The Archko Volume

William Dennes Mahan, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister of Boonville, Missouri, published a pamphlet of thirty-two pages entitled A Correct Transcript of Pilate's Court.

It purported to be an official report of the trial and death of Jesus made directly to the Roman Emperor Tiberius by Pilate as governor of Judaea.

[5] This work was subsequently shown to have been copied almost verbatim from "Ponce Pilate à Vienne," a short story by Joseph Méry published in Revue de Paris in 1837.

[6] In 1884 Mahan published the first version of the Archko Volume, entitled Archaeological Writings of the Sanhedrin and Talmuds of the Jews, Taken from the Ancient Parchments and Scrolls at Constantinople and the Vatican at Rome, Being the Record Made by the Enemies of Jesus of Nazareth in His Day: The Most Interesting History Ever Read by Man.

This included an expanded version of "Pilate's Court" plus a series of other texts that he claimed to have obtained himself in a visit to Rome and Constantinople and translated with the aid of M. McIntosh of Scotland and Twyman of England, also otherwise unheard of.

[7] These texts include interviews with the shepherds, Gamaliel's interview with Joseph and Mary, Caiaphas's reports to the Sanhedrin, "Eli's story of the Magi", Herod Antipater's defense before the Roman Senate for the Massacre of the Innocents, and Herod Antipas's defense before the Senate—all with the claim that they were copied from ancient manuscripts and translated into English.

The circumstances of composition, the letters to the Boonville Advertiser, and the proceedings of the church court were all investigated by Edgar J. Goodspeed and published in his books Strange New Gospels (1931) and Modern Apocrypha (1956); and by Prof. Richard Lloyd Anderson in an article in the Brigham Young University Studies; more recently Per Beskow (1983) has identified Mahan's original sources and reported on subsequent editions of the Archko Volume.