The dispute began almost at once and has not ended. On one side, Morton Smith himself, and later Scott G. Brown and Charles Hedrick, argued that the letter is a genuine copy of a lost work of Clement and that its Greek, its argument and its use of Clement's vocabulary are beyond the reach of a forger. On the other, Stephen C. Carlson, Peter Jeffery and Francis Watson have argued that it is a modern composition, and Carlson argued specifically that Smith wrote it himself, pointing to features of the handwriting he read as signs of a slow, drawn hand imitating a script rather than writing one.
That is a genuine disagreement between serious people, and the atlas records it as one. What makes it unusual is that it cannot be settled by the means that settle such questions elsewhere.
The volume moved to the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem in 1976. In 1983 a team examined it and took colour photographs, and at that point the leaves were removed from the book, reportedly for separate conservation. They have not been publicly produced since. No ink analysis has ever been done. No paper analysis. No forensic examination of the hand with the original in front of the examiner. Fifty years of argument, on both sides, rests entirely on photographs, and where the leaves are now is simply not known.