Well I've know received my copy and have read through it once. Firstly I
want to congratulate Stephen on a really nice job - clear, well argued,
apparently persuasive, and if successful ridding us of a problem. Also I
think Baylor has done an excellent promotion (blogs etc. have also had a
part in this). Baylor are publishing some other useful books too recently.

I had expected, from discussions with various people who had read it in an
earlier form, that it would be the concrete evidence on the hand-writing
that would be the most original and persuasive contribution of the book.
But I didn't find that to be the case. I found some of the more general
considerations (esp. on homosexual activity in antiquity and the 1950s)
more compelling. The raising of suspicions has been done before, what we
need to convict is proof. But that I'm not yet sure I've seen.

Specifically I don't find convincing the argument on p. 42f that the hand
of MS 22 (figure 5A = also the front cover) is the same hand as that of
Theodore. For such a critical argument (one of the few that involve
concrete testable issues rather than suspicious/possibly trickery) the
actual basis for it is rather slim and vague (resemblances of a few letters
etc.), and very little of the relevant text is shown in the photograph (not
enough to get a clear idea even what it is about). To me the differences
are clear and this whole part of the argument doesn't actually work. Nor
do I find any significant association between the samples of Smith's Greek
hand and the photos of Theodore. So this section doesn't persuade me that
Smith wrote Theodore. I'd be interested to know from Stephen the order of
his own thinking on this subject. Did he firstly see the supposed
similarity of hand-style and then think about Madiotes? Or was it the other
way around? He saw that Madiotes could be conceived of as a clue and then
wonder about the hand?

Secondly I have my doubts about the relevance of this so-called expertise
in hand-writing analysis in connection with forgery of signatures in
contemporary English to the problem at hand. No-one doubts that Theodore is
a copied text so everyone would expect to find in it indications of
hesitation etc. that come from copying techniques. You'd need to have a
test that could distinguish 20th cent copying of a 20th cent exemplar
(Morton Smith) from 18th cent copying from an unknown exemplar (A.N.
Other). But there is no such test proposed. The confidence expressed here
in 'forger's tremor' seems unwarranted: there is no 18th Cent original that
Smith is trying to copy/imitate.

So I'm interested to hear what people who may have read it think about the
argument (and I'm copying Stephen in too).

Cheers

Pete
At 12:48 PM 10/31/05, you wrote:
>I've reviewed Stephen Carlson's book on Secret Mark at
>
>http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/reviews/carlson_gospel_hoax.htm
>
>All the best,
>
>Roger Pearse
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>Yahoo! Groups Links
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Peter M. Head, PhD
Sir Kirby Laing Senior Lecturer in New Testament
Tyndale House
36 Selwyn Gardens Phone: (UK) 01223
566607
Cambridge, CB3 9BA Fax: (UK) 01223 566608
http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Tyndale/staff/Head/Staff.htm