These color photographs were made in 1983 by Dourvas at a photo studio. But this was arranged and paid for by Quentin Quesnell. In June 1983, Quesnell was given permission to study the manuscript at the library for several days during a three-week period under the supervision of Dourvas. Quesnell was "the first scholar to make a formal case that the Mar Saba document might be a forgery" and he was "extremely critical" of Smith, especially for not making the document available to his peers and for providing such low-quality photographs. Yet, Quesnell did not tell his peers that also he had examined the manuscript and did not reveal that he had these high-quality color photographs of the letter at home already in 1983. When Hedrick and Olympiou published these same photographs in 2000 due to Dourvas having kept copies for himself, they were not aware of this. The scholarly community was unaware of Quesnell's visit until 2007 when Adela Yarbro Collins briefly mentioned that he was allowed to look at the manuscript in the early 1980s. A couple of years after Quesnell's death in 2012, scholars were given access to the notes from his trip to Jerusalem. They show that Quesnell at first was confident that he would be able to establish that the document was a forgery. But when he found something he thought was suspicious, Dourvas (who was confident that it was authentic eighteenth-century handwriting) would present other eighteenth-century handwriting with similar characteristics. Quesnell admitted that since "they're not all forgeries" it would not be as easy to prove that the text is a forgery as he had expected. Eventually, he gave up his attempts and wrote that experts had to be consulted.