Mar Saba Letter

In 1958 Morton Smith, an American scholar of ancient religion, was cataloguing the library of the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judaean desert. In the back of a printed edition of the letters of Ignatius, published in 1646, he found two and a half pages of Greek written in by hand in what looked like an eighteenth-century monastic script.

The text presents itself as a letter from Clement of Alexandria, writing near the end of the second century, to someone named Theodore. It addresses a group called the Carpocratians, who it says have got hold of a version of the Gospel of Mark and corrupted it. In the course of the argument the letter quotes that gospel, describing a longer or secret Mark used at Alexandria for those being initiated, and it gives two passages from it that appear in no other source. One describes Jesus raising a young man from a tomb, in language close to the raising of Lazarus in John, and the young man afterwards coming to him by night wearing a linen cloth.

Smith photographed the pages in black and white and published his study of them in 1973. What he had found, if it was what it appeared to be, was evidence of a second-century Alexandrian tradition attested nowhere else, and a version of a canonical gospel that had left no other trace.

The dispute began almost at once and has not ended. On one side, Morton Smith himself, and later Scott G. Brown and Charles Hedrick, argued that the letter is a genuine copy of a lost work of Clement and that its Greek, its argument and its use of Clement's vocabulary are beyond the reach of a forger. On the other, Stephen C. Carlson, Peter Jeffery and Francis Watson have argued that it is a modern composition, and Carlson argued specifically that Smith wrote it himself, pointing to features of the handwriting he read as signs of a slow, drawn hand imitating a script rather than writing one.

That is a genuine disagreement between serious people, and the atlas records it as one. What makes it unusual is that it cannot be settled by the means that settle such questions elsewhere.

The volume moved to the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem in 1976. In 1983 a team examined it and took colour photographs, and at that point the leaves were removed from the book, reportedly for separate conservation. They have not been publicly produced since. No ink analysis has ever been done. No paper analysis. No forensic examination of the hand with the original in front of the examiner. Fifty years of argument, on both sides, rests entirely on photographs, and where the leaves are now is simply not known.