Putting the Smoke Back in the Gun (Sort of), pt. 2

Trying to prove that one work influenced another can be a tricky business.

In his 1960 Archaeology article "Monasteries and their Manuscripts", Morton Smith does use an interesting phrase that resembles Hunter’s words in the novel The Mystery of Mar Saba. We read that

Almost all the material is of the seventeenth century and later. The earlier manuscripts were carried to Jerusalem in the mid-nineteenth century, by order of the Patriarch, and now form the well known Mar Saba collection in the central library of the Patriarchate. (“Monasteries”, p. 177)

Here we see Smith again using “almost all”, but in a different context: he is describing the date of the material, not its fate. It’s still possible that the “-most” in “almost” finds its source in Hunter’s novel, but it would more likely seem that the phrase “almost all” is just a particular reflex of Smith’s personal syntax. To be fair, Watson himself does not draw a comparison with this phrase. And the remainder of this sentence does not indicate any similarity with Hunter’s novel, so there is no evidence of influence here.


However, earlier in the article, there is an interesting phrase which does resemble Hunter’s words. We read that

Putting the Smoke Back In the Gun (Sort of), pt. 1

Francis Watson, in his article "Beyond Suspicion: on the Authorship of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark", tries--among other arguments--to link Morton Smith's work The Secret Gospel to James Hunter's novel The Mystery of Mar Saba by finding two or three similar phrases shared by both works, and used in similar contexts in each (in addition to other attempts at linking the two which we won't discuss here).  This can be found in section III.2 of Watson's article.  Watson claims this helps show that "Smith is dependent on the novel" (Suspicion, p. 170).

However, there is an intervening work that shows the same sort of similarity to The Mystery of Mar Saba, and a much closer similarity to The Secret Gospel, and which Morton Smith is more likely to have read: John Allegro's 1964 book Search in the Desert.