For as long as Christians have found God in the written word, the written word has given forgers the power to play God. No doubt some pretenders had the holiest of intentions, like the anonymous second-century author who wrote 3 Corinthians in the name of the apostle Paul. Later fakes, like the Donation of Constantine, were naked power grabs. The Roman emperor’s “inviolable gift” of political supremacy to the Church shaped centuries of history before an Italian literary critic studying its crude Latin in the sixteenth century unmasked it as a medieval forgery.
