In the mid-1850s, Moshe Shapira, a good Jew from a small Ukrainian town, started walking to the Holy Land. En route, he met some missionaries representing a society with a particularly catchy name – the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews. By the time he reached Jerusalem later that year, he was no longer Moshe, but Moses Wilhelm, a converted Protestant through and through. But Shapira was more interested in business than his new faith’s mission, so he opened up a souvenir shop in Jerusalem’s Old City. Like most souvenir shops, they sold touristy trinkets – olive wood camels, dried flowers, holy water, the works.

But that all changed when one day Bedouins in Moab discovered a large black rock with an inscription. It described a battle that was also mentioned in the Bible. In other words, this was external, archeological “proof” of the Bible. And, in what was a highly messianic world to begin with, the craze for biblical archeology began. Everyone wanted to get their hands on ancient artifacts. Our shrewd Shapira sensed a huge business opportunity. There was just one problem – the demand far exceeded the supply.

So when a local tour guide from Hebron told Shapira he could fill his stock daily with fakes it was basically a no brainer. Suddenly Shapira always had the goods, and his collection made him world-famous. But he didn’t stop at selling the fakes to naive tourists. No no no: Shapira convinced the Archeological Museum in Berlin, the Altes Museum, to buy 1700 pieces (!!) from his collection. We are talking big money. After the sale was widely celebrated and reported in all the biggest newspapers of the day, Shapira’s arch-nemesis, a Frenchman named Clermont-Ganneau, outed the collection as fake. The museum was embarrassed and shoved the artifacts deep into storage. Shapira’s reputation was tarnished, at least temporarily. But he waited patiently for people to forget before returning into the limelight.

In 1883 Shapira made a claim that rocked the world: He was in possession of the original manuscript of the Book of Deuteronomy. Maybe it was Moses’ own copy, he hinted, maybe Jesus’. People went wild. The scrolls became international celebrities. And Shapira was his day’s Beyoncé. The British Museum bought his parchments for what was an unimaginable sum of one million Pounds Sterling. Sort of like buying facebook today or something. The excited public cued up for hours to catch a glimpse and even the Prime Minister came to view the wonder.

There was just one problem.

They were fake.

And of course the man who proved Shapira’s forgery was none other than Mr. Clermont-Ganneau. Even though Shapira swore they were authentic, the British Museum retracted their offer. Before long the scrolls were sold in a street fair to a private collector, for ten Pounds. That man’s library burned down, and “Jesus’ Deuteronomy” was gone for good. Shapira himself was ruined. Penniless, disgraced and humiliated, he killed himself in a motel room on his way back to Jerusalem.

And the coda?

Sixty years later, a Bedouin shepherd found the Dead Sea Scrolls exactly in the same place where Shapira had claimed his scrolls were found. A scary new thought emerged: Could it be that Shapira’s scrolls were authentic after all? Was he just a boy who cried wolf one too many times? We may never know, but nowadays Shapira has reached a new, ironic fame. There’s a large, devoted Shapira following and “real” Shapira’s fakes are now themselves highly valuable. So who knows, somewhere, in some back room of a West Bank workshop, some young entrepreneurial forger might just be making fake Shapira fakes…