Smith gave some thought to Murgia's arguments but later dismissed them as being based on a misreading, and he thought Murgia "fell into a few factual errors". Although forgers use the technique of "explaining the appearance and vouching for the authenticity", the same form is also often used to present material hitherto unheard of. And even though none of Clement's other letters have survived, there seems to have been a collection of at least twenty-one of his letters at Mar Saba in the eighth century when John of Damascus, who worked there for more than 30 years (c. 716–749), quoted from that collection. And in the early eighteenth century, a great fire at Mar Saba burned out a cave in which many of the oldest manuscripts were stored. Smith speculated that a letter of Clement could partly have survived the fire, and a monk could have copied it into the endpapers of the monastery's edition of the letters of Ignatius in order to preserve it. Smith argued that the simplest explanation would be that the text was "copied from a manuscript that had lain for a millennium or more in Mar Saba and had never been heard of because it had never been outside the monastery."