Speculative fraud hypothesis

[N._N.]

While there are certainly significant issues with an early 15th century fraud hypothesis (the later ones are too unrealistic to consider until further evidence emerges in my opinion), it should not be dismissed out of hand. Many of the counter-arguments based on cost and effort, return on investement, sellers and buyers etc. require a high degree of rationality from all actors. I would counter: A attempt of fraud which was generally unsuccessful during the time of its creator(s) is more logical than one that went according to plans. If the book did not sell at all until the late 16th century, it is hardly surprising that no one recreated the project or that there is no earlier archival evidence of it. Imagine a small group of scribes and/or scholars seeing that some foreign manuscript fetches a significant price or draws attention from important people, decide to create something similar, but fail to match the quality or relevance of what they tried to copy.

Some kind of fraud hypothesis also work in combination with the best attempts to recreate the manuscript's statistical properties, such as T. Timm's autocopist theory or M. Greshko's naibbe cipher, even if the latter is not intended in this way. Of course, it is basically impossible to prove and almost as hard to find supporting evidence beyond these very general observations, because most 'nonsense'-explanation leave fewer clues to work with than any language/cipher-theories.