Genuineness questioned by Isabelo de Los Reyes
The document referred to as the "Will of Pansomun" first became known through the work of Isabelo de Los Reyes, in Volume 2 of his seminal work in Philippine folkloristics, "El Folklore Filipino."[1] This second volume, published in 1890, included the work in a category titled "Folkloristic miscellany", and, along with the 1563 will of Andres Mangaya, who claimed to be Malang Balagtas' descendant and who had attached the original "Will of Pansomun" to his own will.[1][2]
De los Reyes immediately questioned the provenance of these two "very curious unpublished documents about the Rulers of the Philippines and Moluccas at the time of the Conquest,[1]" noting that they had:
"certain facts which contradict those which are accepted as historic truths"[1]
Exposition on inconsistencies by William Henry Scott
Commenting on the will in his 1982 book "Cracks in the Parchment Curtain,"[2] William Henry Scott notes that two "anachronistic" dates in the documents immediately bing its genuineness to question: the "25 March 1539" date of the document itself, and the "early part of 1524" reference in the text when Malang Balagtas and his family were supposedly baptized by a bishop in Cebu. Both of these dates are impossible, since, as Scott points out:
"the only Spaniards in the Philippines in 1524 or 1539 were captive survivors of Magellan's fleet, and none of them were either priests or bishops."[2]
Scott notes that these dates could not simply be errors of Malang Balagtas when he executed the will, because the Certificate of Death, an official Spanish document, was attached to the document and bore the same dates. Scott notes that these historical inconsistencies:
"... may be simple mistakes on the part of a senile illiterate on his deathbed, but similar details in an official death certificate appended to the will cannot be dismissed so lightly.[2]"
Furthermore, Scott notes that the death certificate was supposedly sworn by a church official who never existed historically:
"The death certificate purports to have been sworn, in the first-person singular, by Augustinian Procurator Fray Juan de Jesus in the Mission of San Carlos on March 21 of the year "mil quinientos treinta y nueve." Aside from the curious date and the even more curious circumstance of the testator's death having preceded the execution of the will by four days, both Isabelo (de Los Reyes) and the othrs who examined the documents were aware that there had been no Augustinian Friar by the name of Juan de Jesus in the Philippines in the 16th century, nor had there been any mission or town of San Carlos at that time. As a topnothcer in graduate courses in paleography, and the theory and practice of editing public documents, Isabelo wisely refrained from attributing authenticity to either document.[2]"