The Kolbrin

The Kolbrin, or The Kolbrin Bible, is a collection of texts alleged to be the translation of an ancient manuscript. UFO, Planet X/Nibiru and 2012 apocalypse enthusiasts are fond of it. It was promoted in North America during 2005 on late night radio programs.

Paul Hughes of apologetics.com characterises it as "a weird glomming of Celtic spirituality, Egyptian spirituality, Arthurian legend, catastrophe cults (to coin a phrase?), comic books, and capitalism."

The "book" is virtually unknown to any mainstream organization or medium. No hard copy of the purported original has been presented or is known to exist. Several attempts have been made to write an article about the book on Wikipedia, but every attempt has been deleted due to the lack of reliable sources.

Structure
The Kolbrin contains eleven books. The first six books are said to have been scribed by Egyptian writers shortly after the Exodus and are collectively called the "Bronzebook." The last five books are collectively called "Coelbook," or "Kailedy," and are said to have been written by Celtic priests around the time that the New Testament was being created.

Claimed history
These texts are claimed in the introduction to have been kept at Glastonbury Abbey and the first section transcribed to bronze sheets, allowing them to survive the fire of 1184, which the text's publishers allege was set to destroy these and other heretical texts.

The texts are then alleged to have been transmitted through a series of owners, including one John Culdy in the early 1300s, eventually being entrusted to "a small religious group in England" and thence to the Hope Trust, "of which little is known." Finally the texts are claimed to have ended up in the hands of the Culdian Trust, formed in 1980; they claim that the current version of the text was produced by "an elderly man from the Hope Trust" around 1992, working from the original texts.

No old manuscript or evidence of literary or scholarly references to it are available. In particular, the publishers not only have no manuscript to exhibit, but no ownership provenance other than vague allusions to an unnamed religious group and a fictional medieval cult called the Culdians (playing on the name of the real but obscure Celtic Christian monks the ). The foreword states that the text "has been adequately validated and endorsed by Higher Authorities" without naming them. The introduction then adds, "Undoubtedly, additional material has been incorporated with good intent, to fill gaps and elaborate on the original", and further that "No claim is made regarding historical accuracy", but that its origin is unimportant.

Available editions
At present three editions of the material are available. A hardbound edition has been published, in association with the Culdian Trust, and is divided between two volumes, titled The Kolbrin and The Gospel of the Kailedy; the same group also presents an online edition. A softcover edition is published by Your Own World Books, ostensibly edited by one Janice Manning and with versification by Marshall Masters &mdash; whose previous works were fiction based on New Age prophecies. The Culdian Trust claims the softcover version is unauthorised.

The connections between the various versions are obscure. The website first appears in the Internet Archive in 2004; the first reference on that site to the Culdian Trust does not appear until October of that year; nor does the Culdian Trust website appear until February of 2005. Given the 2005 publication date of the Manning/Masters edition, it might be presumed that it is derived from the other edition.


 * The Kolbrin, 2005, The Culdian Trust, ISBN 0958-33-1332
 * The Kolbrin Bible, 2005, Your Own World Books, ISBN 1597720054

Other sightings
WorldCat contains listings with copyright dates of 1994 and 1998, though the OCLC numbers were created 2005-03-17 and 2005-02-03 respectively. (Libraries can have years-long cataloguing backlogs, particularly for low-interest items, but these dates are consistent with other sightings.) The Library of Congress lists other Culdian Trust works with copyright dates in the 1990s, though the works were added in 2005. There are other Culdian Trust books with 1990s copyright dates but 2004-2005 OCLC numbers.

The first documented mention of this text is in James McCanney's Atlantis to Tesla - The Kolbrin Connection, a self-published work from 2003. McCanney is, among his other pseudoscientific interests, a proponent of Nibiru collision apocalyptic theories.

Masters first mentions the Kolbrin in his 2004 book ''Indigo-E. T. Connection: The Future of Indigo Children Beyond 2012 and Planet X''. An early edition of Masters' version of the Kolbrin itself specifically lists several passages from "The Book of Manuscripts" (the fifth section of the text) in support of Nibiru-related claims. The text also attempts to support British Israelism as well as providing apocryphal teachings of Jesus Christ.

The text has received nearly no critical attention, but sites outside the pseudoscientific/new religion realm point to its lack of provenance and dubious history and suggest that it is a hoax or at least apocryphal. Hughes suggests Glenn Kimball as a possible author; in 2006 Kimball published an article on the Kolbrin texts and was associated with Masters's edition of the text.

The of  (published in 1862) repeatedly mentions a book of Bardic Wisdom named the "Coelbren." However, this does not bolster the proposed antiquity of the Kolbrin, as the Barddas itself is of questionable authority. The author of the Barddas, Iolo Morganwg, was an 18th century Druid enthusiast who incorporated fragments of authentic Druidic and Bardic lore with material of his own invention. (Morganwg was also a known forger and an opium addict.) It may be that the author of the Kolbrin borrowed this title from the Barddas. None of the material in the Barddas cited as being from the Coelbren corresponds to anything in the Kolbrin, nor does Morganwg's backstory for the Coelbren correspond to that of the Kolbrin.