Modern pseudepigrapha, or modern apocrypha, refer to pseudepigrapha of recent origin – any book written in the style of the books of the Bible or other religious scriptures, and claiming to be of similar age, but written in a much later (modern) period. They differ from apocrypha, which are books from or shortly after the scriptural period but not accepted into the religion's canon. Exposing modern pseudepigrapha is part of the fields of palaeography and papyrology, amongst others. Terminology British biblical scholar Philip R. Davies (1945–2018) defined "modern pseudepigrapha" (singular "pseudepigraphon") in 2002 as "writings in the name of biblical personages composed by contemporary scholars." The term "modern apocrypha" (singular "apocryphon") is closely related to and is often treated as synonymous with "modern pseudepigrapha". But while a pseudepigraphon is by definition a forgery (a document written with the intention to deceive its readers as to its true origins, or more narrowly, written by someone else than the person the text itself claims to be the author), an apocryphon is not necessarily a forgery; the author can also be anonymous and not intent on deception. In the minority view held by scholars such as Eric Vanden Eykel, even admittedly fictitious 21st-century Christian texts involving ancient biblical figures written by authors using their real names may be considered "modern apocrypha". Some writings, even canonical ones, were originally anonymous, and only later copyists and compilers – either accidentally or intentionally – attributed the wrong authors to them. According to Tony Burke, "scholarly forgery" is "the contemporary creation of a text with the attendant claim of its discovery in an ancient manuscript", a practice which he claims began in the Renaissance. History 19th and 20th century The rise of the field of modern biblical textual criticism has led to a hunt for ancient manuscripts containing textual variants in the New Testament and Old Testament, as well as related Jewish and early Christian writings. Discovery, collection and study of these fragments have been instrumental to – as far as possible – reconstructing the original texts of the Bible and other religious scriptures of high interest, and how they evolved over the centuries. The importance of these fragments has considerably raised their market value, and finding an acquiring them became a multimillion-dollar trade after 1945, when the Nag Hammadi library and the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Many forgers and fraudsters have sought to exploit this