The Letter of Benan was a

literary forgery Literary forgery (also known as literary mystification, literary fraud or literary hoax) is writing, such as a manuscript or a literary work, which is either deliberately misattributed to a historical or invented author, or is a purported memoir ...

issued by Ernst Edler von der Planitz in 1910, allegedly a translation from a fifth-century

Coptic Coptic may refer to: Afro-Asia * Copts, an ethnoreligious group mainly in the area of modern Egypt but also in Sudan and Libya * Coptic language, a Northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century * Coptic alphabet ...

papyrus containing a translation of an original composed in Greek in 83 CE. There is no evidence that either the Greek or Coptic works ever existed. It consists of a letter purporting to be of an

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

ian physician describing his encounters with

Jesus Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious ...

and the apostles. Internal evidence and historical inconsistencies, in the absence of the purported original manuscripts, clearly indicate this work to be a fake. It is thus counted among the modern apocrypha.

References

Literary forgeries Modern pseudepigrapha Religious hoaxes {{religion-stub