Gospel of Jesus' Wife
The fragment was first presented by Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen L. King,[1][2][3] who suggested that the papyrus contained a fourth-century Coptic translation of a gospel likely composed in Greek in the late second century.
[4] Following an investigative Atlantic article by Ariel Sabar published online in June 2016,[5] King conceded that the evidence now "presses in the direction of forgery.
[7] After Professor Karen King's announcement of the existence of a papyrus fragment featuring the words "Jesus said to them, 'my wife...'" at the International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome on September 18, 2012,[1][2] scholarly publication of the text with commentary was slated for the Harvard Theological Review in January 2013.
[8] On January 3, 2013, King and Kathryn Dodgson (director of communications for Harvard Divinity School) confirmed to CNN that publication was being delayed pending the results of (in Dodgson's words) "further testing and analysis of the fragment, including testing by independent laboratories with the resources and specific expertise necessary to produce and interpret reliable results.
[16] With reference to the speculative source of the text on the fragment, King and Luijendijk used the term gospel in a capacious sense, as it includes all early Christian writings about Jesus' career.
[17] King also said that the text (which she suggested is a fragment from a non-canonical gospel) showed that some early Christians believed that Jesus was married.
He further explained that, "during the rise of the monastic movement, you had quite a lot of monk-type folks and evangelists who travelled in the company of a sister-wife" and that the term "wife" was open to interpretation.
[23][24] Its thesis was that Jesus had been married to Mary Magdalene, and that the legends of the Holy Grail were symbolic accounts of his bloodline in Europe.
This thesis became much more widely circulated after it was made the center of the plot of The Da Vinci Code, a best-selling 2003 novel by author Dan Brown.
Before the appearance of Ariel Sabar's article, it was reported that an anonymous owner had acquired the fragment in 1997 as part of a cache of papyri and other documents.
[26] Among the other documents in that cache were: (a) a type-written letter dated July 15, 1982 addressed to one Hans-Ulrich Laukamp from Prof. Dr. Peter Munro (Ägyptologisches Seminar, Freie Universität Berlin) which only mentions one of the papyri, reporting that a colleague, Prof. Fecht, had identified it as a 2nd–4th-century AD fragment of the Gospel of John in Coptic, and giving recommendations as to its preservation; and (b) an undated and unsigned hand-written note in German and seemingly referring to the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment.
[26] In June 2016, journalist Ariel Sabar published an article in The Atlantic which identified the owner of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife papyrus as Walter Fritz, a German immigrant living in Florida.
The article discredited the story that Fritz told King about the fragment's history, including its alleged former ownership by Laukamp (who relatives and associates say never had such a papyrus) and the "1982" letter from Dr. Peter Munro (which appears to be a forgery).
The Atlantic speculated that Fritz may have been motivated to forge the text by financial issues, a desire to make The Da Vinci Code a reality, or to embarrass an academic establishment that had spurned his ambitions.
[5] In his 2020 book Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, Sabar reports discovering a modern forgery that Fritz submitted with his job applications in 2013 to the Sarasota County (FL) Schools: a fake master's degree[29] in Egyptology from the Free University of Berlin.
Further investigation of the language and the script and comparison with the clearly forged Gospel of John belonging to the same group of papyri corroborated the initial doubts.
[7] Eventually, Ariel Sabar's tracing of the provenance to Walter Fritz in 2016 provided the final proof, and King conceded that the evidence "presse[d] in the direction of forgery.
While some experts continue to disagree about the other case, King notes that newly discovered texts often feature grammatical or spelling oddities which expand our understanding of the Coptic language.
King commissioned the first laboratory tests of the Jesus' Wife papyrus only after her 2012 announcement, amid sharp doubts about the authenticity from leading experts in Coptic language, early Christian manuscripts, and paleography.
Though King sought to claim that the eighth-century radiocarbon date was still evidence of probable authenticity, the date was historically problematic: by the eighth century AD, Egypt was in the early Islamic era and Coptic Christianity was orthodox, making it unclear why anyone in that period would be copying a previously unknown "heretical" text about a married Jesus.
[citation needed] In a presentation at the Society of Biblical Literature's annual conference in San Antonio, Texas, in November 2016, the Columbia scientific team would declare its findings about the Gospel of Jesus' Wife "consistent with manuscript as forgery.
"[36] Taken together, the various scientific findings are consistent with the scholarly community's prevailing theory that a modern forger took a blank scrap of old papyrus and wrote the Gospel of Jesus' Wife text on top of it, using a simple, carbon-based ink as easy to make today as it was in antiquity.
In his 2020 book Veritas, Ariel Sabar reported that two of the lead scientists King had commissioned to make the case for authenticity had no prior experience with archaeological objects and that both of the scientists had undisclosed conflicts of interest: one was a family friend of King's from childhood, the other the brother-in-law of the only other senior scholar to initially believe the papyrus was authentic.
[27] These interpersonal relationships were not disclosed to the public or to the editors of the Harvard Theological Review, which published the scientific reports in April 2014.
