eugyppius

One of my former American colleagues was on the verge of becoming a celebrity academic when I left the US. The kind of guy who gets interviewed on TV & whose books are reviewed in places like the Times Literary Supplement.

If you read his work closely, you notice that all of the philological work on original-language sources he only has at second hand. A bunch of continental scholars from the late 19th & early 20th centuries did this work and he just restates their conclusions ...

... connecting their ideas to the empty theoretical apparatus of Saidian Orientalism or whatever. One night after we both had a lot of scotch, he confided that he only ever had a few semesters of the language he supposedly worked in and still "struggled" with it.

He was hired by my Uni *because of his expertise in this field*, which at the level of language did not exceed that of many second- or third-year undergraduates.

There are many entirely fake historical events based on smooth-brained misreadings of straightforward statements. For 30 years people in my field have been writing about the supposed exile of this figure - we will call him a theologian - which never happened.

You have to read all about the supposed political significance of his exile & what it means for this or that, on and on. In fact, the only source for this 'exile' are a few of his own remarks in a prologue to one of his tracts.

The passage, in the edition everyone uses, is poorly punctuated at this key moment and everyone has just misunderstood what he is saying.

Likewise, real events are surely suppressed or ignored, down to equally astounding stupidity. Early in my career I came upon the work of some august wahmen, whose well-received thesis was flatly contradicted by a key historical document.