M J Harper / M J Harper
MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE FORGERIES is a response to the best-selling book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. Using a range of methods and sources, it makes a compelling case that all gospel books of the early Christian era are in fact forgeries largely created in the twelfth century. A number of nationally-cherished icons such as the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels are shown to be fakes. These unsettling revelations, if true, would require a comprehensive rethinking of how we understand Dark Age Europe, and indeed might raise suspicions that much of the history and archaeology of this period simply did not exist. They are constructs of historians and archaeologists. Linguistics too comes in for a critical re-evaluation as the author shows that supposed languages such as Latin and Greek were themselves constructs -- artificial writing systems -- and that true languages, 'demotics', were only written down from the Late Medieval period onwards. These conclusions allow the author to point out that the nature of civilisation itself has been misunderstood. Progress was perfunctory until the tools of literacy became widely available, when the languages spoken by most people could also be written by most people. After that, the author argues, progress was unstoppable. For better or worse. 3
