How the 'Jesus' Wife'
Hoax Fell Apart
By Jerry Pattengale in
the Wall Street Journal
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 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.
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.
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