20 Fake Relics That Fooled Churches, Museums And Science

For years the Shroud of Turin, a piece of linen cloth bearing the ghostly impression of a crucified man, was touted as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. It first appeared publicly in the 1350s, when a French knight named Geoffroi de Charny displayed it at Lirey, France. In 1389, a local bishop named Pierre d’Arcis reported to Antipope Clement VII that his predecessor as bishop had tracked down the artist who painted it, and obtained a confession. Clement VII decreed the cloth could be shown only as a “representation,” not as the actual shroud. Then, radiocarbon testing of the cloth in 1988 showed it dates to between 1260 and 1390, just in line with the 14th-century bishop’s account, and centuries after Jesus died.

Christian tradition holds that Jesus ascended to heaven bodily, which made the Holy Prepuce, said to be his foreskin, one of the rarest physical remnants of Christ anyone could claim. Between the 12th and late 19th centuries, rival abbeys across France, Italy, and Germany, including Calcata, Charroux, and Rome, each said they held it, with historians counting anywhere from 18 to 31 claimants over time. In 1900, Pope Leo XIII and the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of Rites threatened excommunication for anyone who publicly discussed the relic, which effectively silenced public discussion of the relic for generations.

In December 1912, an amateur collector named Charles Dawson and a paleontologist named Arthur Smith Woodward announced that a skull discovered at Piltdown, in Sussex, England, was a “missing link” between apes and humans. The find, dubbed Eoanthropus dawsoni, turned out to be a medieval human skull attached to a modern orangutan’s jawbone, its teeth filed down and stained to appear ancient. Dawson, who is generally considered the main culprit, managed to deceive the anthropological community for 40 years, and a few researchers rejected true African fossils because they didn’t resemble the Piltdown specimen. In November 1953, a team of museum staff used fluorine dating to demonstrate that the bones were contemporary.

In July 1883, Moses Wilhelm Shapira, a Jerusalem-based dealer in antiquities, showed up at the British Museum with 15 leather strips. He claimed they were ancient scrolls containing an altered version of the Book of Deuteronomy, dug up by Bedouins near the Dead Sea. He was asking for 1,000,000 pounds, and even Britain’s Prime Minister William Gladstone came to have a look. But weeks later, French archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau and Christian David Ginsburg, a British Hebrew scholar, exposed the hoax. The strips had been blank margins cut out of genuine 16th-century synagogue scrolls and re-inked with a false inscription from ancient times. Shapira fled London, and the next year he committed suicide in Rotterdam.

The Louvre bought a supposed ancient tiara (later known as the Tiara of Saitaphernes) in 1896 for 200,000 gold francs. Experts declared it to be a Scythian tiara dating from the third century BCE, a find that would have been extraordinary if true. But Russian and German archaeologists expressed skepticism, pointing out that the metal looked too much like brand-new work. In 1903, an Odessa goldsmith by the name of Israel Rouchomovsky confessed that a dealer had asked him in 1896 to make a tiara, which was then offered to the Louvre, though the goldsmith was never informed that it was being sold as an antiquity. When called to Paris, he reconstructed part of the tiara from memory and confirmed his authorship. The Louvre immediately removed the tiara from its display.

During the siege of Antioch in the First Crusade, French soldier Peter Bartholomew said a vision led him to a buried spearhead he claimed was the Holy Lance, the spear that is said to have pierced Jesus’s side at the crucifixion. It was found in June 1098, and inspired the starving Crusaders to a decisive victory. Accused of planting a forged spike, Bartholomew agreed to a trial by fire, carrying the tip through burning logs on April 8, 1099. He survived the flames, but with severe burns. He died 12 days later.

Fragments supposedly made of the wood of Christ’s cross turned up in churches throughout medieval Europe. Those that received them made money off the donations of the pilgrims who visited them, and therefore were motivated to discover more. Fake relics of the True Cross could easily be made by dyeing common wood in wine or oil. The reformer John Calvin quipped in 1543 that if one were to collect all the fragments of the True Cross, they would fill a cargo ship. This was not an estimate but a joke about the number. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III banned the display of unapproved relics, and the Council of Trent backed it up with bishop audits in 1563.

From 1915 to 1921, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) acquired three life-size terracotta figures that it thought were fifth-century BCE warriors by Etruscan sculptors. They were actually made in Rome by Riccardo Riccardi and Alfredo Fioravanti, who broke the figures apart and treated them with chemicals to make them look like they had just been dug up. The Met exhibited them from 1933 onward. In 1960, Joseph Veach Noble, the Met’s operating administrator, tested the black glaze and found traces of manganese, a metal unknown in ancient Etruscan pottery. Fioravanti confessed in 1961, and in February of that year the Met announced its admission that the figures were forgeries.

In Walsingham in England and Chartres in France, and many other shrines around Europe, tiny vials of white stuff were on sale to pilgrims as milk from the Virgin Mary’s breasts at the time of Christ’s birth. Peddlers made it from chalk or limestone dust mixed with water. In 1526, the scholar Desiderius Erasmus wrote wryly that “You’d think the Virgin mother was a cow, she has so much milk!” The reformer John Calvin repeated the joke nearly two decades later. But in 1563 the Council of Trent ordered that bishops must audit all shrines. Many of the fake vials were removed.

John the Baptist, the prophet who baptized Jesus and was beheaded on the order of Galilee’s ruler Herod Antipas, left behind a head that was one of the most famous relics of the Middle Ages. When Constantinople fell to the Crusaders in 1204, many returning soldiers brought back what they claimed were the heads of John the Baptist. By the 13th century, there were four complete skulls exhibited in Amiens, France; Rome; Damascus; and Munich. The Church didn’t officially pronounce on any of them; it just kind of endorsed Amiens as the “real” one and let the rest be local devotional objects.

In 1578, Rome’s ancient catacombs were discovered by chance. When the Vatican excavated the graves of unknown bodies there, they decided to label a lot of them as early Christian martyrs. The evidence for their martyrdom was often tenuous, for instance a palm symbol etched into one tombstone. The bones were then distributed across Europe, filling the gap left when Protestant reformers destroyed Catholic relics in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Dealers made certificates of authenticity and adorned the “relics” with gems so that they could be sold. As the practice spread, Pope Clement X set up a special Vatican office in 1672 to issue declarations invalidating fraudulent certificates. In 1825, a geologist showed that the bones of certain “saints” from Palermo had been made from animals.

When the Buddha was cremated, his remaining teeth became prized symbols of spiritual and temporal power throughout Asia. A black market emerged for counterfeit teeth made from ivory, pig bone and other material. In 1561, the Portuguese invaded Jaffna, in Sri Lanka. When they captured an object that local rulers referred to as the sacred tooth, the Portuguese viceroy and the archbishop of Goa ordered it to be publicly ground to dust, burned and dispersed in a river. Sri Lankans believe the tooth that was destroyed was a fake, and that the real one still exists, and can be found today at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy.

In Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica is held the Veil of Veronica, a piece of cloth with which a woman, later venerated as Saint Veronica, wiped the brow of Jesus as he made his way to be crucified, leaving behind her a holy imprint. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, European painters produced hundreds of reproductions, complete with false Vatican seals, and sold them to pilgrims unable to travel to Rome. On May 29, 1628, Pope Urban VIII demanded that all copies of the holy image be surrendered to their local bishop within 30 days or face excommunication. The order protected the original’s exclusivity, and its revenue.

In January 1877, Lutheran minister Jacob Gass said he had unearthed two inscribed slate tablets from a Native American burial mound near Davenport, Iowa. The tablets were carved with symbols resembling Hebrew, Phoenician, or Egyptian writing, and members of the local science academy hailed the find as evidence that some ancient “white race,” not Native Americans, had constructed the mounds. But in 1885, Smithsonian archaeologist Cyrus Thomas revealed that academy members had stolen roof slates from a nearby schoolhouse, carved fake hieroglyphs on them and planted them there to embarrass Gass. That revelation played a major role in killing off the racist mound-builder theory in serious archaeology.

The year was 1924 and the place, Glozel, in central France. Farmer Émile Fradin dug up a cache of clay tablets, bone tools, and stones marked by an undeciphered script. Leading French academics hailed the Glozel discovery as evidence that writing originated not in the Middle East but in Europe, partly out of national pride. The next four years saw over 2,500 “prehistoric relics” emerge from the site, prompting complaints from international archaeologists of mass fabrication. By 1928, the French police raided Fradin’s farmhouse, found freshly cast, unbaked clay tablets among his belongings, and put him on trial for fraud.

According to Christian lore, it was Helena, the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine, who found the original nails in the 4th century on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. By the late Middle Ages, over 30 European churches had laid claim to a Holy Nail, despite there being only three or four of them in total. Blacksmiths regularly forged iron nails to sell as the real thing. Catholic theologians resolved the issue by coming up with a new category: “touch relics,” which were new nails that were believed to have come into contact with, or contained some minute particles of, one of the original nails. They were deemed inferior to “first-class” relics (that is, the original nail).

In the years from 1595 to 1599, workers digging on Sacromonte hill in Granada, Spain found 22 inscribed lead discs known as the Plomos del Sacromonte. The discs were inscribed with a mix of Arabic and Latin texts purporting to show that early Christian martyrs had arrived in Spain in the first century and preached the gospel in Arabic. These documents were immediately hailed by local priests as proof that Granada was an ancient Christian city. In fact, they were created by Morisco scholars, Spanish Muslims who had been forced to convert to Catholicism, to argue for the inclusion of Arabic culture in the core of Spanish Christianity, and to defend their community against being expelled from the country. Vatican scholars eventually identified modern grammatical mistakes, and in 1682 Pope Innocent XI declared the books to be fraudulent.

Strands of hair that fell from the Prophet Muhammad’s head and beard, gathered and guarded by his followers, came to be valued commodities throughout the Islamic world. Between the Middle Ages and the Ottoman period, merchants in Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul were often known to pass off fake strands, sometimes dyed human hair, sometimes perfumed goat hair, to their customers, prompting scholars such as Ibn al-Jawzi and Al-Dhahabi to warn against the practice. Islamic governments began to address the issue by turning the isnad, a system originally used to track the lines of people who handed down the Prophet’s words, into a form of custodial record-keeping for relics, with authenticated hair strands being sealed up and stored at Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace.

In 1579, English explorer Francis Drake landed on the California coast and left behind a brass plate on which he had inscribed his claim for Queen Elizabeth I. A motorist discovered a tarnished brass plate near San Francisco Bay in 1936 that fit the description. Historians at the University of California at Berkeley authenticated it, and it was displayed by the California Historical Society for several decades. The brass plate was actually produced in the 1930s by members of a local historical society as an elaborate practical joke. Modern copper and zinc impurities detected during metal testing in 1977 proved the plate was not authentic.

When workers were digging a well for landowner William Newell in Cardiff, New York, in October of 1869, they stumbled on a ten-foot stone statue that seemed to be a petrified human male. Newell started charging 50 cents to view his “giant,” which believers thought was evidence of the “giants in the earth” mentioned in the Bible. The giant was actually created by an atheist, George Hull, who designed it to make fun of a preacher’s literal interpretation of the Bible. He had a block of gypsum carved and acid-aged, then secretly buried it a year earlier. When showman P.T. Barnum was turned down trying to buy it, he simply built his own copy and exhibited that instead.

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