Academic Discussion • Morton Smith regarding the Writer/Copyist

Clement of Alexandria, p. 2
That the writer was a scholar is also shown by his spelling. Although confusion of the various vowels sounded as £ was common in his time, he has only once fallen into it (ἐξαντλῆται, for ἐξαντλεῖται, πα - unless ἐξήντληται is to be read). He always writes iota subscript and writes it as subscript. He usually writes the coronis. He frequently distinguishes grave from acute accents, and does so correctly; there is only one misplaced accent in the whole text (βλασφημόν for βλάσφημον, II.7), and this is probably due to haste rather than ignorance, as is his use of 6 for 6 in the preceding line and his omission of the accent of καί at the ends of lines (I.2,7 and III.11). That he consistently accentuates Mapxos rather than Mépxos reflects the usage common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His most frequent fault is one to which modern Greeks are especially liable—failure to notice rough breathings. He has written what are probably smooth breathings in four places where rough breathings should have appeared (1.23,26, II.21,22), and he once has οὐκ instead of οὐχ before a rough breathing (III.13). These errors do not prove that the manuscript he copied was incorrect in these points; nor does the usual correctness of his spelling prove that it was generally correct. He probably copied by reading the phrases and then repeating them as he wrote them down. Therefore it is not surprising that what he wrote should sometimes reflect either his knowledge or his pronunciation, rather than the reading of the text he was copying. That he was a scholar is shown also by the shapes of his letters. The whole style of the hand shows the influence of the Greek typography of western Europe. I am indebted to A. Angelou for the observation that the shape of the nu, in particular, is characteristically western. Western influence, however, is no proof of western origin, and here the basic hand, on which the influence has been exercised, seems to be native Greek. Most of the larger and many of the smaller Greek monasteries stocked their libraries, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with western editions of the Church fathers, and the type used in these editions perceptibly influenced monastic hands. Professor Scouvaras has produced an eighteenth-century ecclesiastical document in a native Greek hand strikingly similar to that of our manuscript. (See Plate IV.) A number of the mus, in particular, are practically identical. Since Scouvaras’ document is an autograph codex of the Oecumenical Patriarch Callinicus III and was written about 1760 in the Phanariot hand which 1. References in this form are to the plates at the end of the volume and to the lines of the text as shown on the plates. THE MANUSCRIPT had been formed in Constantinople shortly before that time, we may suppose with some probability that the writer of the present letter had been trained in the Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople. Further proof of the writer's scholarship is his familiarity with many of the older Greek manuscript abbreviations and ligatures. A list of all his abbreviations and a number of his more drastic ligatures will be found in Appendix A; it contains perhaps slightly more of these forms than would normally be found in a manuscript of the mid-eighteenth century. The writer's usage of these special forms is universally correct, though sometimes ambiguous. The use of a flourish to indicate both the smooth breathing and the circumflex reduces both -οῦ and οὐ to { or PET the circumflex combined with the rough breathing is sometimes no more florid than without ( HE = οὗ or -οῦ). In general, the hand is remarkably cursive. As the manuscript progresses the cursive character of the hand becomes more marked. The writer was evidently in a hurry. It may be that lack of time forced him to break off, as he did, in the midst of a page and of a sentence; on the other hand, the text he was copying may itself have been a fragment and have broken off at this point. The copyist's haste appears unmistakably in the greater size and sweep of the letters at the end of his text, by comparison with those at the beginning. It is shown also by a number of minor mistakes of writing besides those already mentioned. ταταυτοῦ, probably for τὰ αὗτοῦ, in I.19 may reflect uncertainty rather than haste, and ἀποθνῄσκων written over ἀποθαγων (?) in I.28 may be a deliberate correction of the reading of the manuscript he was copying. But in II.20 τῶν seems to have been omitted by haplography after αὐτῶν (though such omission of the article is not uncommon in later Greek prose), and on III the curious vs ligature at the end of the first word probably results from correction of a minor slip of the pen, immediately after it was made; the z of ézt in III.8 shows another slip of the pen, uncorrected, and the * of ἔστιν in III.17 shows yet another, caught and corrected at once. For the most part, however, the text is amazingly correct, especially considering the small size and obvious speed of the writing. These characteristics prove it to be a copy of some earlier manuscript. That anyone in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries should have written such Greek at such speed as an original composition is incredible.

p. 28
This would suggest that he may have had before him a MS without
accents and breathings. [But had that been the case, there would have been many
more instances of omitted accents and of false divisions. I suspect that an ancestor
had τὰ a$ro0, which became ταυτοῦ. This can represent either τὰ αὑτοῦ, or τοῦ αὐτοῦ.
Το show that it represented τὰ αὑτοῦ someone superscribed zà—hence ταταυτοῦ.
καὶ τά T αὑτοῦ καί is odd Greek; I should expect καὶ τὰ αὐτοῦ OT (omitting καί) τά
τε αὑτοῦ. B.E.] Stahlin, Τ.ΧΧΧΝΥΗ, remarks on the frequency with which his manu script used αὐτοῦ, etc., after articles, in place of the reflexive forms, and omitted the
coronis in crasis. However, I think the error here must be given an explanation
which will accord with the amazing correctness of the rest of the MS. I should
suppose, therefore, that the writer found a folio of an uncial MS with few or no
explanatory signs or word divisions. Therefore he studied it carefully, correcting
the spelling, marking the divisions, adding accents, breathings, and the like. Along
with his other changes he indicated by a superscribed τά, as B.E. suggests, that
TAYTOY, which stood in his text, was to be understood as τὰ αὑτοῦ. Then he copied
his corrected text into his book. He was pressed for time when he copied, and therefore
made a number of minor mistakes, of which ταταυτοῦ was one.

Clement of Alexandria, p. 289
Perhaps the strongest reason for thinking this one remained at Mar Saba is (after the fact
that it was found there) the absence of any known reference to its content. This
suggests that it did not circulate, but lay neglected in some corner of a single library.

Clement of Alexandria, p. 289
No doubt someone's attention was attracted by the surprising content
of this isolated folio. He studied the text, corrected it to the best of his ability, and
then copied it into the back of the monastery's edition of the letters of Ignatius,
since it resembled them in being a letter from an early father, attacking gnostic
heretics. For analogies reference may be made to the loss in a fire at Strassburg of
the only MS of the Epistle to Diognetus, to the preservation of the Muratorian Canon
(also a fragment) on the last pages of a volume of Ambrose, and to the insertion of
the Syriac translations of the apocryphal psalms into an empty space in the middle
of a MS of the Ketaba de durrasha (Noth, Fiinf 3). The oldest MS containing these
psalms dated from 1340—until the discovery of the Dead Sea documents. For an
example of the correction of the text by the copyist, there is the acid remark of the
hegoumenos Joasaph that one Seraphim, who worked at Mar Saba in the late seventeenth century, was an ignoramus who spoiled old MSS by trying to correct them
(Phokylides, Laura 562f). Note also the correction of itacisms in fifteenth- and eighteenth-century MSS of Marcarius (Neue Homilien p. XVIII). [B.E. remarks: the
correctness may be due to the person who copied the text you saw, or it may be due
to some predecessor. Thus in the case of the MSS of Plutarch, Planudes introduced
a correctness of spelling and accentuation that persists in the MSS derived from
his edition."] As remarked in Chapter One, the occasional errors of transcription
in the present text are probably due to the haste of the copyist.

The Secret Gospel, p. 11
Many of the printed books contained extensive handwritten passages. Binders’ pages at front and back, blank pages between chapters, even margins had been pressed into use. Evidently paper had been in short supply at Mar Saba during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, from which almost all of these copies came.