From the makers of Wife of Brian?
Papyrus referring to Jesus’ ‘wife’ (and once compared to a Monty Python sketch) now believed to be a forgery
“Jesus said to them, My wife . . .”
Written in an ancient script on a 1,300-year-old papyrus scrap, those six words have attracted huge amounts of attention. If true, they could shatter one of the long-held tenets of Christianity. The announcement alone of the scrap’s discovery came as a shock — though what was initially greeted with applause quickly turned to skepticism.
Prof. Karen L. King, of Harvard University’s divinity school, made headlines in 2012 when, at a conference, she revealed what would become known as “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” In a paper published later in the Harvard Theological Re- view, King wrote: “On the basis of the age of the papyrus, the placement and absorption of the ink on the page, the type of the handwriting, and the Coptic grammar and spelling, it was concluded that it is highly probable that the fragment is an ancient text.”
She unveiled the papyrus in Rome, not far from the Vatican. If her goal was to construct a theological lightning rod, King succeeded. After the announcement, but prior to the paper’s publication, journalist Ariel Sabar asked Harvard Theological Review editor Kevin J. Madigan if the questions surrounding the text would be an impediment.
“Everything is now on hold until we are able, with Prof. King’s help and by scientific dating, to establish the authenticity of the text,” he replied, in an email interview published by Smithsonian magazine. The journal awaited “further verification from Coptological papyrologists and grammarians.”
It took two years, but the editors, it seems, were satisfied. King’s paper was ultimately published in 2014, stating that the scrap likely originated in the sixth or ninth century — if not earlier.
But King’s report was not the only discussion of the papyrus in the 2014 issue of the Harvard Theological Review. In a blistering critique, Brown University’s Leo Depuydt compared the bold Coptic lettering on the “my” in “my wife” to a “Monty Python sketch.”
As the Washington Post reported, Depuydt wrote: “If the forger had used italics in addition, one might be in danger of losing one’s composure.”
In addition to the scrap’s academic doubters, one avenue remained curiously unexplored: where the scrap came from in the first place. That no one had pursued its provenance struck some observers as strange.
Importantly, it struck Sabar as strange. He was one of the first journalists to break the story with his Smithsonian coverage and he had never quite let the mystery go. As he recently wrote in a detailed feature in the Atlantic, there was too much uncertainty: many of the people said to have had the scrap before King had died. King argued, therefore, that despite the unfortunate “lack of information,” uncovering its origin was impossible.
“But was there a lack of information?” Sabar wrote. “Or just a lack of investigation?”
Sabar took it upon himself to investigate, and the resulting saga led him from Harvard to Germany to Florida and a well-educated German man named Walter Fritz. It was Fritz who gave the scrap to King. Sabar found historical inaccuracies in the documents accompanying the text. Already hammered by academics such as Depuydt, “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” was dealt an all but mortal blow by Sabar’s Atlantic investigation.
For her part, King is no longer convinced the text is ancient.
“If you ask me today which direction am I leaning more toward — ancient text or a modern forgery — based on this new evidence, I’m leaning toward modern forgery,” King told The Associated Press on Monday.