Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

I have been working on the reference in the Stromata to the 'memoir' of Nicolaus and its relationship to Mattai's gospel. I stumbled across a forgery of Simonides which reinforced one possible interpretation of the data - Nicolaus was Matthew's secretary in the manner that Mark was for Peter. It turns out that this wasn't actual evidence for the proposition. Simonides just happened to interpret the data in the way I did. But does that mean that I can't cite Simonides as a possible manner of interpretation? A probable manner of interpretation?

In the same forgery:

In 1860, Simonides gained access to the considerable papyrus collection of a Liverpool merchant named Joseph Mayer and promptly produced a papyrus scrap containing a few verses of the nineteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. The papyrus was said to be of the first century, thus three centuries earlier than any New Testament manuscript then known. Moreover, it contained an important variant from the accepted text in a famous passage of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew; Jesus’ saying about a camel passing through the eye of a needle was due to a textual corruption, and the true text was not “camel” but “cable,” not κάμηλος but κάλως.

True there are other ways of citing the argument that the original was 'rope' not camel. Almost all are superior to a forgery. But isn't a forgery at the very least the equivalent of an academic 'conclusion' (albeit without the calculus) for a particular thesis? Just a thought to the effect that even forgeries aren't necessarily worthless.