13-01-2026, 10:35 PM
I've searched through the forum and elsewhere on line, and I haven't seen any exploration of an idea that's been running through my mind. Mind you, I'm not a scholar and haven't submerged myself in the existing scholarship.
Most discussions relate to whether the manuscript is a hoax or has meaning encoded in the text, but what if only part of the manuscript is something of a hoax? The 15th century was a time of religious persecution and forced conversions, and it could have been dangerous for folks to have, say, a Jewish text in their possession (such as with Crypto-Judaism). In order to protect the content of an unauthorized manuscript, two strategies might have been taken:
A few other possible clues could support the theory that the manuscript is a secret religious (particularly Jewish) text:
Curious to hear what others might think!
Most discussions relate to whether the manuscript is a hoax or has meaning encoded in the text, but what if only part of the manuscript is something of a hoax? The 15th century was a time of religious persecution and forced conversions, and it could have been dangerous for folks to have, say, a Jewish text in their possession (such as with Crypto-Judaism). In order to protect the content of an unauthorized manuscript, two strategies might have been taken:
- Encode the text so that outsiders would not be able to read its contents
- Adorn the encoded text with spurious and misleading images to serve as something of a misdirection; if someone was caught with a dangerous religious manuscript, outsiders might assume it was a simply a commonplace alchemy text of herbs, recipes, and incantations
A few other possible clues could support the theory that the manuscript is a secret religious (particularly Jewish) text:
- The parchment was carefully prepared, as might happen for a community's sacred manuscript: "prepared with so much care that the skin side is largely indistinguishable from the flesh side." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- The manuscript was heavily used: "Medievalist Lisa Fagan Davis describes the parchment as soft - a texture found in books that have been heavily thumbed.' This indicates the manuscript was handled or paged through a great deal." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- The VM word count is "35,000 to 38,000 words and around 170,000 characters," and could be even longer as it is hypothesized that several pages of the VM are missing; this number is within a magnitude of the Torah, with 79,000 - 80,000 words and ~304,805 letters, especially if abbreviations or shorthand might be used
- Some analyses show the VM text has an affiliation with Hebrew (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
Curious to hear what others might think!