> Wouldn't modern theocrats just ignore or discredit it? If they did, so what? It isn't like they could suppress it. > Suppose Americans found a "true" first

> Wouldn't modern theocrats just ignore or discredit it? If they did, so what? It isn't like they could suppress it. > Suppose Americans found a "true" first version of the Constitution that clearly outlawed private citizens gun ownership* (versus miiltia). Interesting hypothetical; utterly and fantastically unlikely, to the point of requiring something like time travel to achieve, but interesting nonetheless. My answer is that it should be ignored, not because I'm a huge gun fan (I'm somewhat indifferent to them myself) but because a system of laws requires a system of stable laws subject to revision through normal legal processes, not laws subject to sudden and discontinuous revision through a process of digging up new documents. Law is many things. One of the things it is is predictability: People are presumed to know the law, so the law is presumed to be relatively stable over time. Changes are announced, go through a process, and are then enacted. They aren't sprung on people willy-nilly because someone looked behind the right filing cabinet.