Image Details

Photo by Kallistos Dourvas

UNMASKED BY A TREMOR? In his book about Morton Smith’s alleged forgery of the Clement letter, lawyer Stephen Carlson claims that the fake manuscript is revealed by “forger’s tremor,” a characteristic often used by handwriting experts to describe the nervous shake or other errors in forged documents presented in court cases.

Carlson argues that the same sort of shakes, stops and starts can be seen in parts of the Clement letter. Although the Greek writing is less familiar, Carlson sees heavy blunt ends on the first letter and a broken line between the second and third letters in the detail photo as evidence of forgery.