Next in North America: A Secret Mark Symposium

Tony Burke notes in his blog Apocryphicity that there is a Secret Mark symposium in the making, at York University in May 2011 if everything goes as planned. Of the scholars who have argued for the forgery hypothesis, however, only Peter Jeffery and Bruce Chilton have accepted the invitation to participate. Which, naturally enough, raises the question,

Is the argument in jeopardy, particularly with BAR's publication of the report of a handwriting expert? Or have efforts by Allan Pantuck, Scott Brown, and others to dismantle the argument for Morton Smith's creation of the text succeeded in silencing some of the proponents for the theory?

Could it really be that the tide is turning already? In the long run scholars will necessarily either argue for their case, as Jeffery and Chilton have in this instance decided to, or retract their support from the claims of forgery, should they have found other lines of argumentation more persuasive. There are dozens of scholars who have supported the case for forgery in published reviews and papers. Will one of them begin a wave of retraction, dropping the forgery hypothesis from the paradigm status it currently enjoys in the academia, I wonder?