"Robert Kingswell PhD" and "Eterna Verba Publishing" on Amazon are almost certainly a fake author and a shell publisher pumping out AI-rephrased religious texts
Posting this mainly so it shows up in search results. Any academic who looks at this catalogue for thirty seconds can tell something is off, so this isn't really for them. It's for the person two months from now who Googles "Robert Kingswell PhD" or "Eterna Verba Publishing" before buying on Amazon and finds nothing, because as far as I can tell nobody has actually written this up yet.
There's an Amazon "author" calling himself Robert Kingswell PhD, publishing through an imprint called Eterna Verba Publishing. In 2025 alone he's released dozens of "modern translations" of religious and esoteric texts. Both the author and the publisher appear to be fabricated, and the books look like AI-rephrased public-domain material dressed up as fresh scholarly translations.
There's no academic record of Robert Kingswell anywhere. No university affiliation, no peer-reviewed publications, no doctoral thesis findable in ProQuest or any other database, no scholarly footprint that predates 2025. His Amazon author page (ID B0FPQW37DR) was created this year and contains zero biographical information. No institution, no field, no bio paragraph, nothing.
In a single calendar year, this one person has supposedly produced translations from Latin (Aquinas, Gregory the Great), Koine Greek (the Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Nag Hammadi), Coptic (the Gnostic Gospels), Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic (the Essene Gospel of Peace, Jubilees), and Ge'ez (the Ethiopian Bible, including 1-3 Enoch and 1-3 Meqabyan). He also somehow "translated" the Kybalion, which is a 1908 book written in English and does not need translating. No human translator works across that range. Not one. The language training alone takes decades, and that's before you actually start translating anything.
Eterna Verba Publishing has no website, no listed address, no staff, no submissions page, no editors, and no phone number. There is no catalogue outside Amazon and the Amazon-fed aggregators like AbeBooks and BookScouter. The ISBN prefix is 83, which is registered with Poland's national ISBN agency. Nothing wrong with Polish publishers in general, but it's an odd jurisdiction for an English-language Catholic and patristic imprint with no apparent Polish operations. Worth noting: this is not the same as Eterna Verlag, which is a real and legitimate language-learning publisher. Different company entirely. The name similarity may or may not be intentional.
This is a textbook KDP scam playbook. Pick a public-domain corpus that sells well to spiritual or religious-curious readers (early Christian texts, Gnostic gospels, Hermetica, Apocrypha). Run an existing public-domain translation through an LLM with a "modernize this" prompt. Slap a credentialed-sounding pseudonym on it. Set up a Latin-sounding shell imprint. Mass-publish through KDP, hitting the three-titles-per-day cap. Profit off readers who don't realize that, say, Cyril Vollert's Compendium of Theology or Szekely's Essene Gospel of Peace are sitting right there, often free, by translators who actually existed.
The ones that bother me most are the books where the source material genuinely requires specialist training to translate. The Essene Gospel of Peace Complete is sold as a "modern translation" of Aramaic and Hebrew, when there is no scholarly Aramaic edition to translate from; the actual source is Edmond Bordeaux Szekely's 20th-century English text. The Shorter Summa Theologica is attributed as a translation of Aquinas and competes directly with Peter Kreeft's Ignatius Press edition and Cyril Vollert's translation, neither acknowledged. The Apostolic Fathers: Complete Collection requires classics training and competes with the standard Holmes, Lightfoot, and Ehrman Loeb editions. Nag Hammadi Scriptures: Complete Modern Translation would require Coptic, with the Meyer/Robinson edition as the actual standard. There's also a Book of Pastoral Rule by Gregory the Great with "Kingswell" credited as translator, introducer, and contributor, somehow all at once.
Two of the entries are almost comic. The Kybalion: A Modern Translation is, again, a 1908 English book that needs no translation. And The Apocrypha Complete 180-Book Edition claims 180 books, allegedly translated, by one person, in one year.
Amazon KDP requires disclosure of AI-generated text, images, and translations. None of these listings carry that disclosure. That alone makes them reportable under Amazon's own rules, regardless of any judgment about scholarly quality.
If you have academic training you can spot this in seconds. But the target audience isn't academics. It's curious lay readers, people interested in Gnosticism, early Christianity, the Essenes, Aquinas, who reasonably trust that "PhD" on a cover means something. The books are priced and styled to look like legitimate Oxford or Penguin tier editions. Without a scholarly background you have no real way to tell the translator never existed.