How the 'Jesus' Wife' Hoax Fell Apart
The media loved the 2012 tale from Harvard Divinity School.
May 1, 2014 7:17 p.m. ET
In September 2012, Harvard Divinity School
professor
Karen King
announced the discovery of a Coptic (ancient Egyptian) gospel
text on a papyrus fragment that contained the phrase "Jesus said to
them, 'My wife . . .' " The world took notice. The possibility that
Jesus was married would prompt a radical reconsideration of the New
Testament and biblical scholarship.
Yet
now it appears almost certain that the Jesus-was-married story line was
divorced from reality. On April 24, Christian Askeland—a Coptic
specialist at Indiana Wesleyan University and my colleague at the Green
Scholars Initiative—revealed that the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife," as the
fragment is known, was a match for a papyrus fragment that is clearly a
forgery.
Almost from the moment
Ms. King
made her announcement two years ago, critics attacked the Gospel
of Jesus' Wife as a forgery. One line of criticism said that the
fragment had been sloppily reworked from a 2002 online PDF of the Coptic
Gospel of Thomas and even repeated a typographical error.
But
Ms. King had defenders. The Harvard Theological Review recently
published a group of articles that attest to the papyrus's authenticity.
Although the scholars involved signed nondisclosure agreements
preventing them from sharing the data with the wider scholarly
community, the
New York Times
NYT -1.08%
was given access to the studies ahead of publication. The
newspaper summarized the findings last month, saying "the ink and
papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery." The article
prompted a tide of similar pieces, appearing shortly before Easter,
asserting that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife was genuine.
The 'Gospel of Jesus' Wife' fragment is about 1 1/2 inches by 3 inches.
Karen L. King/Associated Press
Then last week the story began to
crumble faster than an ancient papyrus exposed in the windy Sudan.
Mr. Askeland
found, among the online links that Harvard used as part of its
publicity push, images of another fragment, of the Gospel of John, that
turned out to share many similarities—including the handwriting, ink and
writing instrument used—with the "wife" fragment. The Gospel of John
text, he discovered, had been directly copied from a 1924 publication.
"Two
factors immediately indicated that this was a forgery," Mr. Askeland
tells me. "First, the fragment shared the same line breaks as the 1924
publication. Second, the fragment contained a peculiar dialect of Coptic
called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before the sixth
century." Ms. King had done two radiometric tests, he noted, and
"concluded that the papyrus plants used for this fragment had been
harvested in the seventh to ninth centuries." In other words, the
fragment that came from the same material as the "Jesus' wife" fragment
was written in a dialect that didn't exist when the papyrus it appears
on was made.
Mark Goodacre, a New
Testament professor and Coptic expert at Duke University, wrote on his
NT Blog on April 25 about the Gospel of John discovery: "It is beyond
reasonable doubt that this is a fake, and this conclusion means that the
Jesus' Wife Fragment is a fake too."
Alin Suciu,
a research associate at the University of Hamburg and a Coptic
manuscript specialist, wrote online on April 26: "Given that the
evidence of the forgery is now overwhelming, I consider the polemic
surrounding the Gospel of Jesus' Wife papyrus over."
Having
evaluated the evidence, many specialists in ancient manuscripts and
Christian origins think Karen King and the Harvard Divinity School were
the victims of an elaborate ruse. Scholars had assumed that radiometric
tests would return an early date (at least in antiquity), because the
Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment had been cut from a genuinely ancient
piece of material. Likewise, those familiar with papyri had identified
the ink used as soot-based—preferred by forgers because the
Raman
spectroscopy tests used to test for age would be inconclusive.
It
is perhaps understandable that Ms. King would have been taken in when
an anonymous owner presented her with some papyrus fragments for
research. What is harder to understand was the rush by the media and
others to embrace the idea that Jesus had a wife and that Christian
beliefs have been mistaken for centuries. No evidence for Jesus having
been married exists in any of the thousands of orthodox biblical
writings dating to antiquity. You would have thought
Thomas Aquinas
might have mentioned it. But this episode is not totally without
merit. It will provide a valuable case study for research classes long
after we're gone and the biblical texts remain.
Dr. Pattengale
is executive director of the Green Scholars Initiative, with
appointments at Indiana Wesleyan University and other institutions.
