144 VolumeTH E Number

117 E X P O4S IPages

T O 144–149
RY TIMES
EXPOSITORY Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi)
THE DOI: 10.1177/0014524606061616
TIMES http://EXT.sagepub.com

Reply to Stephen Carlson

Y
By SCOTT BROWN
University of Toronto

I
want to begin by thanking Paul Foster and
Expository Times for taking an interest in my
research and for providing me with an early
opportunity to respond to Stephen C. Carlson’s
The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of
Secret Mark (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press,
2005). 1 I must admit I was bewildered when
Carlson announced on his blog last May that he had
uncovered another manuscript from Mar Saba in
the same handwriting as the manuscript containing
Clement’s Letter to Theodore and that Morton
Smith himself identified the writer and described his
handwriting as twentieth century.2 Upon receiving
an advance copy of Carlson’s book I learned that the
writing belongs to one M. Madiotes (M. Μαδιτη)
and appears in the manuscript that Smith catalogued
as item no. 22. In Carlson’s view, Madiotes was
never a real person but only a pseudonym, meaning
‘baldy’ and ‘swindler’, that Smith invented and
included in his catalogue as a clue to his authorship
of the letter. If the scribe of the Letter to Theodore
was in fact a twentieth-century individual using an
eighteenth-century hand, it would be impossible
to maintain the letter’s authenticity, regardless of
whether one accepts Carlson’s claim that Madiotes
is really Smith himself. My reply is devoted to
investigating this claim.
I assume that manuscript no. 22 is still at Mar
Saba. What Carlson inspected is not the manuscript
itself but a photograph that Smith took of the
binding and first page of this manuscript, which
is reproduced in both his book The Secret Gospel
1
My thanks also to Dr Nick Nicholas of the University of
Melbourne for sharing his knowledge of Greek letterforms and
to Charles W. Hedrick for providing me with 1200 dpi scans of
the colour photographs of the Letter to Theodore.
2
Stephen C. Carlson, ‘My SBL Paper Proposal Accepted’,
Hypotyposeis, http://www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2005/05/
my-sbl-paper-proposal-accepted.html.
and the journal Archaeology as an example of
how the endpapers and bindings of printed books
in monastery libraries sometimes contain valuable
manuscripts.3 The recto (right side) of the first
page of this manuscript contains personal notes
in three different hands, the uppermost being that
of Madiotes (see figure 1). Carlson’s reasons for
concluding that this handwriting is the same as that
of the Letter to Theodore are as follows:
The first of the hands . . . , in its shaping of the letters
tau, pi, rho, and the omicron-upsilon ligature, . . .
resembles the hand of [the Letter to] Theodore. The
first hand also resembles Theodore in its choice of
a narrow nib, while the other hands on the page
use the wider pen nib more favored at Mar Saba in
the eighteenth century. In addition, the first hand
also shows the blunt ends and the ‘forger’s tremor’
indicative of the person who penned Theodore. For
these reasons, whoever wrote Theodore was also the
first hand of manuscript no. 22 (pp. 42–43).
Thus, Carlson’s evidence consists of four similar
letterforms, the choice of writing implement, the
speed of writing (blunt ends of letters sometimes
occur when the pen is moving slowly or actually
stops at the end of a letter), and a tremor (Carlson
gives no indication of where this tremor appears).
Some of this evidence is not applicable. It is not
possible to know on the basis of one sample whether
a person normally writes with a particular nib or at a
particular speed, so these things cannot help identify
or eliminate particular individuals. Moreover,
Carlson’s claim that writers at Mar Saba favoured
a ‘wider pen nib’ throughout the entire eighteenth
3
Morton Smith, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and
Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark
(1973 rpt.; Clearlake, CA: Dawn Horse Press, 2005), 37;
idem, ‘Monasteries and Their Manuscripts’, Archaeology 13
(1960): 177.
 THE EXPOSITORY TIMES
century is an unwarranted generalization based on a
small number of preserved manuscripts. I will leave it
to professional document examiners to judge whether
a ‘forger’s tremor’ is evident in either manuscript.
They would know, or determine experimentally,
whether it is possible to assess line quality using the
small picture in Archaeology, wherein the letters by
Madiotes average one or two millimeters in width
and are rendered in 100 dpi halftone, a process that
converts continuous-tone images into rows of evenly
spaced black dots of differing sizes.4
It is the habitual aspects of writing that are
relevant to handwriting identification, as Ordway
Hilton explains:
In a problem involving the authorship of hand-
writing, all characteristics of both the known and
unknown specimens must be considered. Basic
writing habits common to both must agree if all
are the work of the same writer. A single significant
difference between the two is a strong indication
of two writers, unless this divergency can be
logically accounted for by the facts surrounding
the preparation of the specimens. Several repeated,
fundamental dissimilarities establish without a doubt
that two writings are not the work of a single person.
Under no circumstances, however, can identity be
established by one, two, or even several ‘unusual’
characteristics. Rather, if two writings have been
produced by one individual, there must always be
a combination of a sufficient number of points of
agreement without any fundamental dissimilarities
that all chance of accidental coincidence is excluded.
Identification rests therefore not alone on a similar
combination of identifying attributes – a condition
4
The techniques that Carlson uses for detecting forgery
are intended for use on original documents rather than
photographs. The only discussion I have found concerning
the utility of ‘any regular black and white reproduction of
an original document’ claims that these ‘seldom disclose with
sufficient clarity such phenomena or characteristics as pen lifts,
retouching, shading, remnants of lines which may remain in a
traced forgery, the direction of writing motion, the sequence of
strokes, or other minute details, the presence of which might
indicate that a writing, rather than being genuine, is in fact
a forgery’. See ‘Document Examination from a Photocopy’,
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 36 (February 1967), 23–24.
Presumably, a halftone reproduction of a photograph is even
less useful. Carlson’s decision to use the 100 dpi halftone
reproductions of the black-and-white photographs in Morton
Smith’s book Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of
Mark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973) rather than
high-resolution scans or prints made directly from the colour
photographs makes no sense to me.
145
that always must be fulfilled – but also on a
coexistant lack of basic divergencies between the
questioned and standard writings.5
In order to put these principles into practice, the
samples of known writings must be sufficiently
lengthy and varied to reveal ‘not only the individual
writing habits of the author but also the usual
variation in these habits from one writing to the
next’. Accordingly, the most important factor when
compiling samples for comparison is quantity.6
According to Hilton, ‘as a working minimum, four
or five pages of carefully selected continuous, natural
writing’ is sufficient for comparison with ‘questioned
extended writings’.7 Huber and Headrick will settle
for samples as short as two and one-half to three
pages. Yet they emphasize that a variety of sample
writings is needed ‘to substantiate reliably that the
conduct is habitual’.8 As J. F. McCarthy put it, ‘One
cannot determine a person’s normal behavior based
on a single check at one point in an individual’s
history. Thus, in handwriting examinations and
unlike fingerprint identifications, one needs more
than a single standard for comparison’.9
The implications of these fundamental principles
for the question of whether M. Madiotes penned the
Letter to Theodore are clear. The letter constitutes
a single sample of two and three-quarters pages.
This single sample might be sufficient if we were
dealing with a lengthy questioned document, but
the writing by Madiotes that is visible in Smith’s
photograph amounts to four short words and a few
letters – sixteen characters in total, or nine different
letters and one ligature. We cannot learn from this
5
Ordway Hilton, Scientific Examination of Questioned
Documents, rev. edn (CRC Series in Forensic and Police
Science; Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1993), 153–54.
6
Hilton, Questioned Documents, 299. See also David M.
Ellen, The Scientific Examination of Documents: Methods
and Techniques, 2nd edn (Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis,
1997), 64–65; J. F. McCarthy, ‘Some Aspects of Normal
Behavior: Their Use in Understanding Problems Encountered
by Document Examiners’, Journal of Forensic Sciences 21
(1976), 205: ‘the examiner . . . must vigilantly maintain his
standard of sufficiency of evidence’.
7
Hilton, Questioned Documents, 300. The specification
that this applies to ‘questioned extended writings’ comes from
a summary of Hilton’s earlier position, when he recommended
five or six pages. See Roy A. Huber and A. M. Headrick,
Handwriting Identification: Facts and Fundamentals (Boca
Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1999), 249.
8
Huber and Headrick, Handwriting Identification, 249.
9
McCarthy, ‘Normal Behavior’, 203.
146 THE EXPOSITORY TIMES
how Madiotes constructed the other fifteen letters of
the Greek alphabet, how he connected those letters
together or did not connect them, and whether and
when he used the thirty-nine other ligatures that
appear in the Letter to Theodore or how he drew
them. True, we do not need to know everything
about the way Madiotes wrote in order to draw a
firm conclusion. But we do need to know enough
to rule out the possibility that two different people
produced these writings, and the sample we possess
from Madiotes is much too limited to permit this.
A positive identification of Madiotes as the scribe
of the Letter to Theodore is therefore impossible. Yet
since only a small number of significant differences
will eliminate this possibility, Carlson’s claim might
still be falsified by comparing the two scripts. I want
to stress that my analysis – like Carlson’s – is that
of someone who has no formal training in forensic
document examination. I do not even own a lab
coat.
Figure 1
I will begin by outlining what is visible in the
top right corner of the photograph of manuscript
no. 22 that appears on p. 37 of The Secret Gospel,
which is the basis for my figure 1. Carlson’s figure
5B, taken from Archaeology, does not include
letters that appear along the right edge in The Secret
Gospel and has cropped out some letters on the last
line that appear in both of Smith’s reproductions.
Although at least five different hands appear in
Smith’s photograph, for convenience, I will refer to
the handwriting by Madiotes as manuscript no. 22
and the handwriting of the Letter to Theodore as
manuscript no. 65.
The writing of Madiotes contains three cross
symbols down the left margin (the diagonal line
extending from the base occasionally appears in
cross symbols; the horizontal line of the first cross
is easier to perceive in Archaeology). The first two
words on the first line are το παρον. The writer uses
a tall, rounded form of tau that has been used for
centuries in Greek handwriting but still looks strange
to those of us who are used to printed Greek. The
same form of tau also occurs in no. 65 along with
the more familiar shorter form. The letter pi is in
the form commonly called ‘curly pi ’ (e.g., ϖ, , ω),
which fell out of regular use in the second half of the
twentieth century. This particular form of curly pi is a
bit unusual, for it begins with a short horizontal line,
and the rounded part resembling omega is written on
a slant, without the termination of the stroke curving
back to form the remainder of the line (normally the
whole line is formed as the termination of the stroke).
This uncommon variation of the single-stroke form
of curly pi also occurs in no. 65. The remaining
letters in παρον are quite ordinary. The words το
παρον mean ‘the present’, probably in the sense of
‘this’. Two more letters are visible on the first line.
The first letter is a beta ( ). Part of the top of this
letter is cropped out, as is all but a smidge of the next
letter. I share Dr Nick Nicholas’s suspicion that this
word is ιλν and is part of a colophon describing
‘This book . . .’.
The first two words of the second line can also be
discerned: του σου. Both use the omicron-upsilon
ligature ( ). These two words are followed by a
gamma and some illegible marks. No letters are
visible on the third line. The fourth line contains
what appear to be random letters: alpha, capital
rho (?), gamma, and some scratching. Perhaps the
writer was testing his instrument. Perhaps he was
doodling.
Figure 2 permits a side-by-side comparison of
letterforms that exhibit differences. The letters
written by Madiotes are on the left. The examples
of corresponding letters from manuscript no. 65 are
the first instances in the order in which they occur
 THE EXPOSITORY TIMES
Figure 2
in the letter, except the last five examples of the
circumflex accent, which were chosen to illustrate
its positioning above different vowels, and the final
tau, which illustrates the way this author wrote the
word τ. Note, first, the shape of the letter pi.
Although both manuscripts use this unusual form,
a close comparison reveals differences. In no. 65
the initial stroke slopes upwards rather than being
nearly horizontal, and the point at which the letter
terminates is very different. In manuscript no. 65,
when pi occurs by itself or precedes the letters alpha,
epsilon, eta (without accent), lambda, nu, rho, and
tau, the stroke loops back over the letter in order
to complete the horizontal line and connect with
the next letter. Only before eta (with acute accent),
iota, omega, and the omicron-upsilon ligature does
the stroke connect with the next letter without any
loop.10 So where Madiotes used this latter form of
curly pi before an alpha, the writer of the Letter to
Theodore invariably used the form with a loop.
Differences in the way the other letters are formed
are generally easier to discern. In no. 65, the curves
of the high taus are more open and oval in shape to
the point that the beginning of the stroke is almost
horizontal if not actually moving slightly downward
to the left. The character as a whole slants to the
right. In no. 22, the curves are less open and the
beginning of the stroke tends upward and to the
10
There are no exceptions to these patterns within the 112
occurrences of pi in the Letter to Theodore.
147
left. Overall, there is much less of a tendency to the
right. The bottom loop of the letter beta is tighter to
the ‘back’ of the letter than are those of no. 65, and
unlike those fourteen betas, the top loop is situated
to the right of the bottom loop rather than mainly
above it. Although the cropping of the photograph
prevents certainty, it appears to me that the two
loops of the beta in no. 22 are roughly equal in size,
unlike those in no. 65, where one (usually the upper)
is larger than the other. The seventy-two gammas in
no. 65 are formed in one stroke that usually begins
with a short hook and generally takes the form of
an elongated v because the downward movement is
fairly straight and the loop at the bottom is relatively
short. The two gammas in no. 22 are formed with the
initial downward stroke bending sharply to the left
and the upward stroke of the loop mostly retracing
the line. These two gammas have no leading hook
and look more like a y than a γ. Finally, the cross
at the beginning of no. 65 is smaller than a high tau
whereas the symbols in the left margin of no. 22 are
two and three times the size of the tau and differ in
shape.
In addition to variant letter and symbol shapes,
the two manuscripts differ in the way the characters
παρο are formed in relation to each other. As I already
indicated, whenever pi is followed by alpha in no. 65,
the two characters are joined by a stroke that loops
back over the top of the pi before continuing to the
right to form the alpha. Alpha and rho are always
connected, which is not the case in no. 22, and the
148 THE EXPOSITORY TIMES
connection results in the top of the rho taking the
form of a loop rather than being circular. Although
the form of the rho in no. 22 with the end of the tail
curving up to the left does appear in no. 65, it never
has this shape before an omicron.11 Instead, these two
letters are always connected, with the tail of the rho
curving up to the right in order to meet the omicron.
This last difference is especially striking.
One might postulate that these differences of
connection exist because the lettering in no. 65 is
cursive (connected) whereas the lettering in no. 22
is hand printed (unconnected). That explanation
would not help Carlson’s thesis. The process of
handwriting identification requires specimens written
in the same style for comparison: hasty writing must
be compared to hasty writing, cursive writing to
cursive writing, hand printing to hand printing, and
so forth. The ways that an individual prints letters
and writes letters are not usually similar enough to
allow a hand-printed document to be ascribed to the
author of handwritten samples.12 For the same reason
we should suppose that if Smith wrote no. 22 as a
hint that ‘Madiotes’ penned no. 65, he would have
applied the same style in both instances so that a
positive identification could be possible. Finally, we
know what a non-cursive pi looks like in manuscript
no. 65. In the three places where pi is not connected
to the letters preceding and following it, the stroke
still terminates in a loop.13
The first word on the second line of no. 22 poses
a special problem, for the combination of tau with
the omicron-upsilon ligature ( ) is not the way
the word τυ is written in no. 65. For that form
of the definite article, no. 65 uses a variant of this
ligature in which the conclusion of the loop extends
11
The form of rho with the tail curving back to the left
without crossing itself in a loop appears in no. 65 when
the letter following it is one that should not be joined to a
preceding rho, namely, gamma, theta, kappa, nu, pi, tau, and
chi. Occasionally this form appears before epsilon, eta, and
omega. A third form of rho, in which the tail curves back to the
left but then loops over itself in order to join up with the next
letter occurs before epsilon, eta, the omicron-upsilon ligature,
upsilon, and omega.
12
Ellen, Scientific Examination of Documents, 64; Hilton,
Questioned Documents, 304–308; Ron N. Morris, Forensic
Handwriting Identification: Fundamental Concepts and
Principles (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2000), 208–209.
13
Completely disconnected instances of pi occur at I.20
(πρτν and πρκπτυσι) and II.4 (π). Cf. the pi connected
only to the preceding letter at III.1–2 (πεκλισε).
diagonally upward and then forms a mirror image of
the bottom loop in order to represent the circumflex
accent (see the final tau in figure 2).14 One finds a tall
tau followed by the omicron-upsilon ligature only
when no accent is involved or the accent is acute or
grave; in these cases the accent appears above the
ligature.15 The writer’s tendency to employ this other
ligature for  when it follows tau was a personal
idiosyncrasy. He did use the omicron-upsilon ligature
with a circumflex accent when this ligature follows
theta (except λθσα in II.24), gamma, sigma, and
nu (except γυµν in III.8). If he wished, he could
have formed the word τ using the omicron-upsilon
ligature and a circumflex accent, as did the typesetter
of the Greek text of Voss’s book.16
Since we do not know what the last word was
on the first line, it is conceivable that the word του
is not the definite article at all but merely the last
three letters of the preceding word. This possibility
complicates a larger and more significant issue.
Why are there no accents above the words το, του,
and σου? If του is the conclusion of the preceding
word, then it is possible that neither it nor σου
would require one. But if του is the definite article,
then both it and σου would require circumflex
accents. What is certain, however, is that both το
and παρον require grave accents, and do not have
them. Instead, the word παρον has a line over
the omicron. That letter requires an accent, so I
presume that the writer used a circumflex accent
by mistake. If this is in fact a circumflex accent,
then it is problematic for three reasons. First, it is
never correct to write a circumflex accent over an
omicron or any short vowel. The writer of no. 65
would know that, for he is clearly well educated, and
his use of accents is remarkably accurate.17 Second,
the circumflex accents in manuscript 65 are wavy
14
Morton Smith appears to have misunderstood the fact
that the top half of this ligature mirrors the bottom half.
He rendered it incorrectly in his appendix of palaeographic
peculiarities, drawing the top loop backwards (Clement,
293).
15
See, e.g., the words ττι (I.7; II.10; III.11),
πρκπτυσι (I.20–21), and ττυ (II.9).
16
See the third line of page 318, which faces the first page of
the manuscript. A fairly clear picture of this page is available
in Charles W. Hedrick and Nikolaos Olympiou, ‘Secret
Mark: New Photographs, New Witnesses’, The Fourth R
13:5 (2000), 9. The Greek text in early printed books still used
many ligatures.
17
Smith, Clement of Alexandria, 2.
 THE EXPOSITORY TIMES
(tilde), not straight (macron). Third, the beginnings
of the strokes of the circumflex accents in no. 65 are
normally aligned vertically with the left edge or the
centre of the vowel, but the strokes often continue
past the right edge. The horizontal line in no. 22
begins before the left edge of the vowel and ends
nearly in line with the right edge. So the presence of
this line where there should be a grave accent is very
problematic for Carlson’s theory that this writer also
penned the Letter to Theodore.
There is a simple explanation for the line over
παρν and the absence of accents over the definite
article(s) and the personal pronoun. The scribe
was incompetent. As Dr. Nicholas commented to
me, ‘this is merely misspelling, of a type rather
common with less educated scribes: diplomatic
editions of legal deeds involving monasteries are full
of such misspellings as misplaced circumflexes and
unaccented or run-in proclitics’.
There is nothing in the photograph that
contradicts the date Smith assigned the writing of
Madiotes. All of the letterforms can be found in
twentieth-century writing, including the omicron-
upsilon ligature, which ‘survived the ligature cull
in the late 18th century’.18 Carlson’s claim that this
writing ‘resembles an eighteenth-century style’ may
be required by his theory (p. 43), but can hardly be
substantiated by the tiny sample.
Given the wholly insufficient basis for a hand-
writing comparison, I believe that the strongest
finding that a trained examiner might make if there
were no significant differences between nos 22 and
65 would be ‘inconclusive’. Since, however, there are
18
Nick Nicholas, ‘Other Ligatures’, http://ptolemy.
tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/other_ligatures.html. He notes
that the omicron-upsilon ligature is now mainly confined to
self-consciously informal handwriting. The other ligature that
(barely) survived is sigma-tau (better known as stigma).
Coming next month . . .
Our Apostolic Fathers series continues with an article on the Didache by Jonathan
Draper. Also Tim Gorringe explores Numbers 13–14, and a Letters Page includes
responses from readers.
149
many significant differences, a firm negative finding
of two different writers seems warranted. The fact
that Carlson drew such an unlikely conclusion
without couching it in terms of probabilities19 or
acknowledging any disconfirming evidence under-
scores the wisdom of leaving forensic document
examination to disinterested and highly qualified
professionals. As Ron N. Morris emphasizes,
competence in document examination is not easily
acquired:
It cannot be over-emphasized that even the comple-
tion of a graduate degree program in forensic
sciences does not qualify the individual as an expert
in any of them. The graduate must still take part in
a trainee/apprenticeship program before he is eligible
to qualify as a competent, qualified, forensic expert
in any forensic science, especially that of a FDE
[forensic document examiner].
At the conclusion of his trainee program, the new
FDE should continue to work daily with competent,
qualified examiners for approximately two or more
years before being considered senior enough to work
independently.20
Perhaps one of our societies for biblical scholars
will take on the task of arranging for some highly
qualified and suitable professionals to examine
the photographs in consultation with experts in
eighteenth-century Greek handwriting.
Since the writing of Madiotes is not the same as
the Letter to Theodore, it matters very little whether
this surname is real, misspelled, or pseudonymous.
There is no connection between these two texts to
warrant the hypothesis that this name is a clue left
behind by Morton Smith.
19
See David M. Ellen, ‘The Expression of Conclusions in
Handwriting Examination’, Canadian Society of Forensic
Science Journal 12:3 (1979), 117–20.
20
Morris, Forensic Handwriting Identification, 198.