The Letter of Benan was a literary forgery

Literary forgery

Literary forgery refers to writing, such as a manuscript or a literary work either deliberately misattributed to a historical or invented author, or a purported memoir presented as genuine.- History :The common, or popularly known, instance of literary forgery may involve for example the work of a...

 issued by Ernst Edler von der Planitz in 1910, allegedly a translation from a fifth century Coptic

Coptic language

Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...

 papyrus containing a translation of an original composed in Greek in 83 CE. There is no evidence that either the Greek or Coptic works ever existed.

It consists of a letter purporting to be of an Egypt

Egypt

Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

ian physician describing his encounters with Jesus

Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

 and the apostles. Internal evidence and historical inconsistencies, in the absence of the purported original manuscripts, clearly indicate this work to be a fake. It is thus counted among the modern apocrypha.