In 2001, Philip Jenkins drew attention to a novel by James H. Hunter entitled "The Mystery of Mar Saba", which first appeared in 1940 and was popular at the time. Jenkins saw unusual parallels to Clement's letter to Theodore and Smith's description of his discovery in 1958, but did not explicitly state that the novel inspired Smith to forge the text. Later Robert M. Price, Francis Watson and Craig A. Evans developed the theory that Morton Smith would have been inspired by this novel to forge the letter. This assumption has been contested by, among others, Scott G. Brown, who writes that apart from "a scholar discovering a previously unknown ancient Christian manuscript at Mar Saba, there are few parallels" – and in a rebuttal to Evans, he and Allan J. Pantuck find the alleged parallel between the Scotland Yard detective Lord Moreton's last name and Morton Smith's first name puzzling, since Morton Smith got his name long before the novel was written. Francis Watson finds the parallels so convincing that "the question of dependence is unavoidable", while Allan J. Pantuck thinks they are too generic or too artful to be persuasive. Javier Martínez, who thinks the question of forgery is open to debate, regards the suggestion that Hunter's novel would have inspired Smith to forge the text to be outlandish. He wonders why it took more than four decades after the story of Smith's discovery made the front page of the New York Times before anyone realized that this so popular novel was Smith's source. Martínez finds Watson's methods, by which he reaches the conclusion that "here is no alternative but to conclude that Smith is dependent on" "The Mystery of Mar Saba", to be "surreal as a work of scholarship". Timo Paananen asserts that neither Evans nor Watson clarifies what criteria they use to establish that these particular parallels are so "amazing, both in substance and in language", and that they reduce the rigor of their criteria compared to how they dismiss "literary dependencies in other context".