In 1866, Hungarian historian Károly Szabó (1824–1890) proposed that the codex was a hoax by Sámuel Literáti Nemes (1796–1842), a Transylvanian-Hungarian antiquarian, and co-founder of the National Széchényi Library in Budapest. He is known to have created many historical forgeries (mostly made in the 1830s) which deceived even some of the most renowned Hungarian scholars of the time. Since then, this opinion has been maintained by mainstream Hungarian scholarship, even though there is no evidence connecting the codex to Sámuel specifically.