Comments on Charles Hedrick's Article: A Testimony

Habent sua fata litterae: the strange fate of Clement of Alexandria's letter to Theodore reminds one of Heisenberg's indetermination principle: the very attempt to observe a particle's trajectory changes its course. In the spring of 1976, a party of four, including the late David Flusser, Professor of New Testament, the late Shlomo Pines, Professor of Medieval Arabic and Jewish philosophy, both at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Archimandrite Meliton, from the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem (at the time a research student at the Hebrew University) and myself (then a graduate student at Harvard University) drove (in my car) from Jerusalem to Mar Saba monastery, in the Judean wilderness, in the quest for Clement's letter. Together with Flusser and Pines, I had been intrigued by Morton Smith's sensational description of his find, and we wanted to see the text with our own eyes. Archimandrite Meliton had agreed to accompany us. When we reached the monastery, with the help of one of the monks, we began searching for Isaac Vossius' edition of the Letters of Ignatius on the very dusty shelves of the library in the monastery's tower. The young monk and Archimandrite Meliton explained to us that most books from the monastery's library had been moved to the Patriarchate library in Jerusalem, after too many thefts had occurred. We did not put our expectations too high, but at some point, the monk did find the book, with "Smith 65" inscribed on its front page, ¹ and the three manuscript pages of Clement's letter written on the blank pages at the end of the book, exactly as described by Smith. The book had obviously remained where Smith had found it and had replaced it, after having photographed the manuscript letter. It was obvious to all of us that the precious book should not be left in place, but rather be deposited in the library of the Patriarchate. So we took the book back to Jerusalem, and Father Meliton brought it to the library. We hoped to analyze the manuscript seriously and contemplated an ink analysis. At the National and University Library, however, we were told that only at the police headquarters were people equipped with the necessary knowledge and tools for such an analysis. Father Meliton made it clear that he had no intention of putting the Vossius book in the hands of Israeli police. We gave up, I went back to Harvard, and when I came back to Jerusalem to teach, more than two years later, I had other commitments. It was only recently, more than a quarter-century later, in talking to American colleagues, that I realized that I am the "last living Western scholar" to have seen the Clement manuscript, and that I had a duty to testify in front of a skeptical scholarly world.

Since I have been interested in early Christian esoteric traditions for many years, the idea of a secret gospel in the Alexandrian Church never really surprised me. ² Smith's analysis of the secret gospel seemed to me as far-fetched as it was brilliant, but the continuous skepticism about the very existence of Clement's letter, and accusations of forgery, perhaps by Smith himself, have always seemed to me to stem from quite unscholarly grounds, more often than not implicitly rather than explicitly stated. I shall try here to bring new evidence which, to my mind, strongly points to the total trust deserved by Smith's account of his important discovery (though not necessarily to his interpretation of the document).

I met Smith a few times in the United States, but only once in Jerusalem. That was in the spring of 1982, a few months after the death of Gershom Scholem, the leading historian of Jewish mysticism, and one of the brighter stars in the Jerusalem firmament. Smith was in town for a few days, and wanted, above...