Pilate is one of the intriguing characters of the New Testament, and he appears in many poems and novels in the Western hemisphere. An apocryphic Pilate-related literature appeared only a couple of centuries after the New Testament, usually dealing with the conversation between Jesus and Pilate. The most well-known is the so-called Nicodemus gospel. Several "Pilatian" apocryphs were among the manuscripts found by Tischendorf, and doubtless these finds inspired an American pastor to write his own ”Pilate's Report”.
The author was a presbyterian pastor from Boonville, Missouri by the name of W Mahan. He claims to have found out that there was a Latin manuscript containing Pilate's report in the Vatican library. In 1859 he got hold of a translation of this text, via several helpful people. However, the people he claimed had obtained the document for him (Henry Whyndaman, Peter Freelinhusen and C Vantberger) have not left any trace in any records on this planet. Freelinhusen is named as chief librarian at the Vatican but the Vatican has never heard of him..
The document is romantic and theatrical, a typical 19th century novel. Later research has demonstrated that Mahan was not even the original author; he stole the work of French dramatist Joseph Méry, whose novel Ponce Pilate a Vienne had been published in Revue de Paris in 1837. In 1879 Mahan published the "report" which was an immediate bestseller. At the same time another American, William Overton Clough, included it in an edition of Tischendorf's (genuine) manuscript finds.
In this case, the fictional work of a writer with no intention to make any fake historic claims, was appropriated by a plagiarizer, had a "find story" attached to it, and was published as a genuine manuscript find. The financial success was so great that Mahan immediately began making lots of other sensational manuscript finds. in 1884 he published no less than twelve such hoaxes, all manufactured with the same method, under the impressive title The Archaeological and the Historical Writings of the Sanhedrin and Talmuds of the Jews, Translated from the Ancient Parchments and Scrolls at Constantinople and the Vatican at Rome. Mahan pretended to have visited Rome and Constantinople. However, observant readers soon noticed that large parts of the text were stolen from Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur (1880).
Mahan may be the only hoaxer who has been taken to court and punished. An ecclesiastical court sentenced him to one years suspension -- which did not stop new editions of his hoaxes from being printed.