Constantine the Great and Sylvester I, Pope from 314 to 335, were not close friends. They did not, despite Dan Brown's repeated insistence to the contrary, re-write the Bible together at the Council of Nicea. In fact, Sylvester was not AT Nicea. These and other basic facts of history, which were never well-hidden, caused many people, when a document surfaced in the 8th century, purporting to be a letter from Constantine to Sylvester granting him and his Papal successors spiritual and temporal sovereignty over the Western Roman Empire, to see it for the cheesy forgery it was. Nevertheless, this purported letter, known as the Donation of Constantine, was used from time to time by Popes and their allies as an argument in various power struggles, and has occasionally fooled people down to the present day, including, of course, Dan Brown.
Although many people knew from the start that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, it was Lorenzo Vallo who proved it in 1440, by demonstrating that its Latin was that of the 8th century. This was a great milestone in textual criticism.
In the 17th century some scholars, notably Spinoza with his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, began to take a similarly critical view of the Bible and the Classics, investigating their authorship and time of composition. Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish Community of Amsterdam for suggesting that Moses might not have authored all of the Pentateuch.
More recently, scholars have determined that of the 13 books of the New Testament traditionally attributed, 6 were written by someone else: Colossians, Ephesians, 2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus.
Less famous than such investigations into the Bible, but at least as interesting to some readers, are those examining traditional attributions of ancient "pagan" texts. Platonic dialogues certainly or almost certainly not written by Plato include Second Alcibiades, Hipparchus, Minos, The Rival Lovers, Theages, Clitophon, About Justice, About Virtue, Demodocus, Sisyphus, Eryxias and Axiochus. Homer, Vergil, Caesar, Sallust and Ovid are just a few of the ancients whose oeuvres have been whittled down in the estimate of textual critics.
The Historia Augusta are somewhat the other way around: until rather recently they were regarded as a collaboration between six historians, a collection of the biographies of the Emperors and those around them from AD 117 to 284. They tended to be regarded as very poor history. Gibbon and Burckhardt, noticing many of the errors, angrily condemned the shoddy work of the authors, which made their own work much more difficult,
Then in the late 19th and early 20 centuries Harmann Dessau asserted that they are in fact the work of one author, a position which has steadily gained support. This of course raised questions such as: why would an author do this? and, What sort of work is the Historia Augusta? Ronald Syme took up Dessau's work, and in 1968 published a volume entitled Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, which suggests that the work is a parody of historical writing, for which modern readers still need to develop the necessary sense of humor. It seems possible that the author had never intended to deceive anyone into thinking that his work was to be understood as history. This case is very interesting, and most definitely still open.
It's not always texts per se which are under investigation by textual critics. Take the curious case of the Vinland Map, first published in 1965 together with the Tartar Relation, a 13th century text describing a Franciscan mission to the court of then Mongols. This copy of the Tartar Relation seemed to present no great mystery. There was no doubt that this was a genuine 15th-century manuscript on parchment. But then there was the Vinland Map, bound in the same volume, also on 15th-century parchment, and presenting a view of the route from Scandinavia to Canada. This was a map purporting to show the route of Viking voyages to the Western hemisphere, a map supposedly made in the MID-15th century, a few decades before Columbus.
The parchment really was from the 15th century, but this proved nothing about the map. Blank pieces of 15th-century parchment can be had, and can be used to produce various faked things.
Well, if this was a forgery, it was at the very least an above-average forgery, keeping experts busy assessing it for decades. Samuel Eliot Morison immediately declared it a fake, because it included a very accurate representation of the west coast of Greenland. Morison pointed out that the west coast of Greenland had not been navigated before the 17th century, and that until then Greenland had been considered to be part of a continent, not an island.
As soon as I read that, years ago, I assumed that Morison had solved this puzzle, and wondered what was taking the others so ling to catch up. Then, literally just a few days ago, it occurred to me that someone, after Greenland had been navigated, could have altered a genuine 15th-century map to include the west coast of Greenland, not realizing that this would make the map seem obviously fake and not more impressive.
So for a few days I was once more very excited about the Vinland Map -- until today, when I read that, along about 2018, chemical analysis of the ink had finally convinced everyone that the map was a forgery.
Still, having taken more than 60 years before the public to be conclusively exposed, that is definitely an above-average fake.
Although some will find it to be off-topic, I cannot end this essay without a salute to journalistic fact-checkers and their battle against the tide of lies. Because I do not find it to be off-topic.
