The Manuscript That Cannot Be Examined

Morton Smith, cataloguing the library at Mar Saba in 1958, found two and a half pages of Greek written in an eighteenth century hand into the endpapers of a printed edition of the letters of Ignatius published in 1646. The text presents itself as a letter of Clement of Alexandria and quotes from a longer version of the Gospel of Mark. Smith photographed the pages in black and white and published his study of them in 1973.

What happened next is why the case cannot be resolved on the evidence available. The monastery's books were moved to the patriarchate's library in Jerusalem in the 1970s and the volume was located there. In the early 1980s a group of scholars examined it and took colour photographs, and the leaves were then removed from the book by the librarian, reportedly for separate conservation. They have not been publicly produced since. No ink analysis, no paper analysis and no forensic examination of any kind has ever been carried out on them.

Every argument about the document therefore rests on photographs, and the arguments are sharp ones. Some scholars hold the letter to be a genuine ancient text copied by an eighteenth century hand. Others hold it to be a modern forgery, and some of those have named Smith himself as the forger. The atlas does not adjudicate between them. It records instead the one thing both camps agree on, which is that the object that would settle the question is not available to be examined.