[posted to GThomas Yahoogroup April 14th] As I'm reading Depuydt's article in HTR, I'm getting more and more unhappy with it. In analyzing line 6 of the fragment, for example, he knew that his reading of the initial word 'mare' differed from King's, yet he doesn't say anything at all about that difference. Instead, he concludes that his own interpretation of 'mare' results in a "grammatical monstrosity"! ... how could he not have known that he was leaving it open to King to simply say that his interpretation of 'mare' was wrong? Which she did. Talk about blunders. Secondly, Depuydt doesn't make use of the finding that the missing direct- object marker on line 1 mirrors my own pdf of 2002. My guess is that the reason he didn't do this was that a forgery date of 2002 or later would put in doubt both the collector's claim to have obtained the fragment in 1997, and the handwritten, undated, unsigned Munro/Fecht/Laucamp note. Apparently, Depuydt didn't want to raise that issue. As a result, however, he had to argue about missing direct-object markers in general, not the specific case of a missing direct-object marker in front of the specific noun in line 1. That left it open for King to present examples of missing direct-object markers in constructions similar to line 1. Which she did. To which may be added a third shortcoming of Depuydt's case: he never points out that the phrases common to both the fragment and Coptic Thomas occur in a very small number of CGT sayings. As a result, he has to mount a statistical argument about "six phrases" implicitly occurring at random throughout CGT. Most folks likely won't be able to determine whether that's a good argument or not, so this seems a strange tactic. Why implicitly abandon a persuasive point for a questionable argument? All in all, Depuydt's presentation reminds me of the Clark/Darden case against O.J. Simpson - it was so obvious to them that he was guilty that they skimped on it. Mike Grondin