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Old 4th January 2005, 05:15 AM   #24
Rivkin
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Join Date: Dec 2004
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I think the spear was taken by crusaders back to Germany, where it stayed in Nuremberg - I guess it's still there. The True Cross was lost.

Converning authenticity - in my experience it's really rare when the fraud is so transparent. Usually it's either a result of enthusiastic searches - they do find a more or less correct age artefact, declare it the real thing, and then comes the story of a divine vision etc.

Or as in a story with the Staff of Moses it's a part of heirloom, and with every generation the nature of heirloom gets excagerated until it becomes hell knows what.

In the end the true responsibility lies on the shoulders of religious authority for accepting the items rumored to be the real thing as the real thing - not on kings or caliphs.

And the main motivation is like of those collectors who desparately try to prove that their Rembrandt, which happened to be painted with XX century paints, is not a fake - they just want it to be true.
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