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 Greek Orthodox Church, or at least one important representative of the Jerusalem Patriarchate, seems to have favored the first.

We know this because of the earliest surviving note from the first day of Quesnell’s examination. At the top of page 2, while Quesnell was in the process of putting the manuscript under a microscope, he noticed a slip of paper also contained in the plastic folder holding the letter. That slip appears to have borne the date “1672.” Quesnell wrote the date down and then added, in effect, the question: “By whom?” The question matters. He did not treat the date as meaningless. He did not ignore it as a random number. He understood that someone had assigned, associated, or transmitted a seventeenth-century date in connection with the manuscript, and he wanted to know who had done so.

Since Smith and Landau have already contributed arguments for their post-Eusebian dating of the text, and since Morton Smith, Scott Brown, Helmut Koester, and many others have argued in different ways for a second-century horizon behind the gospel excerpts, we should at least try to reconstruct the position of the official guardians and owners of the manuscript. The Patriarchate’s implied position has rarely been treated with seriousness. It has usually been subordinated to the Anglo-American argument, in which Morton Smith either forged the text himself or discovered a later forgery. But the surviving evidence suggests that the Patriarchal environment may have preserved a third theory: that the manuscript was already an old, perhaps seventeenth-century, artifact, and that its textual contents were not necessarily what Morton Smith, modern critics, or modern defenders imagined them to be.

The “1672” notation is therefore not a curiosity. It is the entry point into a lost hypothesis.

The usual debate over the Letter to Theodore has been framed around two possibilities: either the letter is ancient and authentic, or Morton Smith forged it. This framing has had enormous rhetorical power, but it is historically crude. It collapses several distinct questions into one. The date of the handwriting is not the same as the date of the text. The age of the Vossius book is not the same as the age of the manuscript hand. The date of the gospel excerpts is not the same as the date of the Clementine letter. And the authenticity of the Clementine attribution is not the same question as Morton Smith’s personal innocence or guilt.

The Patriarchal evidence cuts across this simplified debate. If someone in the Jerusalem Patriarchate associated the manuscript with the year 1672, then the manuscript was not being treated as a modern object. It was being placed within a seventeenth-century chronological horizon. That does not prove Clement wrote the letter. It does not even prove that the letter is ancient. But it does severely complicate the idea that Morton Smith simply fabricated the document ex nihilo and inserted it into the Mar Saba library without leaving any meaningful institutional trace.

The surviving materials from Quesnell’s 1983 visit are therefore indispensable. Quesnell, an ex-Jesuit humanities professor at Smith College, was one of the first scholars to imply in print that Morton Smith may have forged the Clement text. By the time he arrived in Jerusalem, he was not a neutral observer. His published article had already raised suspicions, and Smith himself understood it as implying forgery. Quesnell later admitted to Scott Brown that he personally believed Smith, perhaps with the aid of another person, had forged the document. This matters because Quesnell did not go to Jerusalem hoping to be convinced by Morton Smith. He went hoping to test, and perhaps confirm, his suspicion.

His investigation survives in three overlapping bodies of evidence. First, there are the working notes made while he was in the Patriarchal library, apparently in an antechamber or study space near the office of Kallistos Dourvas. Second, there are letters written to his wife, Jean Higgins, also a Smith College professor. Third, there are diary or journal entries composed after the day’s work, probably at the Jerusalem YMCA. These three bodies of evidence are not interchangeable. The letters tend to present the trip in its most orderly and respectable form. The private notes and diary entries are rougher, more anxious, and more revealing. They show the pressure under which Quesnell was working, the assumptions he brought with him, and the extent to which his actual encounter with the manuscript disturbed his expectations.

In one letter, Quesnell reports that the librarian was convinced the writing was old and dated to the late eighteenth century. But his notes preserve a more complicated version of the same exchange. There, Dourvas is said to have brought the manuscript back from Mar Saba “ten years ago,” although the transfer had actually taken place seven years earlier, and to have felt sure that the writing was “18th century old.” Quesnell also records that Dourvas understood the text as a response to heretics and remembered a report of someone seeing the letter in the “sixteenth? seventeenth? century.” The uncertainty is important. It may reflect Quesnell’s difficulty understanding Dourvas’s English. The clearest sign of that difficulty is that Quesnell repeatedly writes Kallistos’s name as “Xaristos” or “Charistos” in his notes.

The eighteenth-century dating was, of course, the dating Morton Smith had originally published on the basis of the experts he consulted. But Dourvas’s remarks do not fit comfortably with a simple repetition of Smith’s view. If Dourvas connected the manuscript with a report from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and if he understood the text as a response to heretical misuse, then he may have been entertaining something earlier than the late eighteenth-century dating. Otherwise, the logic is difficult to follow. Why would a late eighteenth-century scribe invent a Clementine letter attacking heretics in a manner that seemed to belong to a much older ecclesiastical controversy? Why would a Patriarchal librarian remember a report connected with the sixteenth or seventeenth century unless some such chronological horizon had already entered the library’s understanding of the object?

One of Quesnell’s later notes preserves the question directly: “Was it 17th c forgery?” This is the missing Patriarchal theory in its starkest form. It is not the modern Smith-forgery hypothesis. It is not the second-century authenticity hypothesis. It is the idea that the manuscript, or perhaps the text represented by the manuscript, may have been forged in the seventeenth century. In other words, Dourvas may have believed that the manuscript was old, that Smith did not write it, and that the Clementine attribution was nevertheless false.

This position has been almost entirely lost in the subsequent debate. But it deserves attention because it is exactly the kind of theory one might expect from an Orthodox custodian who took the physical manuscript seriously but did not necessarily accept Morton Smith’s interpretation of its contents. Dourvas did not need to believe that Clement wrote the letter. He did not need to accept a second-century Secret Gospel of Mark. He only needed to believe that the object in his care belonged to the historical patrimony of Mar Saba and was not a modern prank by Morton Smith.

This helps explain the atmosphere of Quesnell’s first days in Jerusalem. Dourvas seems to have thought that Quesnell might be convinced once he saw the manuscript. Smith and Landau take Quesnell’s response — “Maybe. That’s what this is all about” — as evidence of scholarly openness. But the sentence is more ambiguous than that. It may not mean simply, “perhaps I will discover the truth.” It may also mean, “perhaps Dourvas thinks he can persuade me; let him try.” Quesnell may have welcomed the challenge precisely because he expected to defeat it.

The difficulty with taking Quesnell’s polished letters at face value becomes especially clear when one compares them with his private notes about his meeting with David Flusser. In the letter to Jean, the meeting appears as a serious scholarly exchange about the Letter to Theodore. In the diary, it appears rather differently. There the discussion seems to have focused heavily on sex, especially homosexuality. Even Flusser’s recollection that Smith had once had a Jewish girlfriend in Jerusalem becomes folded into a speculative game about Smith’s motives. The conversation seems to have linked a Carpocratian forgery hypothesis, a seventeenth-century forgery hypothesis, and a Morton Smith forgery hypothesis through assumptions about sexuality. It was less a sober academic consultation than a form of locker-room speculation with footnotes.

This is uncomfortable, but it is necessary to say. Quesnell’s suspicion of Smith was not merely a neutral paleographic hypothesis. His private notes suggest that his suspicion was entangled with assumptions about Smith’s sexuality and with a broader fantasy involving Smith and Arthur Darby Nock. None of this proves that Quesnell’s observations were wrong. It does, however, explain why the private notes matter more than the letters. In the letters, the trip becomes a disciplined scholarly investigation. In the notes, it is also an attempt to rescue a prior theory of motive.

The same sanitizing process appears in Quesnell’s account of how he gained access to the manuscript. In the letter to Jean, he writes in a restrained manner: he got into the Patriarchate, spoke to the officials and the librarian, and was promised the manuscript for Monday morning. But the diary and later testimony of George Dragas point to a more confrontational episode. Quesnell admits that he used colorful language, which he declines to repeat, in describing his “need to get my hands on that book.” Dragas remembered Quesnell’s manner as aggressively rude. According to Dragas, Dourvas resisted both the tone and the assumptions behind the demand. Dragas also remembered that Quesnell raised the “homosexual business” and spoke of Smith’s alleged threat to Christianity, while Dourvas dismissed these anxieties as nonsense.

This exchange is important because it clarifies the conflict between Quesnell and Dourvas. Quesnell arrived looking for a modern forgery, and his suspicion was colored by a theory about Smith’s sexuality and intentions. Dourvas, by contrast, seems to have regarded the manuscript as an old object belonging to the Patriarchate’s care. He did not share the Anglo-American panic over Smith. He seems to have thought the manuscript itself would answer, or at least weaken, the accusation.

The “1672” note appears against this background. It is not simply a random number. Quesnell saw it in or with the manuscript folder and immediately asked who had assigned it. That reaction matters. If the notation had been meaningless, or if it referred only to some unrelated item, the question would not have been necessary. Instead, Quesnell treated it as an archival datum requiring attribution. The simplest explanation is that the note was understood by him as a proposed date for the manuscript or for its institutional handling.

We do not know who wrote the date. It may have been Dourvas. It may have been another Patriarchal worker. It may have been copied from a now-lost shelf list, comparison note, supplementary catalogue, or internal register. But the date had enough authority or visibility for Quesnell to ask, “By whom?” The problem is not that we know too much. The problem is that the surviving notes preserve the question but not the answer.

This gap has encouraged two opposite mistakes. One side may be tempted to treat “1672” as if it were a formal scientific dating of the manuscript, established and documented by the Patriarchate. The other side may be tempted to dismiss it as a meaningless scribble. Neither treatment is adequate. The notation is too specific to ignore, especially because it appears in the immediate context of the manuscript’s examination. But the evidence is too incomplete to turn it into a fixed paleographic conclusion. Its significance lies not in proving the manuscript was written in 1672, but in showing that a seventeenth-century chronological horizon had entered the investigation.

Could the date have resulted from a confusion with Pearson’s 1672 Vindiciae epistolarum S. Ignatii? That seems unlikely. The Vossius volume was the book in which Smith said he found the Clement manuscript. Pearson’s book was a different work, by a different author, with Vossius appearing only in the appended letters. If Dragas is right that Dourvas had read Morton Smith’s books, then Dourvas would hardly have confused the Vossius Ignatius volume with Pearson’s Vindiciae. The date is better understood as belonging to the working environment of the Patriarchal library.

That working environment was complicated. The Jerusalem Patriarchate did not operate with a single simple catalogue. Scholars such as Papadopoulos-Kerameus, Kleopas Koikylides, Morton Smith, and later collaborators of the National Hellenic Research Foundation all produced and used overlapping catalogues, lists, concordances, and supplementary registers. Ioannis Meimaris, working in the library in the same year as Quesnell, explicitly says that he consulted the five-volume Papadopoulos-Kerameus catalogue, Morton Smith’s work, and an unpublished supplementary register compiled by collaborators of the Center for Byzantine Studies in the summer of 1981. This is precisely the kind of archival environment in which a manuscript number, shelf note, date, or comparison label could circulate in more than one form.

The important point is that the “1672” notation need not have come from a printed Papadopoulos-Kerameus entry for the Letter to Theodore. Indeed, it could not have done so, because Papadopoulos-Kerameus does not catalogue the Letter to Theodore. Rather, the date may have arisen from a local shelf note, a comparison list, a date assigned after examination, or a now-unpublished supplementary register. In that sense, its informality does not make it irrelevant. It may be precisely its informality that makes it revealing.

This is where Quesnell’s own 1975 article becomes important. In that article, he laid out the proper sequence for investigating a disputed manuscript. One should begin with the physical aspects of the object: the composition of the ink, the color and consistency of the ink, and especially its degree of penetration into the paper. In other words, the question of ink soaking was not a later apologetic invention but part of Quesnell’s own forensic program. After that he called for microscopic examination of the writing itself: the formation of letters, the impression left by the pen, the possibility of tremors, hesitations, or signs of careful copying. Finally, he argued that the manuscript should be compared with other material from the same environment: other handwritten notes in the tower volumes, other Mar Saba manuscripts, and materials transported to Jerusalem from Mar Saba.

The chronology of the Jerusalem visit is therefore essential. Quesnell first heard, or at least recorded, a possible seventeenth-century forgery proposition from Dourvas on Thursday. On Saturday, he examined ink soaking on the face pages of seventeenth-century Dutch volumes at the École Biblique. On Monday, when he finally saw the manuscript, he saw the “1672” note, asked who had assigned it, and then proceeded to carry out much of the forensic program he had outlined in 1975. He asked Dourvas to bring eighteenth-century manuscripts from Mar Saba on Tuesday and Wednesday. Then, on Thursday, June 9, the pattern changed. After his own research began to weaken his prior assumptions, he started receiving manuscripts almost exclusively from the seventeenth century for comparison. After that, he stopped taking notes in the same sustained way and never completed the proof of forgery he had gone to Jerusalem expecting to find.

This movement from eighteenth-century comparison to seventeenth-century comparison is the key to understanding the “1672” date. At first, Quesnell appears to have pursued the dating he had inherited from Morton Smith’s publication: the late eighteenth century. He asked for mathemataria, school exercises or copybooks associated with the training of future priests, because such manuscripts offered comparable Greek hands. He judged each one for resemblance to what he called “our baby,” the same affectionate phrase he used for the manuscript in his letter to Jean. There were many such samples. He asked for them, and they existed in abundance.

The first group of comparison manuscripts listed in his notes includes twelve entries. They begin with a mathematarion from 1760 and continue through manuscripts dated 1760, 1727, 1803, 1719, the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the mid-seventeenth century, 1731, 1709, and 1769. These are not modern samples. They are not even narrowly eighteenth-century samples. They already show Quesnell’s attention being drawn backward into the seventeenth century. Yet his first conclusion was polemical. The material, he said, confirmed his notion that any well-educated Greek student could, in theory, write in such a manner. Not only Kallistos, not only Morton Smith, but even Quesnell himself imagined that he could forge such handwriting — this after only a few days of practice imitating the hand with a ballpoint pen on lined paper.

This boast tells us more about Quesnell than about the manuscript. It shows how quickly his investigation became entangled with personal confidence and prior suspicion. He moved from observing that some Mar Saba hands had similar breaks, hesitations, or squiggles, to imagining that the production of such a hand was within reach of any educated person. But this was precisely the inference that the evidence began to undermine. In his last letter to Jean, written on June 8, he acknowledged that he had been examining eighteenth-century Mar Saba writings and that many of them had the very breaks, squiggles, and possible hesitations that he had been lining up as evidence against Morton Smith. “They’re not all forgeries,” he admitted.

That sentence is one of the most revealing in the whole record. If Quesnell’s initial theory was that the Letter to Theodore looked suspicious because of its breaks, tremors, or hesitations, the Mar Saba comparanda weakened the theory. The very features he hoped to isolate as signs of forgery appeared in other manuscripts from the same broad scribal environment. His own method had begun to work against his own conclusion.

After this disappointment, the pattern shifts decisively. The relevant entries reconstructed from his handwritten notes include manuscripts dated 1737, 1634, 1698–99, 1635–36, 1664, 1645, 1745, 1651, and 1674. The resulting group clusters heavily in the seventeenth century. More significantly, the average date of the datable manuscripts is approximately 1673.5 — astonishingly close to the “1672” notation that Quesnell had seen in the manuscript folder.

This is not a random set of dates. It is the kind of list one would expect from someone testing whether a hand might belong not to the late eighteenth century, and certainly not to the modern period, but to a broad seventeenth-century world suggested by the note. The repetition of certain entries, especially the examples dated 1651 and 1674, suggests that these manuscripts mattered to the comparison. June 9, the last day on which Quesnell took sustained notes, appears to be the point at which the investigation moved decisively backward in time.

Whether or not Dourvas directly determined Quesnell’s selection of comparanda on that day, the resulting pattern is difficult to separate from the “1672” horizon. Quesnell had seen the note. He had recorded Dourvas’s challenge. He remained dependent on Dourvas for access to the manuscript and related material. Dourvas had already spoken with him about the pages and their contents. Later notes suggest that Kallistos did more than merely bring whatever books Quesnell requested. He talked with him about the document, and there was “no chit chat”; all their conversation was focused on the manuscript. It is therefore difficult to argue that Dourvas had no effect on Quesnell’s decision to move the comparison field backward.

This does not prove that the manuscript was written in 1672. It does not prove that Dourvas possessed a formal scientific dating. It does not prove that the Letter to Theodore is ancient. But it does show that the most important spokesman for the Morton Smith forgery hypothesis in 1983 went to Jerusalem looking for modern forgery and found himself drawn into a seventeenth-century field of comparison. That is a significant fact.

The larger institutional context points in the same direction. Beginning at least in 1976, the Vossius volume and the manuscript leaves were treated as property belonging within the Mar Saba/Jerusalem Patriarchate system. This does not prove the letter authentic. But it weakens the scenario in which Morton Smith simply created the document and slipped it into the library without leaving any institutional trace. Abbot Seraphim’s reported attempt to maintain control over the book suggests that the volume was not treated as a casual object or as an obvious modern intrusion. It was regarded as monastic property, or at least as an item belonging within the sphere of Mar Saba.

David Flusser’s report that negotiations took place between representatives of Jerusalem and Mar Saba, with promises that Mar Saba’s property would be returned, points in the same direction. The language of negotiation presupposes institutional ownership. One does not negotiate the return of a prank. One negotiates over property.

The same is implied by the mission of Dourvas and Meliton to preserve valuable material from Mar Saba. Their activity suggests that the Vossius volume was handled as part of the monastic or Patriarchal patrimony. Subsequent efforts to catalogue, photograph, and shelve the manuscript by Dourvas reinforce the same point. Agamemnon Tselikas’s discovery of a 1976 receipt involving the Jerusalem Patriarchal library, the Mar Saba monastery, and their respective representatives is especially important. A receipt is issued when property is transferred, removed, deposited, acknowledged, or otherwise placed under responsibility. Its existence implies that the manuscript and the book were not treated as mere curiosities delivered in the wake of Smith’s publication. They were handled as institutional items.

The Patriarchate’s reluctance to allow unrestricted access or destructive testing also fits this pattern. When asked why he was so suspicious of Western scholars, Dourvas reportedly responded that great treasures had been stolen during the previous century and had later turned up in Western libraries. This is why he went to Mar Saba in 1976, and why he turned away other academics who came looking for the text. “The library has great treasures,” he said in effect, and those who are there guard them with all the strength they have. This also explains Quesnell’s repeated observation that Kallistos was always with him and was careful to remain in the same room. The manuscript was not being treated like an exposed forgery. It was being guarded like a possession.

This is perhaps the most damaging point for the modern-hoax hypothesis. The institutional behavior surrounding the manuscript does not look like the passive absorption of a fraudulent object planted by Smith. It looks like the treatment of a problematic but real item of monastic property. The Patriarchate did not behave as though the document belonged to Smith. It behaved as though Smith had discovered, photographed, and published something that belonged to Mar Saba.

Even the later disappearance of the manuscript does not necessarily break this pattern. It may intensify it. When Father Meliton was asked years later what he thought had happened to the document, he hinted that Theophanis, the Head-Secretary or Archigrammateus, “was also interested in the book.” Meliton left the Jerusalem Patriarchate in 1986, perhaps a year before Dourvas. His reference to Theophanis matters because Theophanis was closely connected to the later Patriarchal administration. According to George Dragas, he belonged to the same circle of Jerusalem monks who had studied under him during the period when Quesnell was investigating the manuscript. Dragas remembered both Theophilos, the future Patriarch, and Theophanis, later Archbishop of Gerasa, as his students. He also recalled that the Patriarchate drew them back to Jerusalem because of their ecclesiastical obligations, even while they were attempting to complete their studies.

Dragas’s testimony is striking because he did not imagine the text as a disposable fraud. He referred to it as a “holy text.” He described Kallistos as a man dedicated to the truth, someone who would not have allowed the destruction of the text merely to satisfy institutional convenience. His broader point was that the document could not simply have been destroyed, and that no one could have casually smuggled such a book into the library. He knew the library, he said, and such a scenario was impossible.

One need not accept Dragas’s own judgment that the document was probably an authentic apocryphon from antiquity in order to recognize the importance of his evidence. His testimony belongs to a wider institutional pattern: the 1672 dating, the 1976 receipt, the Mar Saba negotiations, the guarded access, Quesnell’s supervised examination, the later hints concerning Theophanis, and Dragas’s insistence that the text was regarded as sacred. All of these details pull against the picture of a modern object casually planted and then passively accepted.

The manuscript was not treated as Smith’s prank. It was treated as Mar Saba’s property, Jerusalem’s responsibility, and, in the eyes of some who handled or remembered it, a text whose religious character required protection.

That is why the 1672 date matters. It is not merely a paleographic guess or a stray archival notation. It stands at the intersection of catalogue practice, monastic custody, Patriarchal suspicion, and Quesnell’s own changing investigation. Once the date is restored to the center of the discussion, the problem looks different. The question is no longer whether Morton Smith could have forged a Clementine letter in the abstract. The question is whether the entire subsequent institutional history of the object — from Mar Saba to Jerusalem, from Dourvas to Quesnell, from the 1976 receipt to the later guarded silence — is better explained by a modern forgery slipped into a library, or by a manuscript already absorbed into the Mar Saba/Jerusalem system before the modern controversy began.

The answer cannot be reduced to certainty. But the burden of explanation shifts. Those who defend the post-Eusebian forgery hypothesis must explain not only the text, the handwriting, and Smith’s opportunity. They must also explain why the Patriarchal library associated the manuscript with 1672, why Quesnell’s own comparanda moved so close to that chronological field, why the Vossius volume was treated as institutional property, why access was so closely guarded, and why later witnesses remembered the document as something that could not simply be destroyed.

The “1672” notation does not solve the problem by itself. But it prevents the problem from being solved without it.

The lost Patriarchal theory, then, may be summarized as follows. The manuscript was old. It was not written by Morton Smith. It belonged to Mar Saba. Its contents were troubling, perhaps even false, but the object itself was real. Whether Dourvas thought of it as a seventeenth-century forgery, a copy of an older forgery, or a problematic witness to an older tradition, he seems to have understood it as part of the manuscript patrimony entrusted to the Patriarchate. That is enough to unsettle the modern hoax theory at its foundation.

The Anglo-American debate has too often treated the Greek custodians as passive background figures: monks, librarians, and clerics who simply failed to understand the implications of what Smith had done. But the evidence from Quesnell’s visit suggests something else. Dourvas understood very well that the object was contested. He understood that Western scholars wanted access to it. He understood that the accusation against Smith was bound up with suspicions he did not share. And he seems to have believed that direct inspection of the manuscript would make the modern-forgery theory harder to maintain.

In this, he was right. Quesnell came to Jerusalem expecting to find Morton Smith. Instead he found paper, ink, scribal habit, Mar Saba comparanda, a guarded Patriarchal folder, and the date 1672. He never published the proof he went looking for. He never produced the decisive demonstration that Smith had written the manuscript. His own surviving notes point not toward closure, but toward disturbance: the disturbance produced when a theory encounters an object that refuses to behave as expected.

The seventeenth-century horizon does not force us to accept the Letter to Theodore as Clementine. But it does force us to abandon the lazy version of the hoax hypothesis. If the hand is authentically post-Byzantine, if the manuscript was materially old, if the Patriarchate treated it as property, and if Quesnell’s own investigation moved toward a seventeenth-century comparison field, then Morton Smith cannot simply be imagined into the role of scribe. The discussion must move elsewhere: to the relation between the seventeenth-century copy and the text it transmits.

At that point, the three possibilities remain. A seventeenth-century scribe invented the Letter to Theodore. A seventeenth-century scribe copied an earlier forgery. Or a seventeenth-century scribe copied an authentic Clementine letter. The first possibility appears to have been the most natural defensive explanation within the Patriarchal environment. The second has become the favored compromise among those who reject Smith as scribe but remain suspicious of Clementine authenticity. The third remains, in my judgment, the simplest explanation of the textual, historical, and material evidence taken together.

But whatever conclusion one reaches, the first great clarification has already been achieved. Morton Smith did not need to be the author of the manuscript hand in order for the Letter to Theodore to be debated. Indeed, once the handwriting is taken seriously, the debate must stop revolving around Smith’s psychology and begin revolving around the manuscript’s actual history. The 1672 notation is the surviving trace of that history. It is a small mark, but it opens a large door.