Chapter Fopling Flutter to Forgers and Forgeries of F by Brewer's Readers Handbook

1695, by Charles Boyle (earl of Orrery), who maintained their authenticity; but Richard Bentley, in the same year, published his Dissertation to prove that they are apocryphal, and no doubt Bentley was right. These letters, on philosophical subjects, profess to have been written six centuries before the Christian era, but Bentley has proved, by internal historical evidence, that they could not have been written for at least eight centuries later.

Bentley’s Dissertation introduced a new era of criticism, and probably suggested to Dr. Murray the idea of an English Dictionary on the same lines.

(29) Letters of Shelley (Percy Bysshe), published in 1852, proved to be forgeries by the Athenœum in the same year. The letters profess to have been a correspondence with his friends Byron and Keats.

Percy Bysshe Shelley lived 1792–1822.

(30) Moabite Stone (The), said to have been discovered near the Dead Sea by Klein, in 1868, and broken up by Bedouins in 1869. Mr. Löwy, in 1887, pronounced it to be a forgery, one of his arguments being that the stone was more worn than the letters, in other words, that the stone was old, but the inscription modern.

(31) Mormon (Book of). The Golden Bible, the pretended work of Mormon, “the last of the Hebrew prophets.” It was said to be written on golden plates about the thickness of tin. In reality it was a fiction written by the Rev. Solomon Spalding, who died in 1816. Joseph Smith gave out that the book was revealed to him by the angel Mormon, who also supplied a Urim and Thummim which would enable him to decipher the book. (See Koran.)

(32) Orphica. An immense mass of literature which, in the third and fourth centuries, grew out of the old Orphic myths and songs; somewhat like the Ossian of Macph erson, based, it may be, on older literature. Not only the Hellenists, but also the Church Fathers appealed to these forgeries as primitive sources of the religion of ancient Greece, from which they took it for granted that Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Plato had drawn their theological philosophy. Wesseling and Lobeck demonstrated that these Orphica were forgeries of the third and fourth centuries; and that, so far from being the source of Greek mythology, the truth lies in the contrary direction, and the Orphica were deduced from Hesiod and Homer.

(33) Pereira (Colonel). (See under Sanchoniathon.)

(34) Phalaris. (See under Letters of Phalaris.)

(35) Phœnician Stone (The). In 1824 the learned Raoul Rochette, professor of archæology, and keeper of the cabinet of antiquities, Paris, received from Malta (for the French Academy) a stone with a bilingual inscription in Greek and what professed to be Phœnician. The stone was dated the 85th Olympiad (B.C. 436). Rochette gave the inscription credit for the antiquity it laid claim to, and sent a copy of the inscription to every noted savant in Europe for decipherment and translation. The great scholar Gesenius of Halle and the hardly less learned Hamaker of Leyden agreed with Rochette, and published comments on the stone. Yet after all it turned out to be an impudent hoax and modern forgery.

(36) Pilate’s despatch to the emperor Tiberius. (See Acta Pilati.)

(37) Porphyry’s Oracles of Phylosophy were proved by Dr. Lardner to be a forgery.

(38) Protevangelium (The). A gospel falsely ascribed to James the Less, first bishop of Jerusalem. It is noted for its minute details of the Virgin and of Jesus. Some ascribe it to Carinus, who died 362.

First of all we shall rehearse …
The nativity of our Lord
As written in the old record
Of the protevangelium.
   —Longfellow.