Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
Those who purchase fine art are concerned about the provenance
of their painting - that is, who owned it most recently and who
before that . . . and so on all the way back to the original artist. If
there are breaks in the chain, if a 300-year-old painting can be
tracked back only sixty years and then we have no idea in what
home or museum it was hanging, the forgery warning flags go up.
Because the rewards of forgery in fine art are high, collectors must
be very cautious. Where the MJ-12 documents are most vulnerable
and suspect is exactly on this question of provenance - the
evidence miraculously dropped on a doorstep like something out
of a fairy story, perhaps 'The Shoemaker and the Elves'.
There are many cases in human history of a similar character -
where a document of dubious provenance suddenly appears
carrying information of great import which strongly supports the
case of those who have made the discovery. After careful and in
some cases courageous investigation the document is proved to be
a hoax. There is no difficulty in understanding the motivation of
the hoaxers. A more or less typical example is the book of
Deuteronomy - discovered hidden in the Temple in Jerusalem by
King Josiah, who, miraculously, in the midst of a major reformation
struggle, found in Deuteronomy confirmation of all his views.
Another case is what is called the Donation of Constantine.
Constantine the Great is the Emperor who made Christianity the
official religion of the Roman Empire. The city of Constantinople
(now Istanbul), for over a thousand years the capital of the
Eastern Roman Empire, was named after him. He died in the year
335. In the ninth century, references to the Donation of Constantine
suddenly appeared in Christian writings; in it Constantine
wills to his contemporary, Pope Sylvester I, the entire Western
Roman Empire, including Rome. This little gift, so the story
went, was partly in gratitude for Sylvester's cure of Constantine's
leprosy. By the eleventh century, popes were regularly referring
to the Donation of Constantine to justify their claims to be not
only the ecclesiastical but also the secular rulers of central Italy.
Through the Middle Ages the Donation was judged genuine both
by those who supported and by those who opposed the temporal
claims of the Church.
Lorenzo of Valla was one of the polymaths of the Italian
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