equipped to deal with both the content and the form of the amazing Clementine fragment that he was later to discover at Mar Saba. 33 In this regard, we should also remember that, from the first steps of the historico-critical school in nineteenth-century German universities, one of the most sensitive cases in the debate about the differences between the Gospel of John and the Synoptics was the absence in the latter of any mention of “Jesus’ greatest miracle,” the raising of his friend Lazarus of Bethany as narrated in John 11. Since the uncompromising analysis of David Friedrich Strauss, this episode has become a locus classicus for discussions of the Johannine question and the reliability of the Fourth Gospel’s evidence for the reconstruction of Jesus’ deeds. 34 Now, what Smith was going to discover in the first passage of Secret Mark quoted in the Letter to Theodore (II.23–III.11) was precisely the missing link between the Synoptics—in this case, an Urmark—and the Gospel of John that a good number of exegetes had dreamt of for more than a century. A scholar as meticulous and well-prepared as Smith, already conversant in New Testament criticism, would hardly have ignored this. 35
In the Beginning, a Hoax?
Smith’s correspondence with Scholem also sheds a new light on the circumstances that compelled him to interrupt his collaboration with Brown University sooner than he had expected. In 1953 Smith was apparently doing well at Brown, where he was even planning to have Scholem invited as a guest professor with the help of some faithful friends such as William G. Braude, the well-known specialist of rabbinic literature. Unhappily, in spite of the prospect of tenure that they had used to lure him two years earlier, 36 another candidate received the position left vacant at the Department of Biblical Literature and History of Religions. As a result, at the beginning of 1954 Smith was informed that his contract was not going to be renewed:
......
(Pierluigi Piovanelli)
the cumulative amount of circumstantial evidence mentioned above—the wrong document, at the wrong place, discovered by the wrong person, who was, moreover, in need of exactly that kind of new evidence to promote new, unconventional ideas—raises the worst suspicions about the authenticity of Smith’s finding.
....
Therefore, at this point we should agree that, in the case of a text as dubious as the Letter to Theodore, the only possible scholarly attitude to adopt is simply not to use it in any reconstruction of the history of early Christian traditions, texts, individuals, and groups, be they the Gospel of Mark, the historical Jesus, Alexandrian Christians, the Carpocratians, or Clement of Alexandria. Paraphrasing legal terminology, the recommendation I would give to my students is, “You shall not rely on any information, materials, opinions or content found on or delivered through the so- called Letter to Theodore.”
=================================
BEYOND SUSPICION: ON THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE MAR SABA LETTER AND THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK, by Francis Watson, in The Journal of Theological Studies NEW SERIES, Vol. 61, No. 1 (APRIL 2010), pp. 128-170 Published By: Oxford University Press
Annick Martin “À propos de la lettre attribuée à Clément d’Alexandrie sur l’Évangile secret de Marc.” Pages 277–300 in Colloque international “L’Évangile selon Thomas et les textes de Nag Hammadi” (Québec, 29–31 mai 2003).
There is a relevant bibliography here
This article enquires whether the long-standing suspicion of forgery—occasioned largely by the circumstances of the text’s discovery—can be put beyond reasonable doubt. It proceeds by way of a close scrutiny of the letter itself against the double background of the undisputed writings of Clement of Alexandria on the one hand, and the published work of Morton Smith on the other. It is argued that the letter’s internal anomalies are incompatible with Clementine authorship, as are certain compositional techniques; and that it is the product of interests and influences that predate its supposed discovery at the Mar Saba monastery.
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