Rather than pursue that question, I want to deal with the prior one. Is this an authentic letter of Clement, or was it forged? And if it was forged, forged by whom?
I am sorry to say that I will not be able to give a definitive answer, for reasons that will soon be apparent. At the outset, however, I should emphasize that the majority of scholars Smith consulted while doing his research were convinced that the letter was authentic, and probably a somewhat smaller ma
jority agreed that the quotations of Secret Mark actually derived from a version of Mark. Even today, these are the majority opinions. But they have never been
the full consensus. Some scholars have thought the letter was forged, either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages or in the modern period. Some have suspected from the beginning that Smith forged it. Those who think so appear to be in
creasing in number—or at least they are speaking out more, now that Smith is not around to respond.19
Among the earliest doubters was one of the greatest scholars of Christian antiquity of the twentieth century, Smith’s own teacher at Harvard, Arthur Darby Nock, one of the few people in the field who could probably claim intellectual superiority to Smith in several of his own areas of expertise. Nock was one of the first scholars to whom Smith showed the photographs. And Nock was suit
ably impressed, even amazed by what he read. But to the end of his life his instincts—he was famous for his instincts—told him no, this was not genu
inely Clementine. In his view, it was a “mystification for the sake of mystifica
tion,” that is to say, a forgery by someone to see if she or he could get away with it. But Nock evidently did not think that it would have been a modern forger, let alone Smith. Others have thought otherwise.
There are a number of factors to consider. The first is nearly as amazing as the discovery itself, and it has been the source of heated contention ever since its announcement. From the moment Smith took his photographs, no other scholar has been able to subject the book to a careful and controlled examination.
There is no doubt that the book existed. There is no doubt that Smith photo
graphed the relevant pages. There is no doubt that the letter is written is an eighteenth-century style of Greek hand. There is no doubt that the writing style of the letter is like Clement’s. And there is no doubt that the quotations of Secret Mark are very much like Mark. But no one has carefully examined the book.
Why does that matter? After all, we have the photographs! It matters be
cause the only way to see if a modern person has forged the text is to have the manuscript available for analysis. On the most basic level, until there is a chemi
cal analysis of the ink, we cannot really know if the scribe was writing in the late 1750s—or the late 1950s.
It is true that a modern forgery would be an amazing feat. For this to be forged, someone would have had to imitate an eighteenth-century Greek style of handwriting and to produce a document that is so much like Clement that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Clement, which quotes a previ
ously lost passage from Mark that is so much like Mark that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Mark. If this is forged, it is one of the greatest works of scholarship of the twentieth century, by someone who put an uncanny amount of work into it.
But it would not have been impossible. What seems most incredible to most of us is that someone could imitate an eighteenth-century style of handwriting in Greek! In fact, this is not at all impossible. We know of numerous forgers since the Renaissance who taught themselves different Greek and Latin writ
ing styles and produced documents that fooled experts for years. Some docu
ments are still probably unsuspected. In the 1850s and 1860s, a Greek scholar named Constantine Simonides passed off dozens of forgeries of ancient texts (including some in hieroglyphics) and made a small fortune doing it. For a long while, he managed to convince a good number of people that he in fact had forged the famous manuscript of the Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, discovered by the great manuscript hunter Constantine Tischendorf in the Monastery of St. Catherine’s at Mount Sinai. This was the most significant New Testament manuscript discovered in the nineteenth century, and Simonides claimed that he himself had fabricated it. And he was so good at his craft, as everyone knew, that learned societies throughout England debated the merits of his claims for months.20
Someone with skill and patience can learn how to imitate a style of writ-ing.21 Moreover, it should be pointed out that in the case of the letter of Clem
ent, there was not a particular scribe’s hand that had to be imitated, simply a hand that looked like other hands of the eighteenth century. We cannot know if this eighteenth-century hand was actually writing in the eighteenth century until we can examine the ink. And the manuscript is unavailable.
I do not mean to say that it has always been unavailable, even though that is what scholars in the field invariably claim. Whether in serious publications or in popular accounts on the internet, nearly everyone who discusses the authen
ticity of this letter of Clement points out that no western scholar except Smith has ever laid eyes on the book. As it turns out, that is not true. In one of those quirky coincidences of history, the very evening I completed my first draft of this chapter, I met the last western scholar on earth to see the book.
I was at my colleague Elizabeth Clark’s house for a social event. Also there was a scholar named Guy Stroumsa, a professor of comparative religions at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a respected expert in early Christianity.
Stroumsa happened to be in town to visit his daughter, who was just starting her Ph.D. program in classics at Duke University. The event was organized around Stroumsa’s visit. He gave a brief talk—about Clement of Alexandria, as it turned out—and then we had a light dinner and social, academic conversa
tion. He and I had never met before, but we knew each other’s work. I told him I was writing a book on lost Christianities, and told him I had just completed a draft of my chapter on the Secret Gospel of Mark. To my astonishment—and everyone else’s—Stroumsa told me that years ago he had tracked down the book and seen it with his own eyes. He could confirm that the letter was in the final pages (which, of course, no one doubted). But he suspects that no one will ever see the letter again.
I immediately stopped drinking and started listening. As a graduate student in 1976, Stroumsa found himself discussing the Secret Gospel with his teacher in Jerusalem, David Flusser, a highly erudite scholar of the New Testament and early Judaism. Flusser had claimed that the letter was probably forged. Stroumsa suggested they try to find it. It was, after all, only a forty-five-minute drive to
the monastery. And so they called up another scholar at the university and a Greek Orthodox monk connected with the monastery, who happened to be doing a Ph.D. there at the time (and who could open the doors for them once they were there, so to speak). They all piled into Stroumsa’s car and drove out to the monastery.
The dust was heavy over the library in the upper room of the tower, where Smith had done his work of cataloging nearly eighteen years earlier. Stroumsa suspected that no one had been in the library since. The monks were not taken to reading the complicated tomes stored in this out-of-the-way place. The foursome began their hunt, opening one book after the other, looking for an edition of Ignatius with a handwritten text on the final pages. After about fifteen minutes, one of the monks found it. It was right there on a shelf, where Smith had left it.
The scholars persuaded the monks to allow them to take the book back to the library of the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem, where they could find some
one to do a chemical analysis of the ink. But once they had conveyed the book back with them, things turned out to be more complicated than they had ex
pected. No one at the National Library was able to perform the necessary test
ing; Stroumsa was told that the only agency that could do it was the police department. When he informed the librarian who was keeping the book, he was told, “No thanks.” The Greek Orthodox Christians were not eager to hand over one of their prized possessions—whether they read the book or not, it was still one of the sacred tomes of their library—to the Israeli (Jewish) authorities.
That brought the matter to a close.
Some years later, someone told Stroumsa of a rumor that the letter of Clem
ent had been cut out of the book for “safe-keeping.” Stroumsa called the librar
ian at the Greek Patriarchate and was told that it was true. He himself had done just that. And he now did not know where the pages were.
And that’s the end of the story. Did the librarian hide the pages, to keep scholars from rifling through the monks’ treasured possessions looking for lost Gospels? Did he burn the pages simply to get them off his hands? Where are they now? Do they still exist? I’m afraid that as of this moment, no one appears to know. Maybe that will change. What is certain is that no one has carefully examined the book itself, and it may be that no one ever will.