At one point he gave me a box of several thousand pages of material and I read enough of it to conclude that there were internal inconsistencies and conflicts with the record. His story I think was that the documentary history of this was older than the bible and therefore entitled to great credibility.
Your link citation contemplates a considerably more recent origin--I suppose his story would be well it is ancient but we just got the rendition in 1936 or whenever.
From time to time I have run across this in the hands of guys almost all of who are normally clear thinking business investor types and the idea that they would buy it even though they can't come up with a coherant explaination of its authenticity is interesting.
The second basic law of human stupidity (there are four basic laws of human stupidity which define human existence) is:
The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
A great deal of the modern world -- at least pop America in the modern world -- is built around the Second Law. (And failure to recognize it is the defining failure of the Rand Objectivists, who divide the world simply into the competents and the incompetents...)
Mark W.