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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 heavy ink blobs in the first letter in the photo supposedly betrays a pause midstroke as the forger realized he had written the wrong letterform.