The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[asteckley]

I think your dedication to the theory that it is an authentic 15th century creation has caused you and many others to lose track of how little hard (i.e. objective) evidence there actually is, and how much of the story depends on subjective suppositions, speculations, and scenarios that just seem "plausible".

There is some tension between citing the scattershot early theories towards a date to undermine the hard evidence for a 15th Century dating and narrows back to the hard evidence to provide plausibility for a 20th Century dating. I'm sure that this will generate a long response explaining how you square those two modes, and it's not entirely impossible to do, but the tension remains nonetheless

I'm not sure who you expect to generate a long response but to be clear, it wouldn't come from me because I have never tried to square those two modes. (Nor have I tried undermined any of the hard evidence where it actually exists.) My post above, from which you quoted, was only addressing the lengthy history of people on this forum (not just Rene by any means, but others too) overstating where hard evidence actually exists with the VMS, and of not recognizing the role of subjectivity in many of their own claims.  

It does seem from a few of your comments that you perceive some "scattershot" in Rich's arguments since they certainly do cover a lot of different angles and various proposed scenarios.  I can see that a little, though I don't find it all that distracting. It is just inevitable if one is trying to respond to a variety different comments and questions, which are themselves coming from different uncoordinated directions and counter-arguments.  I think you'll probably find much less of that in his blog series though.