Chapter Six
Chapter Six 1672 The very thought that Morton Smith could not successfully print his own name into that damaged 1646 Vossius edition of Ignatius, but could nevertheless invent and inscribe a complete post-Byzantine Greek hand, is untenable. The handwriting is authentically post-Byzantine. Once this is admitted, the discussion changes. We are no longer dealing with the simple Anglo-American fantasy that Smith sat down with an old book, composed a Clementine letter, and forged three pages of convincing Greek manuscript writing. We are down to one of three possibilities: first, that the seventeenth-century scribe invented a Clementine Letter to Theodore; second, that the scribe copied a Letter to Theodore forged sometime between the age of Clement of Alexandria and his own age; third, that the Letter to Theodore was an authentically Clementine letter copied by the seventeenth-century scribe. I favor the latter possibility. Smith and Landau, and many others, favor the second. But the ...