Forgeries are fitter

Claim (verbatim)

Forgeries are fitter: Byzantine pseudepigrapha should out-transmit the genuine works of the very fathers they impersonate, because forgery is demand-driven while authorship is occasion-driven. A pseudonymous homily was composed for an existing liturgical or catechetical market and was born into demand; a genuine work was tied to a dead occasion or a settled controversy. Attaching a great name was a distribution decision taken at the point of maximum expected copying, so the spuria are a selection of texts optimized for reproduction — the transmission record should show the fakes not as a thin tail but as the fittest part of the corpus.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Restrict Pinakes to works transmitted under the name of John Chrysostom, split by catalogued authenticity status (genuine versus spuria/dubia). Primary clause: the median witness count of the pseudo-Chrysostomica is at least 80 percent of the median witness count of the genuine works, i.e. the pseudo corpus is not the thin tail the naive model expects; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clauses: the same holds for works transmitted under Basil of Caesarea and under Ephraem Graecus; and at least one of the ten most-witnessed Chrysostomic items is a spurium.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the in-house Pinakes works-by-witnesses counts (21.5k Greek works), which record attributed author, authenticity flags, and witness counts per work; one grouped query per author closes the question.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

That John Chrysostom's spuria vastly outnumber his genuine works and that some pseudo-Chrysostomica are among the most-copied Byzantine homilies -- the demand-driven logic of attaching a great name at the point of maximum expected copying -- is the received picture of the pseudo-Chrysostomic corpus (Voicu; the Pseudo-Chrysostomica database records ~550+ spuria, each transmitted in up to roughly 100 manuscripts). So the item's secondary clause -- at least one of the ten most-witnessed 'Chrysostomic' items is a spurium -- is close to known-true. Not located: any measured comparison of the median witness count of the pseudo-corpus against the genuine works (the primary >=80% clause), which is the item's decidable operationalization on the in-house Pinakes counts.

• Sever J. Voicu (dir.), Pseudo-Chrysostomica online database (CETEDOC/Trismegistos) — Catalogues the ~550+ texts wrongly attributed to Chrysostom; demand-driven forgery, each text in up to ~100 mss
• Pinakes / Pontificium Institutum -- works-by-witnesses counts for the Chrysostomic corpus (in-house) — The kill dataset: genuine-vs-spuria authenticity flags plus witness counts per work

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.