The Letter to Theodore: Stephen Carlson's Case against Clement's Authorship

Chapter four of Stephen Carlson's The Gospel Hoax identifies certain features in the Letter to Theodore as anomalous within a private letter of Clement of Alexandria but explicable if the letter is a modern forgery. This paper examines the logic of those arguments and demonstrates that each feature of the letter that Carlson deems suspicious is fully consistent with Clement's modus operandi as revealed in his undisputed writings; the concordance is so striking as to add new support for the letter's authenticity.