When people today tell me, or want to know if, Jesus travelled to India in his youth to learn the “wisdom of the East” or to Egypt to learn how to do “magic,” or any other rather exorbitant claim for a lower-class peasant born and raised in a small rural Jewish village, I tell them that the idea comes from one of the modern-day (usually 19th century) Gospel forgeries.  Sometimes my informant/questioner tells me they don’t believe the book they read about it (or heard about it) was forged but was an authentic account of Jesus hidden by the authorities (usually “the Vatican”), afraid of the truth being revealed.  I simply sigh.

I’ve written about a few of the most important of these modern forgeries in my book Forged, which is mainly not about them, but about ancient Christian writings produced in the name of a famous person by someone who was, well, someone else – that is, what we would today called forgeries.  Some such books are found in the New Testament (1 Timothy, 2 Peter, etc.), and lots more outside of it.

Near the end of the book, though, I talk about modern Gospel forgeries, and set them in the context of modern forgeries generally.

In the book I introduce all this by talking about one of the great forgery stories of modern times that some of you will know of and some of you not (with contemporary college students being uniformly in the latter category).

Here’s what I say about it there (Forged: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are, HarperOne, 2011).

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Whenever I teach about forgery, I think back to my first lecture on the subject, twenty-five years ago now, at Rutgers University.  As odd as this might seem, forgery was on everyone’s mind at the time.  Only a few months earlier forgery had been front page news for weeks

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