In the December 1960 meeting, in New York, of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Columbia professor of ancient history Morton Smith announced that he had discovered fragments of a previously unknown version of the Gospel of Mark.
Smith reported that, during a 1958 visit to the ancient monastery of Mar Saba near Bethlehem, he had examined a copy of a 1646 printed edition of the works of the early Greek church father St Ignatius of Antioch. In the endpapers of this book, Smith said that he had found, written in eighteenth-century Greek handwriting, a fragment of a previously unknown letter by another Greek father, Clement of Alexandria. In the letter, Clement explained that St Mark had written a “more spiritual” version of his Gospel, that was carefully guarded in Alexandria. Clement quoted two passages from that Gospel.
Smith did not publish this text till 1973, thirteen years after he had announced its discovery. His publication was then accompanied with black and white photographs of the original leaves. That original has since disappeared. In 2003, the Israeli scholar Guy Stroumsa reported that he and a group of colleagues had seen the St Ignatius edition, including the fragmentary letter of Clement, in 1976 at Mar Saba, and had brought it from there to the Orthodox patriarchal library in Jerusalem. According to his own later report, the librarian, Father Kallistos Dourvas, then removed the Clement pages from the book, for photographing and recataloguing. Colour photographs were taken in 1983 and published in 2000, but the original went missing at some time after it was photographed in Jerusalem.
Because of the photographic record, no one doubts that the original document existed. However it does not follow that the letter of Clement, or the fragments of Mark that it contains, are authentic ancient texts. Authenticity has indeed been questioned since 1975, notably because one of the Mark fragments can be read as suggesting homosexual activity by Jesus. Some scholars believe Morton Smith forged the document, in line with his own interests and predilections, while others maintain vigorously that it can be shown to be real. The matter has led to the spilling of oceans of scholarly ink, and even to popularizing accounts, but it remains unresolved.
The Mar Saba forgery would have required great learning and competence from Morton Smith and any associates.
My own slightly informed view is that the Mar Saba letter is a forgery. But even if this is correct, it is a forgery that would have required great learning and competence from Morton Smith and any associates. It would have required, at least, knowledge of the relevant history and theology, of the forms of ancient Greek used by Mark and by Clement of Alexandria, of the transmission history of early Christian texts, and of the plausible holdings of Mar Saba’s library. Someone would also need to imitate eighteenth-century handwriting. And all of this would have to be done with enough expertise to stand up to minute scrutiny.
In other words, even if Morton Smith was a forger, he was still a highly competent scholar. Nor indeed was this in doubt: both his defenders and his opponents agree that he was, in the round, a learned and serious man.
Such competence ought to be the necessary prerequisite for any scholarly fraud to succeed. Scholars’ work is meant to be exposed to a community of peers, who can only be fooled with great difficulty, because of their own deep knowledge of the relevant subject matter. By the same token, it ought to be impossible for extensive plagiarism to go undetected, because anyone likely to read an academic plagiarist’s work would also be familiar with the scholarship from which he is stealing.
This brings us to the case of Jason Arday. Its tragic end—and may he rest in peace—ought not to distract from the many aspects of academic rot that it reveals. One of these can be seen in the extreme thinness of Arday’s published work and talks, and the ease with which some of his plagiarism could be detected, if one cared to look: Café Américain author Ian Pace has, with exemplary fairness and patience, documented the poverty and plagiarism in Arday’s monograph. Yet that book was published by Routledge, a mainstream scholarly press, to positive reviews.
A scholarly community that can let such poor work and such obvious plagiarism as Jason Arday’s pass muster is broken.
A scholarly community that can let such poor work and such obvious plagiarism pass muster is broken, and far too broken for Arday’s case to be a far outlier. On the contrary, Arday’s record is surely symptomatic of a field where expertise is so shallow as to be easily faked, and where publication is so voluminous, and actual careful reading of it so rare, that plagiarism will go unnoticed. Arday, it seems, was largely only pretending to be a scholar of any sort, but he could not have got so far if “real” scholars in his field constituted a true community of learned experts.
Scholarship is not, in the end, a matter of credentials, awards, or even publications. Some of the most learned people I know, of an older generation, have no doctorate or have published quite little. They needed neither advanced degrees nor reams of publications to gain the respect of their peers, because those peers knew and cared about the substance of learning more than its accidents. A scholar like Morton Smith could still beguile such a community, but a Jason Arday could only succeed in an academic milieu that is going through the ritual motions of scholarship, but has ceased either knowing or caring what those motions are supposed to mean.
