A Critique of Watson: MWRANQHNAI and "Morton"

Does MWRANQHNAI say "Morton", as Watson claims it does?

Let's try to imagine the scenario:



Morton Smith, inspired by his reading of Hunter's novel The Mystery of Mar Saba to write a secret gospel of Mark (and for other reasons that remain obscure--he needed it neither for career advancement nor for emotional satisfaction), decides he needs to place a sphragis in his invented letter to Theodore. Smith realizes--again, for some unknown reason--that the Greek infinitive MWRANQHNAI contains a mu, an omega, and a rho. From this, he is supposed to equate omega with omicron, and realize that here lie the first three letters of his first name? And from this, he's then supposed to 1) equate a theta with a tau, 2) equate an eta with another omicron (!), and 3) realize all he needs is a nu to spell his own first name within MORANQHNAI? Leaving out all the other letters that do not spell "Morton", that is (and leaving out the fact that the remaining letters don't actually spell "Morton" either...) He concludes that he must therefore contrive to include MWRANQHNAI in his text, so he can tell the world he wrote To Theodore.

So, after pretending to spell his name in a word that doesn't spell his name, he goes in search of an appropriate use of MWRANQHNAI in Clement, since his elaborate ruse must for some reason involve the writings of Clement of Alexandria. It just so happens there is an appropriate metaphor in Clement's other writings equating salt with gnostic knowledge, based on the Q-saying in the gospels. But the passage in Clement isn't good enough for Smith's purposes, for some unknown reason, so he turns to the gospel passages behind Clement's metaphor...discovering to his dismay that they do not contain the infinitive, only the participle MWRANQH. It just so happens Smith can drop EAN DE and transform MWRANQE into the infinitive to get his nu back! Good thing for Smith, because otherwise he'd have to start all over again, invent a totally different set of metaphors from Clement, and take another fifteen years to publish...

Are we really to take this scenario seriously? Doesn't it seem absurd on the face of it? But how else are we to imagine Smith constructing these fiendishly complex clues? Under Watson's assumptions, MWRANQHNAI couldn't have appeared in the Mar Saba letter by accident...but the compositional process Smith would have had to go through to create a text that uses MWRANQHNAI in just the right way seems impossibly convoluted; why would Smith have even bothered in the first place (and why would the Greek grammar and gospel and Clementine allusions have lined up in just the right way for him to pull off the feat?)

Watson also thinks that Smith invented the independent use of the proverb just to introduce an infinive form of "savor" into it. But it turns out we do have evidence for an independent use of the proverb...it's in the Talmud, Bek. 8b, as mentioned by Smith in the commentary to Clement of Alexandria. As Smith notes, some think this just refers to the gospel usage, but others do not.

As I've said of arguments similar to the kind of metaphor-hunting and semantic twisting that Watson presents, this sort of "evidence" of forgery resembles astrology more than scholarship.