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Tremors, or Just an Optical Illusion? A Further Evaluation of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis
I am now fairly certain why Stephen C. Carlson saw all signs of forgery in the handwriting of Clement's letter to Theodoros. It seems all to be due to the basis of his work; printed low resolution images from Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark by Morton Smith.
In 2005 Stephen C. Carlson came out with The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s invention of Secret Mark. As the title says, Carlson argued that Morton Smith in fact invented Clement's letter to Theodoros containing extracts from a so-called Secret Gospel of Mark. Among the several indications for this presented by Carlson, he also pointed to the actual writing. We only have photographs of a now lost copy of the letter. This shows a text that appears to be written in a hurried cursive eighteenth century Greek handwriting. Carlson thinks that “it should be possible to tell if the hurried handwriting of Theodore is natural or simulated.” (Carlson p. 27) He suspects that if Morton Smith forged that handwriting in the twentieth century, imitating a hurried cursive eighteenth century handwriting, he would have had to write much more slowly in order to form the letters in a way which was not typical for his own way of writing. This careful imitation where the letters are almost drawn would, according to Carlson, lead to a number of characteristics which could reveal the counterfeiter (and according to Carlson, this counterfeiter, or hoaxer, was Morton Smith).
Carlson also claims to have found signs revealing this slow imitating. He refers to a number of “[b]lunt ends at the beginnings and ends of the lines” of the letters. This would be the effect of a very slow shaping of the letters and that the pen thereby came to a stop and the ink would accumulate. He also finds many instances where the pen was lifted in the middle of a stroke and this would indicate that Smith needed to prepare himself for writing the next letter before continuing. Occasionally Smith still had to go back and retouch certain letters. Further Carlson sees a lot of tremors in the writing, tremors which reasonably would not occur if a skilled scribe would have written the letter in a fast pace. Accordingly the tremors are also an effect of slow writing.
When I previously evaluated Carlson’s claims in the article Reclaiming Clement's Letter to Theodoros – An Examination of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis, I had a tough job in extracting all the letters for comparison. When I later systemized them and then also could evaluate Carlson’s assertions, I was often surprised to see that I could not find the signs that he referred to. I realize now, that I sought to find them in places where they were not. What I did not do, and of course should have done, was to compare my colour images, which were scanned in 1200 dpi directly from the colour photos taken by Kallistos Dourvas in the late 70s, to the images Carlson used, which he took from the printed images in Morton Smith’s book showing the black and white (b/w) photos Smith took in 1958. I did at that time however, not have access to Morton Smith’s Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark.
Now that I have got hold of the book, and have scanned also these images in 1200 dpi, I realise that the low resolution prints, done on a printing press in the early 70s, have a line screen at a 45 degrees angle. I had of course noticed this before and I had also previously been updated by Scott G. Brown, who informed me of this in an e-mail. Further, also Walter M. Shandruk in a blog post named Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis on Secret Mark, noticed how pixelated the letters were. But the images he presents do not seem to fully show all the details.
A line screen can be described as
lines
made out of separate dots of different sizes, yet organised in straight lines separated by the
same distance and reproduced at a fixed angle. In this case the angle is
45 degrees. As can be seen from the enlarged image to the right, which
is scanned from the printed black and white images of the letter
When you print for instance letters, these letters are also made up of
similar dots. However, because of the low resolution reproductions in the book,
the letters will not appear smooth in high magnification. This is due
to the
low resolution line screen. When you enlarge a halftone image very much,
like the one printed in
I will not, like I did in my previous article, make a full survey of all the examples Carlson refers to. I will settle for including about half of his examples, showing the most obvious within each category, in order to demonstrate how and why Carlson saw what he saw. Nor will I refer to from where the letters are taken, since this information is given in my previous article Reclaiming Clement's Letter to Theodoros – An Examination of Carlson’s Handwriting Analysis. Those who wish to know this will have to go there.
Ink blobs as a result of pen stops
Pen lifts and retakes
Carlson claims that on several occasions, where a skilled
scribe would have written in one stroke, this scribe stops, lifts the
pen and begins anew. I leave aside the example Carlson gives for of a
pen
lift between epsilon and kappa, where there certainly is a
pen lift, but where this scribe always lifts his pen
as he never
connects the letter kappa to the preceding letter. For the rest,
there are obvious
examples
Next
we have this lambda,
where Carlson sees “[u]nnatural pen lifts in the middle of what should
be” a smooth curve in the left leg. This was one of the examples where I
in my previous evaluation was unable to see where Carlson saw the pen
lift. Now I realize that he must have taken the
As Carlson actually gives only three examples of retouching, and these are closely connected with the pen lifts (one of the examples is the lambda presented here and which according to Carlson “shows a lot of retouching”), I do not give any such example.
Tremors due to slow writing
No basis for judgement
This somewhat short survey still demonstrates that Carlson’s assertion that the handwriting of Clement’s letter to Theodoros shows signs of ink blobs, pen lifts, retouches and tremors, cannot withhold a critical examination. These signs lie rather in the poor images Carlson used than in the writing itself. The signs of forgery which Carlson claims could be detected in the handwriting cannot really be used as a basis for judgement of the letter’s authenticity, since the quality of the images he used is simply too poor. On the contrary, it can be said that the high resolution colour images do not show any conspicuously marks of ink blobs, pen lifts, retouches and tremors; thereby strengthening the opinion that the text was indeed written rather swiftly. This does in turn strengthen the opinion that the text was written by a skilled scribe in the eighteenth century.
Copyright © 2009 Roger Viklund 12 December 2009
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found
in Smith’s book, the dots are arranged very symmetric. When you are
printing, as in this case in black and white, there is only one colour,
and that colour is black. There will either be a black dot, or nothing
at all, just the background colour of the paper, which normally is
whitish. If you wish to produce different shades of grey, you still only
have black dots at your disp
Smit
Next
is this tau. Also this time the faded endings cannot be reproduced
in the b/w image, leading to a large blob at the bottom, when in fact
there are two intersecting lines seen in the colour image. The blob that Carlson sees below the
top loop in this tau is also a consequence of the halftone
process.
After
that
Another
example where Carlson spots a pen lift, is between this alpha
and this tau. In my
All
of these examples show that when lines are produced at angles which
differ markedly from the angles possible to reproduce correctly, the lines will be
stepped and it will appear as if the pen was lifted and a new stroke was
done beginning on a different level. This holds true also for the next
example, where Carlson finds a pen lift between the epsilon and
gamma. The actual place where the break appears, is cut out and
enlarged in this ellipse. It really looks like the epsilon is do
Next
we have a connection between epsilon and pi, or as
Carlson puts it 
Another
Finally
there are the forger’s tremors. Carlson writes: “
Other
good 
The
Also
in th
