Peter Kirby wrote:I think we need a "Bob Principle" here: nine times out of ten, if some ancient religious text gets forged, the forger is some random guy who might as well be named Bob, not whatever sounds cooler than that.
The name looming largest behind the scenes in the field of ancient history is
Pseudo-Isidore.
Jean Hardouin (1646 – September 3, 1729) grew up in an age during which
one of the largest, most complicated ecclesiastical forgeries of all time: The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals had just been exposed (Blondel ... 1628) for the massive church forgery it was.
WIKI wrote:Composition
The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, along with certain fictitious letters ascribed to early popes, from Clement to Gregory the Great, were incorporated in a ninth-century collection of canons purporting to have been made by the pseudonymous Isidore Mercator. Collections of canons were commonly made by adding new matter to old; the forger of the Pseudo-Isidore collection took as the basis of his work a quite genuine collection, Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis, and interpolated his forgeries among the genuine material that supplied credibility by association. The official Liber pontificalis was used as a historical guide and furnished some of the subject matter. The Pseudo-Isidorian collection also includes the earlier (non-Pseudo-Isidorian) forgery, the Donation of Constantine.
Textual overview
- * 1.The addition of forged material to an earlier, entirely authentic Spanish collection containing texts from councils and papal letters originating in the 4th through 8th centuries—the so-called Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis (the name is derived from a manuscript that was at some time in the French city of Autun, Latin Augustodunum).
* 2.A collection of falsified legislation of Frankish rulers allegedly from the sixth to the ninth centuries (Capitularies)—the so-called Capitularia Benedicti Levitae—after the name of the alleged author in the collection's introduction: deacon (Latin levita) Benedictus, as he calls himself. The author falsely states that he has simply completed and updated the well-known collection by abbot Ansegis of Fontanelles (died 833).
* 3.A brief collection on criminal procedure—the so-called Capitula Angilramni—allegedly handed over by Pope Hadrian I to Bishop Angilram of Metz.
* 4.An extensive collection of approximately 100 forged papal letters, most of which were allegedly written by the Roman bishops of the first three centuries. In the preface to the collection, the author of the collection calls himself bishop Isidorus Mercator (hence the name of the whole complex). Besides the forged letters, the collection contains a large amount of genuine (and partly falsified or interpolated) council texts and papal letters from the fourth to the eighth centuries. The genuine and interpolated material derives predominantly from the Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis.
Apart from these four main pieces, there are other minor forgeries derived from the same workshop:
the so‑called Excerptiones de gestis Chalcedonensis concilii.[1]
some falsifications in manuscript Hamilton 132 of the Berlin State Library
Collectio Danieliana
You don't need the Bob Principle when you have Pseudo-Isidore. A massive scriptorium (probably at least involving Corbie Abbey) acting as a forgery mill is well-attested in the 9th century.
"100 forged papal letters, most of which were allegedly written
by the Roman bishops of the first three centuries".
THE DETECTIVES and the Modus Operandi of Pseudo-Isidore
From Eric Knibbs blog:
The forgery work is a regular mosaic of phrases stolen from various works written either by clerics or laymen.
This network of quotations is computed to number more than 10,000 borrowed phrases,
and Isidore succeeded in stringing them together by that loose, easy style of his,
in such a way that the many forgeries perpetrated either by him or his assistants have an undeniable family resemblance.
This 10,000 "borrowed phrases" is "kind of" another way of saying a giant literary cento.
DETECTIVES
1) in the sixteenth century Erasmus and the Protestant canonist
Charles du Moulin and the Catholic canonist Antoine le Conte
declared their strong suspicions. However in 1580 in the official
edition of the Corpus Juris the authenticity of the Decretals was
never doubted. Probably the difficulty of a formal repudiation
was shirked, and, moreover, the controversies of that period pre-
vented an impartial discussion of the subject.
2) 1559 Magdeburg Centuriators:
However, a reply by the Jesuit Torres to the centuriators of Magdeburg, who had
launched in 1559 a polemic agains^^^papacy, deriding the False Decretals,
3) 1628: provoked a violent rejoinder by the Protestant David
Blondel in 1628 in his Pseudo-Isidorus et Turrianus vapulantes.
Since then the ' forgery ' of the Pseudo-Isidore has been an estab-
lished fact.
Blondel's work may have been known to Hardouin, which accounts for some aspects of his theory.
Whether its the "Bob Principle" or the "Pseudo-Isidore Principle" the forgery of ancient religious texts of all varieties is an historical reality.
Blood wrote:According to Haddlebury, the idea of inventing a wholly fraudulent ancient culture came about when he and other scholars realized they had no idea what had actually happened in Europe during the 800-year period before the Christian era.
Ah, the spirit of Biblical writing lives on!
You don't have to go any further than the 9th century Pseudo-Isidore to find a
massive, well-organised Ecclesiastical Forgery Mill.
.
