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".
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.
[8] Per Beskow (1926–2016) is considered the second-most famous scholar of modern apocrypha after Goodspeed, starting with his 1985 essay collection Strange Tales about Jesus.
William Kando opened his family's vault in Zürich in 2000, and ever since has been selling fragments he claims to be authentic remnants of the Scrolls to rich American evangelical Christians who are willing to spend huge amounts of money to find out more about the Bible's origins.
[7] After the Museum of the Bible (MOTB) opened in Washington, D.C. in November 2017, academics were skeptical about the authenticity of the 16 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments displayed there.
[12] In order to attempt to conceal their deception, fraudsters may simply buy ancient papyrus, for example online or in an Egyptian souk.