The forged Sacromonte texts were given an elaborate divine chain of textual transmission.

Evidence

Al-Hajari reports a statement he found in a book by Ukayhil al-Andalusi (van Koningsveld et al. 1997, 248–49): “The total number of the books was twenty-one,” and he sets out a chain of textual transmission from earliest times up to him as follows: the Archangel Gabriel revealed green chrysolite tablets to Mary; Mary sent the texts to Spain copied in her own handwriting; Saint James and his disciple Tasfiyun (both of them Arabs) wrote out the books dug up on the Sacromonte (Khandaqal-janna), which were copied (in the sixteenth century) by al-Ukayhil, from which a further copy was made by Yusuf Calvo al-Andalusi and taken by him to Tunis, from which al-Hajari makes the copy included in his book. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1762

Categorization

• SHARE: The fabricated provenance chain — Gabriel revealing green chrysolite tablets to Mary, who copies them by hand — is a delightfully absurd detail worth sending to anyone interested in forgery or religious forgery.
• SEED: The ‘divine chain of custody’ as a forgery technique — how fabricators plant a credible transmission history to legitimate fake relics — could make a good short essay on forgery psychology.