There is something almost irresistible about a relic, a bone fragment in a golden box, a cloth that seems to bear a human face, a stone giant lying in the dirt. Christianity, with its emphasis on the miraculous and the physical, the empty tomb, the risen body, the holy shroud, has always been especially fertile ground for forgeries and fabrications. And people have been exploiting that fact for a very long time.
Some of the hoaxes on this list were elaborate cons engineered for cold profit. Others were acts of ideological theatre, designed to make a point about faith and gullibility. A few ended up making believers out of skeptics, or skeptics out of believers. What they all share is a specific kind of audacity: someone decided that the appetite for physical proof of God’s presence on Earth was strong enough to be exploited, and they were almost always right.
What follows is not an argument for or against any particular faith. It’s a look at some of the most remarkable cases where human ingenuity collided with human longing, and the collision produced something stranger than either.
1. The Shroud of Turin
Held in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, the Shroud of Turin is a 14.4 ft by 3.6 ft linen cloth bearing the faint image of a crucified man. For centuries it has been venerated as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, and few objects in religious history have generated as much argument, scientific study, or genuine awe.
The Shroud first came to the attention of the public in 1355, when it was exhibited at the Church of St. Mary in Lirey, France. It had been given to the church by a French knight, Geoffroy de Charny, who probably acquired it in Constantinople. The problems with its authenticity began almost immediately. There is compelling evidence the shroud is a hoax, including a 1389 letter from French Bishop Pierre d’Arcis to Pope Clement stating that a painter confessed to creating it. The Bishop’s evidence was so convincing that even Pope Clement acknowledged it as a forgery, one of countless faked religious relics circulating at the time.
A 2025 study published by Medievalists.net pushed that timeline of skepticism back even further. In his Problemata, composed between 1370 and his death in 1382, medieval scholar Nicole Oresme denounced the Shroud, then displayed in Lirey, Champagne, as a “patent” example of clerical deception. There is no record of the Shroud’s existence before then; if it really is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, it seems suspicious that no one knew anything about it for 1,300 years. Carbon dating of the Shroud revealed it does not date back to the time of Christ but instead 14 centuries later, exactly when the forger confessed to making it.
The counterargument is genuinely interesting, and worth not dismissing. Claims that the image was painted were largely discredited by later peer-reviewed studies, particularly those conducted by the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), a multidisciplinary group of American scientists who examined the Shroud directly in 1978. One of the most striking discoveries was that the image rests only on the topmost surface of the linen fibers, penetrating no more than 0.2 microns. No paint, pigment, or dye penetrates the cloth. Some researchers have since challenged the 1988 carbon dating itself, arguing that the tested section was from a medieval repair rather than the original cloth. Raymond N. Rogers, in a study published in Thermochimica Acta, argued that the carbon-14 sample used in 1988 came from a medieval repair, not the original linen, calling the dating results into question. The Shroud remains the most studied artifact in history, and uniquely, the more it gets studied, the less settled the question becomes.
2. The Cardiff Giant
The Cardiff Giant was one of the most famous archaeological hoaxes in American history. It was a 10-foot-tall, roughly 3,000-pound purported “petrified man,” uncovered on October 16, 1869, by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. “Stub” Newell, in Cardiff, New York.
The giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. Hull got into an argument with Reverend Turk and his supporters at a Methodist revival meeting about Genesis 6:4, which states that there were giants who once lived on Earth. Hull, a skeptic, being the minority party, lost the argument. Angered by his defeat and the credulity of the crowd, Hull wanted to prove how easily he could fool people with a fake giant. It was a $2,600 bet against biblical literalism, and he won it spectacularly.
Needles were used to create a skin-pore texture, water and sand were rubbed across the statue to simulate weathering, and the statue was doused in sulphuric acid to achieve an aged appearance. The finished figure was buried on Newell’s farm and “discovered” nearly a year later. A tent was set up on the discovery site and Newell charged each visitor fifty cents for a fifteen-minute look at the giant. The demand skyrocketed, with around 300 to 500 people visiting the site per day.
What made the Cardiff Giant remarkable wasn’t just the hoax itself, but the reaction. Fundamentalist Christians embraced it as proof of the biblical passage about giants. Scientists split. Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh, a skeptic of the giant, noted that the gypsum the giant was carved from would not hold such fresh tool marks after centuries buried in the ground. On December 10, 1869, Hull confessed to the media that the giant was a hoax. Both giants were eventually revealed as fakes in court. Both, because P.T. Barnum had by then created a plaster replica and was exhibiting that as the real one. A fake of a fake, displayed to paying crowds who didn’t especially care either way.
3. The Incredible Discovery of Noah’s Ark
Interest in Noah’s Ark resurfaced in February 1993, when CBS aired “The Incredible Discovery of Noah’s Ark,” Sun International Pictures’ rehash of its 1976 film “In Search of Noah’s Ark.” It included the riveting testimony of a George Jammal, who claimed not only to have personally seen the Ark on Mount Ararat but recovered a piece of it.
Jammal was later revealed as a paid actor who had never been to Turkey and whose piece of the Ark was not an unknown ancient timber. Jammal’s sample of wood from the Ark was actually a piece of railroad tie he had found behind his house, made to appear old by cooking it in his kitchen with a mixture of blueberry and almond wine, iodine, sweet-and-sour barbecue sauce, and teriyaki sauce. The names he invented for his fictional travelling companions, including the Armenian friend “Allis Buls Hitian” and the Polish companion “Vladimir Sobitchsky,” were so absurd that, in hindsight, it seems almost baffling that no producer caught them.
Noted skeptic Gerald Larue and his friend, actor George Jammal, contrived an elaborate hoax in which Jammal claimed he had found Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey, and had wood from the ark to prove it. Larue, professor emeritus of biblical history and archaeology at the University of Southern California, said he “coached George Jammal, an acquaintance, to perpetrate the hoax, intended to expose the shoddy research of Sun International.” Red-faced CBS, which had done little fact-checking for their much-hyped special, said that the program was entertainment, not a documentary. The lesson, that confirmation bias can make even professional journalists skip basic verification when a story fits the narrative they want, was sharp and remains relevant.
4. The James Ossuary
In 2002, an Israeli antiquities collector named Oded Golan brought a limestone bone box to the world’s attention. The James Ossuary is a limestone box claimed to be from the 1st century that was used for containing the bones of the dead. An Aramaic inscription reading “Jacob (James), son of Joseph, brother of Yeshua” is cut into one side of the box. The ossuary attracted scholarly attention due to its possible association with the Christian Holy Family.
Biblical scholars went into a frenzy. If genuine, it would be the first archaeological artifact to explicitly mention Jesus by name. The Israel Antiquities Authority concluded the inscription had been forged onto an otherwise authentic ancient box and charged Golan with running a sophisticated forgery operation.
What followed was extraordinary. In a trial that lasted almost eight years, from 2004 to 2012, the District Court of Jerusalem heard testimony from over 50 experts from a wide range of fields, who examined the inscriptions and submitted dozens of scientific reports, and 70 other witnesses. Trial transcripts covered over 12,000 pages, and the court ruling was 438 pages long. Golan denied all accusations and was acquitted of all charges of forgery and fraud. The judge convicted him only of lesser offenses: possessing objects suspected of being stolen and selling antiquities without a license.
Crucially, the acquittal didn’t settle the underlying question. The judge explicitly declined to rule on the authenticity of the objects, underlining that the acquittal “does not mean that the inscription on the ossuary is authentic or that it was written 2,000 years ago.” The ossuary sits in a peculiar historical space today, neither confirmed nor debunked, a genuinely open question wrapped in a criminal saga.
5. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
This one is darker than the others, and the damage it caused was far more than ecclesiastical embarrassment. Perhaps the most infamous and malicious religious hoax in history, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a book supposedly revealing a secret Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. It first appeared in Russia in 1905, and though the book has been completely discredited as a forgery, it is still in print and remains widely circulated.
The text was adopted with enthusiasm by some corners of the Christian world as supposed “proof” of Jewish manipulation of Christian society. Many people endorsed this religious hoax, including actor Mel Gibson, Adolf Hitler, and automaker Henry Ford, who in 1920 paid to have a half-million copies of the book published. Its influence in fueling antisemitic violence across the 20th century is documented and devastating. Scholarly investigation confirmed it was plagiarized largely from a 19th-century French political satire that had nothing to do with Jewish people at all.
What separates the Protocols from the other hoaxes on this list is the trail of real human suffering it produced. It wasn’t a prank, or a profit scheme, or even an ideological stunt that got out of hand. It was fabricated propaganda dressed in religious garb, and millions of people chose to believe it long after it was thoroughly exposed. In some communities, they still do.
6. The Medieval Relic Trade
The Cardiff Giant and the Shroud were extraordinary cases, but they were drops in a much larger ocean. Beyond the Shroud itself, Oresme’s remarks reveal a broader issue: the problem of false relics and false belief in medieval Christianity. The fourteenth century saw an explosion of devotion to images and relics, but also growing concern about their authenticity.
The medieval Church had a relic problem that bordered on the farcical. The shroud on display in Turin is only one of over 40 such Jesus shrouds, all claimed to be the real one. Churches across Europe competed for fragments of the True Cross, so many that, as critics pointed out, the combined wood would have built a small fleet. There were multiple heads of John the Baptist displayed at different shrines simultaneously. Thousands of “authentic” thorns from the Crown of Thorns were scattered across Europe. Merchants traded in these objects openly; pilgrims paid to view them; churches built entire identities around their authenticity.
The scale of the relic trade’s forgery problem was genuinely staggering. Individual abbots and bishops sometimes commissioned forgeries themselves, not out of cynicism but out of a genuine belief that if the relic drew people closer to God, its physical origins hardly mattered. That theological flexibility made the whole system almost impossible to police from the inside. The same dynamic that made the medieval relic trade so resilient to correction would later make the CBS Noah’s Ark special so easy to air without scrutiny.
7. Peter Popoff’s Divine Radio
Peter Popoff was a televangelist who, through the late 1970s and 1980s, performed what appeared to be genuine miracles before packed arenas. He would call out sick members of the crowd by name, describe their illnesses, their home addresses, even their phone numbers, all apparently received directly from God as divine knowledge.
Live Science reported the actual mechanism: Popoff’s wife Elizabeth would read information from prayer request cards filled out by audience members before the show, transmitting it to a small hearing device concealed in her husband’s ear via a short-wave radio frequency. The whole operation was exposed in 1986 by skeptic James Randi, who purchased a radio receiver, scanned frequencies during a Popoff performance, and recorded the broadcasts. He then played the audio on the Tonight Show, letting audiences hear Elizabeth Popoff’s voice feeding her husband the “divine” information in real time.
Popoff declared bankruptcy in 1987. By 1998, he was back on television, this time selling “miracle spring water” by mail and claiming it could cure illness and generate financial windfalls. His ministry reportedly raked in tens of millions of dollars annually in the 2000s. The exposure, the bankruptcy, the nationally broadcast humiliation, none of it was enough. The appetite for miraculous intervention, it turns out, is fairly resistant to evidence.
What This Actually Means
The uncomfortable thing about this list is that it doesn’t divide neatly into believers on one side and cynics on the other. George Hull was a skeptic trying to mock faith, and he made a fortune from the very believers he wanted to embarrass. The CBS producers who aired the Noah’s Ark special probably thought they were serving their audience’s genuine desire for biblical confirmation. The medieval bishops who looked the other way at suspicious relics were, by their own lights, facilitating encounters with the sacred. The line between hoaxer and true believer is blurrier than it looks from the outside.
What the history of Christian hoaxes actually tells us is something about the intensity of the longing that makes them possible. The desire for physical, tangible proof of what faith asks you to accept without it is real, and it is very old. A piece of wood from the Ark. A cloth that held the body of Christ. A bone box that names the brother of Jesus. Each of these objects, real or forged, represents an attempt to close the distance between belief and evidence. The people who fabricated them understood human nature well enough to know that the distance never fully closes, and that the longing to close it never goes away.
That’s not a criticism of faith. It’s an honest look at what happens when someone decides to exploit it. And if history is any guide, someone always will. The next George Jammal is probably already soaking a plank in something.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.