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Many scholars who simply are not sure whether Smith, or someone else, forged this letter of Clement have proceeded on the assumption that it is original and

then given their own interpretation and assessment of its historical significance.

What if we reverse the procedure and assume, for the sake of an argument, that it was forged? It would almost certainly have to have been forged after Stählin’s 1936 edition of Clement was published. It would have to have been forged by someone who had access to the library of Mar Saba (not everyone is admitted).

If the ironies of its placement in this particular book are not simply intriguing circumstances but fingerprints, then it would have to have been perpetrated by someone who knew the book was there in the library, who realized that this was the perfect place to copy the letter—for example, from an earlier visit to the library. Whoever perpetrated the fraud would have had to spend many years thinking it over and working out the wording of the letter, to make it sound like Clement, and the wording of the quotations of Secret Mark, to make them sound like Mark. This person would have had to become skilled in Greek manu­

scripts and to have learned to write in an eighteenth-century Greek hand. He or she would have had to have time, after long hours of practice, to write the letter in the back of the book. And he or she would have to invent a plausible account of its discovery.

What fun it would be to photograph the text and try it out, then, on a few scholars to see if it appeared convincing. If the first ones to see the photos were not convinced, well enough! Simply let it die there. But if they were convinced, maybe show the photos to a few more people. And then more. And then, yet more intriguing, decide to analyze what you yourself had written and make all sorts of discoveries about it, recognizing a few places where you missed the mark, where the forgery wasn’t quite like Clement’s style, point them out, and indicate that this is a sure sign that the letter wasn’t forged, since no one would make such a gaff.

Is it conceivable that a scholar would forge this letter, just to see if it could be done? To create a “mystification for the sake of mystification?”

In the annals of forgery, it has been done before. One of the earliest known instances is another rather humorous account. In the fourth century before the Christian era, a philosopher known to history as Dionysius the Renegade²⁸ forged and published a play in the name of the fifth-century tragedian Sophocles.

The play was cited as an authentic text by Dionysius’s personal rival, the phi­

losopher Heraclides. When Dionysius mocked Heraclides for not knowing a forged text when he saw it, Heraclides insisted that it was authentic. Dionysius claimed that he himself had forged it, and pointed out to Heraclides that the first letters of several of the lines were an acrostic, which spelled out the name Pankalos, who happened to be Dionysius’s lover. Heraclides persisted, claim­

ing that this was an accident. He was told, though, that if he would read on he would find yet more hidden messages, including the lines: “An old monkey is not caught by a trap. Oh yes, he’s caught at last, but it takes time.” This was probably convincing enough, but a final acrostic hidden in the text dealt the death blow. It said, “Heraclides is ignorant of letters and is not ashamed of his ignorance.”²⁹

I am not willing to say that Smith was a latter-day Dionysius the Renegade, that he forged the letter of Clement which he claimed to discover. My reasons should be obvious. As soon as I say that I am certain he did so, those pages cut from the back of the book will turn up, someone will test the ink, and it will be from the eighteenth century!

But maybe Smith forged it. Few others in the late twentieth century had the skill to pull it off. Few others had enough disdain of other scholars to want to bamboozle them. Few others would have enjoyed so immensely the sheer plea­

sure of having pulled the wool over the eyes of so many “experts,” demonstrat­

ing once and for all one’s own superiority. Maybe Smith did it.

Or maybe this is a genuine letter by Clement of Alexandria, and there really were different versions of the Gospel of Mark available in ancient Alexandria, one of which was lost until modern times, when it was uncovered, in part, in an ancient letter in an ancient library of an ancient monastery. If so, then the letter provides us with a glimpse of yet another lost form of Christianity, a group of Carpocratians who utilized an expanded version of the Gospel of Mark that they modified for their own purposes, possibly in order to justify their morally dubious communal activities.

Either way, whether forged or authentic, Morton Smith’s letter of Clement provides us with one of the most interesting documents relating to early Chris­

tianity to be discovered in the twentieth century.