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. The shaky beginning tail of the initial theta in the photo seems to him to indicate a hesitant or nervous hand.