The Case of the Vanishing Tremors

Tony Burke drew attention to the publication of an interesting article about the Secret Gospel of Mark:

Roger Viklund and Timo S. Paananen, “Distortion of the Scribal Hand in the Images of Clement’s Letter to Theodore,” Vigiliae Christianae 67 (2013): 235-247.

The article is based on material which had previously been made available online by one of its authors, Roger Viklund. And so you can see there, even without a subscription to the journal, what the gist of the argument is: the examples of supposed forger’s tremors – i.e. places where Stephen Carlson alleged, in his book The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark, that one could see where a forger had stopped his pen mid-letter, are a product of the lower quality images consulted, and are not there in high-quality images of the manuscript.