The Archko Blog http://blog.archko.com Thoughts on fraud in the name of religion Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:38:51 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 en hourly 1 Hello Blog! http://blog.archko.com/2008/04/01/hello-blog/ http://blog.archko.com/2008/04/01/hello-blog/#comments Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:33:09 +0000 kevin http://blog.archko.com/?p=4 Religious fraud abounds. As a Christian, I believe what Jesus said: “The truth will make you free”. That means no fraud is tolerated, no matter how well meaning. I want to talk about that on this blog.

Visitor comments are welcome, and all will be treated with respect.

]]> http://blog.archko.com/2008/04/01/hello-blog/feed/ The Archko Volume http://blog.archko.com/2008/04/01/the-archko-volume/ http://blog.archko.com/2008/04/01/the-archko-volume/#comments Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:17:07 +0000 kevin http://blog.archko.com/?p=3 The Archko Volume (or the Archko Library) came to my attention only a few years ago when a friend told me about this incredible store of historical Jesus information he had. I got a copy and it took about a minute to realize that it was a fraud. OK, so why am I talking about a 100-year-old fraud? The reason is some people actually believe this hoary hoax perpetrated by a Reverend Mahan of Cooper County, Missouri, in the 1880s.

The fraud was immediately exposed after publication by the newspapers. Unfortunately newspapers publish ephemeral news while the Archko Volume kept on being published. In 1931, Professor Edgar J. Goodspeed of the University of Chicago published a book about biblical frauds and hoaxes which retells the Archko story for the benefit of another generation. Goodspeed goes to some lengths to prove the Archko fraud (more lengths than it deserves to my mind).

Now, more than 100 years after it’s original publication, the Archko Volume is still in print and Goodspeed’s book is not. While Goodspeed’s best known work, Modern Apocrypha, is out of print, but still under copyright, an earlier work entitled Strange New Gospels is beyond copyright.

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