stephan huller

Peter Jeffrey, the author of the Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (or via: amazon.co.uk), seems to be convinced that the handwriting analysis commissioned by Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) on the existing photographs of the document Morton Smith claimed to have discovered at Mar Saba in 1958. BAR seems to have published a bunch of new things (or things I hadn't seen before) on the six month anniversary of their special issue devoted to To Theodore. First a more recent summary of the final report by document examiner Venetia Anastasopoulou which reads:

In the question: “can a document in itself reveal a forgery or not,” we have a lot to say.

The writing as a whole can speak to the examiner and his trained eye will catch the signals of its rhythm and spontaneity.

There are characteristics which point to a genuine or to a suspicious writing, but we should always have in mind, that these characteristics are just indications and could be present in a genuine handwriting as well. We should not forget that the method of comparison is leading us to a conclusion on genuineness or not.

In general, the genuine writing

◦is natural and carelessly written

◦has a good line quality

◦has good pressure patterns

◦is written rapidly or more precisely with continuity in motion

◦is internally consistent

◦has good rhythm

whereas the opposite characteristics are always suspicious indications.

More over, a suspicious writing

◦appears drawn

◦lack of natural variations

◦has excessive perfection of details

◦has poor line quality

◦there are no pressure variations

◦uses incorrect method of constructions

◦close resemblance to a model

◦has tremor (meaning that tremor is not the curve or the leaning of a line, but as Osborn says tremor of fraud shows a painstaking and unnatural care throughout that indicates an effort to follow an unfamiliar copy)

◦has pen lifts in places where there is no need, where it shows the difficulty of the writer to draw a certain form

◦uses unusual forms or forms written in an awkward way.

In a questioned suspicious writing we are expecting for the forgers genuine characteristic to come up as the handwritten document is getting larger and in such documents we are looking for a distortion in the writing. When a large document is consistent, we have a first indication of genuineness and this applies to the Secret Mark letter.

The Secret Mark letter, as written in detail in my analysis report, is written in a natural and spontaneous way and in my opinion, does not have such indications so to make us think of a suspicious writing. So, the only way to check whether the handwriting is genuine or not, is to compare with a known handwriting, as I have done in my earlier report. If the Secret Mark letter was written by someone with the intension to mislead people, this is something that cannot be seen in a handwriting alone.

Venetia Anastasopoulou

Athens, 22/07/2010

And then Jeffrey's reaction to Anastasopoulou's report where he says he never believed Smith forged the original document:

The Mar Saba handwriting seems to her to be that of a native Greek-speaker, who is comfortable connecting Greek cursive letter forms and uses accents correctly (but see p. 31). Smith, in the examples she gives, writes Greek like an English-speaking student: one letter at a time, and in a non-cursive, even “immature” hand modeled on printed “copybook” forms (p. 37). This is most obvious in the combination omicron-upsilon (ou), which is often regarded and written by Greeks as a single letter, and even passed as one letter into the Old Slavonic alphabet. But Smith, like most English-speakers who learned Greek in school, usually wrote it as two letters (pp. 33-34). The implication, as Anastasopoulou herself concludes, is that Smith was incapable of writing the kind of rapid cursive we find in the Mar Saba text (nothing about “forger’s tremor” here). This seems to be borne out by the examples she herself presents, assuming they are typical of the material she was given to work with. I believe it does raise the bar for those who argue that Smith penned the Mar Saba document in his own hand (a claim I never made myself). They will need to show, if they can, that Smith acquired or attempted fluency in this type of Greek cursive, even though he did not habitually use it. The second example on her p. 33 shows Smith writing a cursive abbreviation for the word theou (of God) which is not the same as the one in the Mar Saba text. Anastasopoulou describes it as “of poor quality.” Were such attempts frequent or highly unusual for Smith?

If the Mar Saba scribe was not Smith, who was it? An unknown Greek accomplice of Smith? A rival of his who successfully deceived him? An 18th-century monk? We still need to know. According to Anastasopoulou (p. 4), this type of cursive “was learned and used by few people because of its difficulties . . . . In each monastery there were a limited number of monks who knew” the characteristic abbreviations and ligatures that identified the house script. Potentially, then, the Mar Saba script could be localized to a specific monastery, but she gives us no bibliographical help in doing this. Therefore we still badly need some thorough analyses by qualified paleographical specialists in early modern Greek cursives.

Jeffrey still thinks the document is a fake but not counterfeit by the hand of Smith. Original story here - http://www.bib-arch.org/scholars-stu...al-forgery.asp

Toto

From that article: Jeffery's response

Presumably, Jeffery still holds to the thesis of his book:

DCHindley

Is that really the thesis of Jeffrey's book? I haven't read Jeffrey but that quote sounds exactly like the thesis of Carlson's book.

That constant allusion to Oscar Wilde is nonsense. Smith may have been thinking of this when he translated the passage, but the trope of seven veils hiding secret teaching can be found in an ancient Egyptian text (where it refers to the seven heavenly spheres) and was current in medieval magical texts (where it refers to mystical ascents through those spheres). I was also able to find it used in a Theosophical publication written in the name of Madame Blavatsky, published in 1901.

The theosophist G R S Mead was a highly trained biblical critic. F W Hort, co editor of a well known eclectic text of the NT published in 1881, and thoroughly familiar with ancient manuscripts, was a dabbler in occult ideas in the late 19th century. So, if the handwriting genuinely dates from late 19th to early 20th century, I think researchers should be looking at theosophic or occult dabblers among the academic elite for the origin of this fragment. Even if one finds a likely suspect, that won't answer the question whether the writer actually transcribed a manuscript fragment found in one of the libraries of Mar Saba (the larger one had been recently emptied earlier in the 19th century, but some fragments always get left behind along with the less desirable books and mss), or conjured up in the mind of the scholar or monk as he perused the books of the smaller library with its "rather good collection of patristic texts."

FWIW, according to a travel guide by J M Buckley published in 1894, the library of the Lavra at Mar Saba was under lock and key, with the key held by the Patriarch of Jerusalem. In that period, whoever had access to the larger library would have had to have been given permission to do so by the Patriarch himself.

DCH

stephan huller

Yes Toto, I did cite extensively from both articles (all of Venetia's piece and about half of Jeffrey's). The point is that Jeffrey's statement is noteworthy - I think even praiseworthy. I am not so sure how people that accept the authenticity of the document would have reacted if her verdict ran counter to their theses.

This statement from Jeffrey is startling to say the least:

I believe it does raise the bar for those who argue that Smith penned the Mar Saba document in his own hand (a claim I never made myself).

While technically true Jeffrey does intimate such a correlation by basically painting a portrait of Smith as a scholar with a dildo up his ass (metaphorically) and assuming that whoever penned the Mar Saba letter had a gay agenda. I don't see what the point of the Secret Gospel Unveiled if it is not indirectly accusing Smith of forging the document. Maybe he just wanted to study Smith's 'madness' and personality quirks and then do a separate study of an ancient libertine sect. :constern01:

As noted though, it shows that Jeffrey is an honest man. He does acknowledge arguments that go counter to his beliefs. I found the same honesty with Birger Pearson through personal contact (again not a recanting of his belief that the text is a fake but a man in possession of enough integrity to admit he had accepted the forger's tremor argument without actually examining the evidence). David Trobisch is another name. Maurice Casey etc.

Toto

Just a nitpick - it's Jeffery, not Jeffrey. I fixed the spelling in the title.

But Jeffery seems to say that he never ever even claimed that Smith was the forger, implying that - what? a confederate forged it under Smith's direction? I haven't read the book.

stephan huller

No not nitpicking. I so sloppy. Jeffery's book is well researched. I mean he spent a lot of time on it. It comes against Smith from a number of different angles. The core of his argument develops from his knowledge of ancient Christian music and his projection of liturgical constructs back from the fourth century to the time of Clement. No one can argue that Jeffery isn't authoritative about early Christian music. His assumptions are again that the initiation of Jesus's disciple in LGM 1 (the first addition to Mark) doesn't fit the way the baptism of catechumen was arranged within Passion week/Holy Week. It doesn't fit the liturgy of his Catholic tradition.

That's a valid observation. But one could easily take it the other way too - i.e. that Alexandrian Christianity WAS something different. That it only slowly adapted itself to the official position of Rome (and later Constantinople). The fact that Constantine allowed Alexandria to determine the calculation of Easter does in my mind suggest that the Egyptian Church was seen as authoritative by many over the proper way to celebrate Easter.

I know many of Jeffery's associates. His friend J Harold Ellens - who organized a 'psychological' conference on the state of Morton Smith's mental illness at a recent SBL symposium actually gave my book a good review (even though it supports the authenticity of the letter to Theodore). Ellens for instance doesn't even believe there was an Alexandrian tradition before the fourth century.

I think that's what everything boils down to. If you don't believe that Alexandrian Christianity represents a separate tradition of Christianity, the document 'has to be' a fake (because it contradicts your inherited assumptions. As I have always believed that Mark was originally MORE important to Christianity than is now held by the 'official Church' and the scholarship which develops from it, I necessarily embrace the text.

There's much more to Jeffery's book. It's like a buffet of controversies that he sees 'swirl' around the discovery of the letter. Morton Smith's excitement at uncovering this document is presented as proof of his mental illness. I don't know I used to thank God for finding me whores and strippers. Strange, yes. Ideosyncratic, yes. But crazy? Sometimes different is just different.

stephan huller

By the way, how do you know the right spelling for Jeffery but don't know anything about the book? Odd.

Toto

My friends Google and Amazon told me. I know something about the book; I have been aware of it for some time, but I haven't gotten around to reading it.