religious forgery

This page considers forgery relating to religious texts and artefacts.

As we suggested earlier in this profile, forgery has been a recurrent mechanism for substantiating (or undermining) claims to spiritual and temporal authority.

A landmark in the development of forensics is Lorenzo Valla's Declamitio de falso credita et ementia donatione Constantini, a renaissance exposure of the 'Donation of Constantine' which purported to be a grant by the Emperor Constantine transferring control of Italy and western Europe to the Papacy in gratitude for being cured of leprosy. It's discussed in Anthony Grafton's superb Forgers and Critics: Creativity & Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1990).

Within the last five years we've seen the so-called Jehoash Tablet, an archaeological relic supporting some contemporary claims regarding Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, and the 'James Ossuary', promoted as having once held the bones of "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." The Brother of Jesus (New York: HarperCollins 2002) by Hershel Shanks & Ben Witherington offers

the dramatic inside story of what may well be the most momentous archaeological discovery of our time: the first-century ossuary of Jesus' brother, James, the head of the Jerusalem church. Reportedly found just outside ancient Jerusalem, the fragile limestone burial box bears the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." The ossuary and its inscription are now regarded as authentic by top scholars in the field; they represent the first visual, tangible, scientific evidence of Jesus' existence.

The antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion (manufactured by the Tsarist secret police but lovingly propagated by Henry Ford and the Nazi Party among others) are discussed in Norman Cohn's Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy & the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Paladin 1976) and A Lie & a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Lincoln: Uni of Nebraska Press 1997) by Binjamin Segel

Since its establishment the Mormon church has been plagued by forged documents alleged to substantiate or undermine key dogmas. The most prominent in recent years involved Mark Hofman, the subject of The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery (New York: Dutton 2001 ) by Simon Worrall, Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders (Salt Lake City: Signature 1988) by Linda Sillitoe & Allen Roberts and The Mormon Murders - A True Story of Greed, Forgery, Deceit & Death (London: Sphere 1989) by Steven Naifeh & Gregory White Smith.

An account of the Turin Shroud - claimed to date from the time of Christ but recently dated to the 1350s - is given in Clive Prince's In His Own Image - the Real Story of the Turin Shroud (London: Bloomsbury 1995).




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