Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem is a church body first and a manuscript repository second, and the atlas records it here in the second capacity. Its library in the city holds the manuscripts of the Judean desert monasteries, and in particular those of Mar Saba, the monastery founded in the fifth century and inhabited more or less continuously since, whose books were moved into Jerusalem in the 1970s for security and for conservation.

That move is the ordinary modern pattern for monastic libraries and it has an ordinary cost attached. A book in the monastery that made it is where it has always been, and its context, the shelf, the volumes beside it, the community that used it and wrote in it, is part of what the book means. A book moved into a central library is safer, better catalogued, better conserved and far easier to reach, and it has lost that context permanently. Both statements are true at once, and a custodian choosing between them is choosing which kind of loss to accept.

The patriarchate's holdings have been catalogued and photographed by visiting scholars over more than a century, which is how anything at all is known about them outside the library walls. That dependence matters for the case the atlas is most interested in here, because when a manuscript in this collection cannot be produced, the photographs taken by visitors are the only thing that remains of it.

Morton Smith, cataloguing the library at Mar Saba in 1958, found two and a half pages of Greek written in an eighteenth century hand into the endpapers of a printed edition of the letters of Ignatius published in 1646. The text presents itself as a letter of Clement of Alexandria and quotes from a longer version of the Gospel of Mark. Smith photographed the pages in black and white and published his study of them in 1973.

What happened next is why the case cannot be resolved on the evidence available. The monastery's books were moved to the patriarchate's library in Jerusalem in the 1970s and the volume was located there. In the early 1980s a group of scholars examined it and took colour photographs, and the leaves were then removed from the book by the librarian, reportedly for separate conservation. They have not been publicly produced since. No ink analysis, no paper analysis and no forensic examination of any kind has ever been carried out on them.

Every argument about the document therefore rests on photographs, and the arguments are sharp ones. Some scholars hold the letter to be a genuine ancient text copied by an eighteenth century hand. Others hold it to be a modern forgery, and some of those have named Smith himself as the forger. The atlas does not adjudicate between them. It records instead the one thing both camps agree on, which is that the object that would settle the question is not available to be examined.