Mar Saba Letter - Discovery and Disappearance

Discovery and Disappearance

In 1973 Morton Smith published a book on a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria. He stated that, while cataloging documents at the ancient monastery of Mar Saba in the summer 1958, he discovered the text of the letter handwritten into the endpapers of Isaac Vossius' 1646 printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch. This letter is consequently referred to as the Mar Saba letter of Clement of Alexandria. Smith also published a second book for the popular audience in 1974.

Smith's books reproduced black-and-white photographs he claimed to have taken at the time of the discovery. In 1976 a group of four scholars visited Mar Saba, and viewed the manuscript. This visit remained unknown until 2003 when one of the party, G.A.G. Stroumsa, published an account of the visit. In 1977 the volume containing the manuscript was taken to the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem. That same year, the manuscript pages were removed from the bound volume by the librarian Kallistos Dourvas, to be photographed and kept separately. These photographs were published in 2000. Subsequent attempts by scholars to view the manuscript have been unsuccessful. Paleographers, working from Smith's photographs, have assigned dates from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.