Preface: don't take this too seriously.
During discussion with friends, I imagined a hypothetical explanation for the creation of the manuscript. My chief problem with most hoax theories is that the amount of effort required makes the proposition that it was made as a hoax to fool someone gullible out of money stupid: a fraudulent actor simply finds someone more gullible to con, not spend a year's worth of scribing effort to create a fraudulent artifact. Such forgeries do happen, but when the amount of money thus received is tremendous - like an art forgery. The manuscript, to my mind, doesn't fit this criteria.
However, that is not the only way a con artist could use a manuscript like this. In fact, a travelling snake oil salesman could use such an artifact to bolster their credibility among marks, as a prop. After creation of such a prop, it could be reused, making for a much better return on investment. A con artist group could reuse the same artifact, making it a reasonable proposition for the five scribes to collaborate. And, the prop would also serve its purpose during creation: one could simply show off a single folio or quire and, noticing an uptick in marks catching the bait, spend more effort to create further and further pages, culminating in a book.
The advantages of this speculative hypothesis:
The disadvantages are still legion, of course:
Still, I found it a fun hypothesis so decided to share. Would love to hear some thoughts. Thanks for a bunch of threads containing interesting info to pass the time looking into this silly mystery.
During discussion with friends, I imagined a hypothetical explanation for the creation of the manuscript. My chief problem with most hoax theories is that the amount of effort required makes the proposition that it was made as a hoax to fool someone gullible out of money stupid: a fraudulent actor simply finds someone more gullible to con, not spend a year's worth of scribing effort to create a fraudulent artifact. Such forgeries do happen, but when the amount of money thus received is tremendous - like an art forgery. The manuscript, to my mind, doesn't fit this criteria.
However, that is not the only way a con artist could use a manuscript like this. In fact, a travelling snake oil salesman could use such an artifact to bolster their credibility among marks, as a prop. After creation of such a prop, it could be reused, making for a much better return on investment. A con artist group could reuse the same artifact, making it a reasonable proposition for the five scribes to collaborate. And, the prop would also serve its purpose during creation: one could simply show off a single folio or quire and, noticing an uptick in marks catching the bait, spend more effort to create further and further pages, culminating in a book.
The advantages of this speculative hypothesis:
- Explains the amount of effort for a hoax
- Allows for collaboration with common purpose by multiple people, explaining multiple scribes
- A hoaxster could plausibly have enough cunning to invent a simple method to generate words (crust-mantle-core style) and then generate a document by basing it bits of meaningful books, thereby reproducing many of the features of the manuscript
- A hoax would have little use for corrections unless they looked bad on a page, explaining the relative lack of retouching
- Explains the signs of use on the manuscript
- Explains how someone (perhaps after incarceration or death of the hoaxters) could find the document and then bind it/add things at a later date.
- edit to add: The lack of occult or religious symbolism makes sense for such a hoax, as it gives plausible deniability that this isn't some cursed or heretical artifact, allowing for safer use as a prop in a Christian community.
The disadvantages are still legion, of course:
- This is still a lot of effort, but perhaps one spent to assure that someone can't realise it is gibberish at a glance - important when you're showing the prop to multitudes of people. But there are easier ways to con people.
- The explanation for why the larger-scope semantic and textual analyses seem to suggest topic clustering is flimsy
- Gives zero clues for a possible decipherment scheme
- The parchment appears to have been acquired and prepared similarly, not congruent with being built up piece-by-piece (though not impossible)
Still, I found it a fun hypothesis so decided to share. Would love to hear some thoughts. Thanks for a bunch of threads containing interesting info to pass the time looking into this silly mystery.
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