A scene in Jennifer Lopez’s new film in which her character is given a supposed first edition of The Iliad has prompted viewers to attempt to find their own first edition of an epic poem composed at least 2,000 years before the invention of the printing press.

According to books marketplace AbeBooks, since Lopez’s film The Boy Next Door was released in the US on 23 January, “The Iliad, first edition” has been its top search term, ahead of To Kill A Mockingbird. AbeBooks attributes this to a scene in the film in which Lopez’s character, a high-school teacher, is given a hardback copy of the book by the teenager with whom she is to go on to have a dangerous affair.

“Oh my God – this is a first edition? I can’t accept this, it must have cost a fortune,” she tells her admirer. “It was a buck at a garage sale – one man’s trash...” he replies.

“It appears people who have watched the film are trying to identify the actual edition handed to Lopez, which has dark yellow and blue boards. I cannot match the book seen in the movie to anything currently for sale on AbeBooks. It could be a movie prop and not even be a real book. It certainly appears to be an attractive book,” said AbeBooks spokesman Richard Davies.

Sadly for the film’s fans, The Iliad, the 15,000-line poem about the Trojan war attributed to Homer, was composed around 700BC, long before the invention of the printing press in 1440. The oldest complete text is from the end of the 10th century, the Venetus A manuscript, with the work not widely disseminated in English until George Chapman’s 17th-century translation, immortalised by John Keats’s poem.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Greeks fighting Trojans, a 19th-century depiction. Photograph: Philip Spruyt/Stapleton Collection/Corbis

The scene has been widely mocked online. “Who knew that old Greek scrolls came so cheap and beautifully bound?” asked Jezebel. “There are some things money can’t buy,” said WTFark, “and apparently, basic general knowledge about the very subject of your movie is one of them.”

“Surely such a perfect F-you to the audience belongs in a Lars von Trier film, not a camped-up Fatal Attraction remake from the director of The Fast and the Furious. Yet there it is, presented with a completely straight face – as amazing as the mini-replica of the Parthenon you can see in the wide shots of Claire’s desk. (I can hear the art director now: ‘It’s old. She likes old stuff, I guess.’),” wrote Slate.

“We have two choices here,” according to the publisher Melville House’s blog, Moby Lives. “We can accept that Claire has a deep and ready knowledge of obscure translations and editions of The Iliad, and she recognizes this as a first edition of one such version. That would be the easy way out. Or, we can commit the cardinal sin of new criticism and delve beneath the surface of the text, by asking the screenwriter: WTF were you thinking?”

So far, one expensive edition of the Iliad has sold on AbeBooks since the film’s release – a copy of Alexander Pope’s famous 1715 translation, which went for £2,500 on 4 February. The most expensive edition of the poem currently on the site is a £21,468.47 first edition of Pope’s illustrated translation, which was described by Samuel Johnson as “certainly the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen”.

“The Iliad has been the 29th bestselling book on abebooks.com since 23 January, but that’s not unusual as we always do good business in the classics,” said Davies.

He added that while “journalists and bloggers have mocked the scene as no-one knows when The Iliad was first written down to create the ‘true’ first edition”, there have been “numerous” editions of the Iliad printed since the 16th century, “and each new edition would have its own first edition, so in that context the movie’s dialogue is correct”.

The film’s screenwriter, however, Barbara Curry, has moved to distance herself from the scene. Asked by Fusion “WTF happened?”, she replied that “much of my original script was rewritten by the producers and the director. I was not given the opportunity to participate in the production of this movie”, and that “as for the first edition Iliad reference in the movie, that was not something I wrote in my original script”.