The legend that he was a supposititious child, really the son of an Italian police constable named Chiapponi, is dealt with elsewhere (see Maria Stella, countess of Newborough).
One or two circumstantial forgeries of this kind would form the basis of a scheme for explaining not a few other problems of the case, such as the plain inscription "Jacobus," whom St Elizabeth promptly transformed into a supposititious British archbishop of Antioch, brother to the equally imaginary British Pope Cyriacus.
Stories tell how on one occasion a merchant, who had bought several cases of sardines at Nijni-Novgorod, found that they contained forbidden print instead of fish, and at another time a supposititious copy of the Kolokol was printed for the emperor's special use, in which a telling attack upon a leading statesman, which had appeared in the genuine number, was omitted.
In 1607 Gaspar Scioppius, then in the service of the Jesuits, whom he afterwards so bitterly libelled, published his Scaliger hypobolimaeus (" The Supposititious Scaliger"), a quarto volume of more than four hundred pages, written with consummate ability, in an admirable and incisive style, with the entire disregard for truth which Scioppius always displayed, and with all the power of his accomplished sarcasm.
Toland's next work of importance was his Life of Milton (1698), in which a reference to "the numerous supposititious pieces under the name of Christ and His apostles and other great persons," provoked the charge that he had called in question the genuineness of the New Testament writings.
