Quick Post on Tselikas

Agamemnon Tselikas' report on the Mar Saba manuscript was posted to the BAR website last week.  I'm a little surprised it hasn't garnered more attention, but I thought I'd make a few comments about it.  Really I only want to focus here on his "Textological Observations", which is where he presents the real substance of his claims.  I'll comment on only a few of those observations, numbered below.



#3: I can't quite make sense out of Tselikas' somewhat fractured English, but I'm intrigued by his claim that the model for the scribe would have been a Byzantine miniscule manuscript from perhaps as early as the 9th century.


#7: Tselikas assumes that because the Mar Saba manuscript runs out at the end of the page, that the model must have ended there, too.  Smith thought this, too.  I'm not opposed to this idea, but I think the copyist could well have chosen to end it there deliberately.  There was no need to keep going, especially as "Clement" had just finished one thought and was obviously about to begin a rather long explanation of the meaning of SGM, which would not have fit into the Voss volume.


#10: Again, my theory that the manuscript was written by a western visitor to the Levant (perhaps a Jesuit, or even a Capuchin, as both orders were active in the area at the time) seems quite compatible with Tselikas' thoughts.  The Jesuits were also active in Greece at the time, so the manuscript could have been written there, then made its way to Palestine.



#13: If Tselikas is going to base an argument of forgery on the 1923 catalogue of Mar Saba he discovered, we certainly deserve to know more about it.

Why did the patriarchate ask Smith to catalogue Mar Saba at all, if this 1923 catalogue already existed and was complete?

Why does Tselikas think the 1887 catalogue of books going into the library, plus the 1923 catalogue of books in the library, are a complete listing of items in the library, if

--the 1887 catalogue includes only 263 items
--the 1923 catalogue is of totally unknown length with unknown contents, save only that it does not mention the Voss
--we know from notes in Morton Smith's archives (as reported by Allan Pantuck and Scott Brown in their 2008 article) that he numbered 489 items in the library, which would include about 400 printed volumes after subtracting the 96 manuscripts he mentions
--we also know from Smith (in his 1960 Archaeology article) that the tower room alone contained between 450 and 500 items, strongly implying that his enumeration of 489 items included only the tower room, meaning there were many more in the room above the porch (a "good library" there, according to Smith in The Secret Gospel).

(Timo Paananen has raised similar questions.)

Without more information about the 1923 catalogue, I see no reason to assume that Tselikas has uncovered an adequate list of items in Mar Saba prior to 1923.

Even if the volume entered Mar Saba after 1923, why does this even suggest that Smith introduced it into the collection?  What does Tselikas say to Smith's claims that items flowed back and forth from one collection to another freely among the institutions of the Levant?



#19: Tselikas has not proven at all that the handwriting of the letter is "alien to the genuine and traditional Greek"--all he has suggested is that it was written slowly and carefully.  Anyone--whether a western or eastern scholar--would have done so if they had been transcribing a medieval text into an Enlightenment-era document.  And especially so if, as Tselikas suggests, that medieval text were a miniscule.


In general, Tselikas has made some progress on investigating the provenance of the letter, but I'm afraid he has dropped the ball.  He has withheld important information about his sources, and has used what limited information he reveals to unjustifiably make a case for forgery.