re: #255 dholmes32

Reminds me of the documents Mark Hofmann was passing off to the Mormon church as real. He claimed they were stampless covers, basically, a type of mail prior to the invention of postage stamps. I mentioned his discoveries to my sister, who was a stamp collector at the time. She said something was hinky, because it was likely that he could turn up one important stampless cover, but the fact that he kept coming up with important stampless covers indicated to her there was a problem which needed checking into. In the summer of 1985, I brought this up at a symposium discussing the Hofmann discoveries and I was basically blown off by the highly-educated historians.

It turned out I was right to be suspicious, because Hofmann had been forging documents. He killed two people two months later to try and protect his secret. You have no idea how upset I was to find out I was right. But the historians didn’t bother to look into the number of stampless covers Hofmann was turning up, and asking stamp collectors questions. That was beneath them. If they could have put a stop to Hofmann then, maybe two people would have lived…

I read Carrier’s post and it appears that the “gospel of Jesus’ wife” appears to have been copied from a Coptic interlinear, line breaks and all. As much as I dislike Carrier for his belief that Jesus himself was mythical and not a real person, I agree with him that this is probably a forgery.

With regard to Hofman, from what I gather, it’s entirely possible that some of his forgeries are still floating around there. By all accounts, he was one of the best forgers ever.