As is well known the history of religions is replete with stories of the discovery of purportedly lost or miraculously appearing books with messages from deities. This includes instances from ancient Egypt and Rome to 19th century America with the claimed discovery and translation of the book of Mormon. Some of these discovery tales have been accorded legitimacy while others have been suppressed or denounced as forgeries. Joseph Smith found an accepting audience but also incurred the accusation of fraud from many others. The historicity of the story of Josiah’s law-book and reform (2 Kings 22-23) occupies a central position in debates about the composition of much of the Hebrew Bible and the work of so-called deuteronomists. In a 2003 paper in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, that revolves around the story of Josiah, Arthur J. Droge finds it curious that the lexica of Religious Studies tends to exclude the term “fraud” despite it occurring frequently within religious discourse. He writes that a cynic may well regard fraud as the “modus operandi religiousus.” Droge refrains from asserting that fraud should be an analytical category for religious studies, preferring to call attention to the need for critical analysis of how religious communities—and academic disciplines—construct legitimacy and illegitimacy within the socio-political contexts in which their texts are produced. Yet, the question of fraud or forgery is not easily subsumed under this larger project. This paper takes a “cynical” approach to Josiah and Joseph Smith as a thought experiment to tease out some interpretative benefits of asking directly if a given religious text is the result of a deliberate fraud or forgery and relating this to legitimizing strategies that generate religious belief.

Few researchers deny that the origin of the literature now contained in Tanak is unknown. A few hints in the content suggest earliest possible dates of composition but do not require a specific latest possible date. Linguistic elements and manuscript variants suggest a long process of unguided evolution for at least some portions of this anthology. The many discontinuities, inconsistencies, and contradictions might suggest that the entire anthology evolved through a haphazard process of supplementation that was unguided by any overarching goal or ideology. And yet, few researchers are content to view the literature as a library or archive of unrelated narratives, poems, and fragments of unknown provenance and date. This paper suggests that conventional hypotheses about the origins and evolution of the Bible have been motivated by theological need and not by the evidence.

Was the phenomenon of "pious frauds" limited to the Middle Ages, or are there signs of it in the New Testament text as well? If zealous Christians could have perpetrated such hoaxes in the former, why not the latter? And is the practice carried on today in a more subtle form as Christian apologetics? One may consider parallels with the special pleadings of "sindonologists" and "scientific creationists." The motivation appears to be an allegiance to "Truth" in a material, not a formal sense, namely, in Tillich's terms, the tag "Truth" now attaches to a particular candidate for the truth, rather than to a "North Star" by which one navigates but knows one is never likely to reach. We will consider both whole writings with pseudepigraphical author-claims as well as particular elements and statements from particular NT writings. We will consider possible ways of distinguishing pious lying from midrash and emendation. There will also be attention to the work of Bart Ehrman, Gerd Lüdemann, and Joseph Wheless

This presentation will be divided into two parts. The first part will consist of brief survey of the most significant material finds from the Nazareth basin as they relate to the existence of a settlement there at the turn of the era, namely: (a) the lack of general material evidence from c. 700 BCE to c. 100 CE; (b) the 25 CE+ dating of the earliest oil lamps at Nazareth; (c) the 50 CE+ dating of all the post-Iron Age tombs at Nazareth, which are of the kokh type; and (d) the existence of Middle Roman tombs under the Church of the Annunciation. The second part of the presentation will focus on the question of “pious fraud” as this may relate to the history of Nazareth archaeology. Three aspects will be touched upon: (a) The non-rigorous nature of “Christian archaeology” wherein priests train in seminaries and are unable to conduct a rigorous modern excavation; (b) The monopoly exercised in Nazareth by the Catholic Church, evident in Church ownership of the “Venerated Sites” where most of the digging has taken place (thus limiting access, evaluation, and publication); (c) A persistent history of error, internal contradiction, and outright fraud which continues to mar critical findings from Nazareth.