Thread for all discussion about "genuine/meaningless/fake" etc

[Stephen Carlson]

Personally, I've never found this line of argument appealing. If you look at the immense ingenuity displayed in fakes and hoaxes over the centuries, the amount of effort devoted to them is the least surprising thing. 

Are you sure we are not dealing with an outlier in terms of text size? Do you know of anything pre-1500 that comes close?

I was a teenager when the Hitler diaries came out. One of the defenses was that no forger would forge 60 volumes of such banal material. This turned out to be wrong, very wrong.

There are examples of earlier large-scale forgeries.

In 1492 Annius of Viterbo published Antiquitatum Variarum, which his forgery of Greek and Latin historians in a momental volume running more than 400 pages.

There's also the case of Dictys the Cretan, a forged "translation" of a Greek work that never existed. This thing was huge. From Wikipedia: "In the 4th century AD a certain Q. Septimius brought out Dictys Cretensis Ephemeris belli Trojani ("Dictys of Crete, chronicle of the Trojan War") in six books, a work that professed to be a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. translation of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. version."

Another 4th or 5th century forgery is the Historia Augusta, which purported to give 30 contemporary lives of the emperors but was written much later. From Wikipedia: "A peculiarity of the work is its inclusion of a large number of purportedly authentic documents such as extracts from Senate proceedings and letters written by imperial personages. In all it contains around 150 alleged documents, including 68 letters, 60 speeches and proposals to the people or the senate, and 20 senatorial decrees and acclamations." All these are fake, containing anachronisms.

In Christian literature, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, denounced by Tertullian as a second-century forgery from an Asian presbyter, was the size of a full literary work.

The VM is an outlier on almost every theory for it. But to so easily dismiss it as can't-be-fake simply based on the effort required strikes me as naive.