the invention of the printing press to be fictitious; asked why he had written his history of the ecumenical councils despite believing that none of the councils prior to the Council of Trent had taken place, he replied "God and I only know." Hardouin also believed that nearly all ancient secular literature was likewise manufactured to support the fraud; Hardouin only admitted the authenticity of the works of Homer, Herodotus, Cicero (whom he later replaced with Plautus), and Pliny the Elder, as well as the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil and the Satires and Epistles of Horace (but not the other works of Virgil or Horace). Hardouin published these theories in his Chronologiae ex nummis antiquis restitutae (1696) and Prolegomena ad censuram veterum scriptorum (1729). According to Hardouin, all other pre-modern literature was written in the same style of Greek or of Latin, far inferior to the style of the few genuine classical authors, which proved that all these works were composed in the same era, and he took any factual contradictions with the works he admitted as genuine as proof of the forgers' ignorance. He denied the genuineness of most ancient works of art, coins and inscriptions, and declared that the New Testament was originally written in Latin, contrary to the received view that the Latin Vulgate edition of the New Testament was translated from Greek. The Prolegomena were translated by Edwin Johnson and published by Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1909, with a noteworthy preface of Edward A. Petherick. In a four-volume manuscript critical discussion of the Summa theologiae, Hardouin denied Thomas Aquinas' authorship of the work, and questioned the existence of Aquinas himself. Hardouin also perceived anachronisms in Dante's Purgatorio, in notes published in Paris 1727, which was edited with an English commentary in London 1847 by C. F. Molini. The historian Isaac-Joseph Berruyer had his Histoire du peuple de Dieu condemned for having followed this theory, which has a modern heir in the Russian mathematician Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko, whose conclusions being based on proprietary methods of statistical textual analysis and computational astronomy are even more radical, but considered to be pseudoscientific. Although Hardouin has been called "pathological", he was only an extreme example of a general critical trend of his time, following authors like Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes or Jean Daillé, who had started to identify and discard mistaken attributions or datings of medieval documents or Church