The Archko Volume or Archko Library[1] is a 19th-century volume containing what purports to be a series of reports from Jewish and pagan sources contemporary with Jesus that relate to the biblical texts describing his life. The work went through a number of versions and has remained in print ever since. The texts are otherwise unknown, and the author was convicted by an ecclesiastical court of falsehood and plagiarism.[2]
The Archko Volume is regarded as fraudulent by some religious scholars. The scholar M.R. James described the work as a "ridiculous and disgusting American book."[3]
In 1879, the Rev. William Dennes Mahan, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister of Boonville, Missouri, published a pamphlet of thirty-two pages entitled A Correct Transcript of Pilate's Court. It purported to be an official report of the trial and death of Jesus made directly to the Roman Emperor Tiberius by Pilate as governor of Judaea. Mahan claimed the text was supplied to him in 1856 by a German scholar, Henry C. Whydaman, from Father Peter Freelinhusen, "the chief guardian of the Vatican," who sent the Latin text to Whydaman’s brother-in-law, C.C. Vantberger of New York, for English translation.[4] Whydaman, Freelinhusen, and Vantberger are otherwise unknown, and the documentation of the exchange contains inconsistencies and errors, including Freelinhusen’s request for a fee payable in "darics" (ancient Persian coins).[5]
This work was subsequently shown to have been copied almost verbatim from "Ponce Pilate à Vienne," a short story by Joseph Méry published in Revue de Paris in 1837. Méry said he had been inspired by an old Latin manuscript, and an 1842 English translation of the story made the claim that it was in fact taken from an old Latin manuscript. Mahan’s contribution was evidently to create correspondence showing him to be the discoverer of the manuscript.[6]
- ^ E.J. Goodspeed, Strange New Gospels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 58
- ^ E.J. Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), 40.
- ^ James, Montague Rhodes (1924). . Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 90 – via Wikisource. [scan
]
- ^ Goodspeed, Strange New Gospels, 42; Modern Apocrypha, 1956, 29–31.
- ^ Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha, 31–32.
- ^ Edgar J. Goodspeed, Historical Records Concerning Jesus the "Christ" Messiah ..., Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 63, No. 3 (Sept 1944) page 326; Per Beskow, Strange Tales about Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983) 53–54: "As Goodspeed has shown, Mahan unabashedly plagiarized an existing story, and I am happy to have identified the original author: it was the French dramatician Joseph Mery (1798–1867), who wrote a number of short stories in his youth. The original story, Ponce Pilate à Vienne, was published in the Revue de Paris in 1837; a comparison with Mahan's "manuscript" reveals a literal agreement in every detail, except where the text has been distorted by mistranslations or misreadings."
