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Author : Oliver Revilo Pendleton
Title : Race and History Distortion Revised Historiography
Year : 1980

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IN THE DECADE before us, the methods of historiography will undergo a very considerable modification. History depends primarily on written documents, from the clay tablets of ancient Sumeria and the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs to the archives of. modern states. In the absence of documents, the historian can only elicit tentative conclusions from artifacts disinterred by archaeologists or surmise what actual events gave rise to folk-tales and legends, such as the myths about Hercules or the story of Heimdall in the Rigsthula. It is the function of the historian to submit all documents, whether purported originals or copies of lost originals, to the most rigorous critical analysis to determine their authenticity and their veracity. Wherever there is an apparent motive for forgery or mendacity, the document and its contents must be tested by every available criterion and technique, and only rarely are these sufficient to give results that have so high a degree of probability as to be virtually certain. Inevitably of course, there are a few documents of great historical import about which doubt subsists. The famous letter of the younger Pliny, evidently written in A.D. 112, which is the earliest evidence for the existence of a sect with which modern Christians would admit an affinity, is now accepted as genuine by the majority of scholars, chiefly on the grounds that if it were a forgery concocted by the Christians and inserted in the corpus of Pliny's letters that came down to us in only one manuscript, now lost, it would presuppose in the forger a degree of learning, skill, and care much greater than is found in other Christian compositions. But we cannot be quite certain. The letter was quoted, with some odd variations, by Tertullian in the very Apologeticum, written astound 200, in which that Father of the Church and shyster lawyer cites one of the most audacious of Christian forgeries, a purported letter from Pontius Pilate to Tiberius: recent studies have disclosed two odd anomalies; and it is not impossible that Tertullian or an accomplice had the requisite skill and diligence: so doubt remains. The famous Kensington Rune Stone, which purportedly attests the presence of Norse explorers in what is now Minnesota in 1362, has long been regarded as a forgery perpetrated by a local resident for the glory of Scandinavia, but a recent linguistic analysis makes it seem unlikely that the supposed forger could have introduced subtle dialectical variations of Old Norse unrecorded in his time; so doubt remains. These examples suffice to show the underlying assumption in all historical criticism: forgeries or impostures are always the work of an individual or a small group of individuals for profit, piety, or political ends. The most recent Christian gospels are good examples. When Joseph Smith found that swindling farmers with tales of buried treasure entailed legal hazards, he manufactured the Book of Mormon, possibly with one assistant author, and enlisted eleven perjurers to attest its authenticity. In 1879 and 1883, the Reverend Mr. William Dennis Mahan produced a whole sheaf of forgeries to prove the historical truth of a religion to which he had a deep emotional attachment, and it seems that only his wife was a party to his pious hoax, although other clergymen soon tried to muscle in on what had become a lucrative imposture by producing supplemental forgeries. Smith founded what became the staunchest, most stable, and most cohesive church in the United States, exciting the emotional faith of millions who never suspected that the "Newest Testament" was a fraud. Poor Mahan undertook a more difficult task, for which he had neither the education nor the financial resources, but he stimulated the glands of many thousands of yearning Christians, and many enterprising publishers since his time have found it highly profitable to reprint, ad maiorem gloriam Dei, what some of them call "the Archko Volume." ...