t the records of the past in order
to reconstruct the Templar heresy. This was clearly Gnostic, and the
Mandaeans or Christians of St. John may well have appeared to present the
required characteristics. If it could be shown that here in Johannism
true "primitive Christianity" was to be found, what a blow for the
"infame"! A skilful forger could easily be found to fabricate the
documents said to have been preserved in the secret archives of the
Order. Further we find von Marschall arriving in the following year in
France to reorganize the Templars, and von Hundt later claiming to be in
possession of the true secrets of the Order handed down from the
fourteenth century. That some documents bearing on this question were
either discovered or fabricated under the direction of Frederick the
Great seems the more probable from the existence of a masonic tradition
to this effect. Thus Dr. Oliver quotes a Report of the Grand
Inspectors-General in the nineteenth century stating that:

During the Crusades, at which 27,000 Masons were present, some
masonic MSS. of great importance were discovered among the
descendants of the ancient Jews, and that other valuable documents
were found at different periods down to the year of Light 5557
(i.e. 1553), at which time a record came to light in Syrian
characters, relating to the most remote antiquity, and from which
it would appear that the world is many thousand years older than
given by the Mosaic account. Few of these characters were
translated till the reign of our illustrious and most enlightened
Brother Frederick II, King of Prussia, whose well-known zeal for
the Craft was the cause of so much improvement in the Society over
which he condescended to preside.[413]

I suggest, then, that the documents here referred to and containing the
secrets claimed by von Hundt may have been the ones afterwards published
by the _Ordre du Temple_ in the nineteenth century, and that if
unauthentic they were the work of Voltaire, aided probably by a Jew
capable of forging Syriac manuscripts. That Johnson was the Jew in
question seems probable, since Findel definitely asserts that the
history of the continuation of the Order of Knights Templar was his
work.[414] Frederick, as we know, was in the habit of employing Jews to
carry out shady transactions, and he may well have used Johnson to forge
documents as he used Ephraim to coin false money f