Literary forgery

"The present generation has this ingrained weakness, that it thinks that nothing discovered by the moderns is worthy to be received—the result of this is that if I wanted to publish anything of my own invention I should attribute it to someone else, and say, “Someone else said this, not I.” Therefore (that I may not wholly be robbed of a hearing) it was a certain great man that discovered all my ideas, not I."

"The very best proof of how much writing mattered was the forgeries. Forgery had been an ecclesiastical habit for centuries. ... faking had become a monastic speciality. The monks persisted. They were the archivists, the keepers of records, and they were quite prepared to improve on history to keep the record straight. The more respect for the written word, the more fakes."

"Such forgeries were common enough... So unenviable was the reputation that priests had acquired in this matter that Isaac Newton spent 50 years of his life trying to undo the forgeries that he thought various priests had incorporated into the Bible, to serve their temporal ends. And the only answer to his scholarly and voluminous accusations was to hide them for some 250 years—in fact they still remain secret."