Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife

by Ariel Sabar

What’s more important, the Truth or a good narrative? Karen King is a Harvard Divinity School professor who specialized in Gnostic writings. She received an email about a new papyrus that seemed to indicate that Jesus was married. She dismissed it for a year, then suddenly emailed back and began working with the papyrus’s owner on authenticating, translating, etc.

It’s hard to take notes on an audiobook, but I used Audible’s “bookmark” feature to note two passages:

Her lectures “prodded students to reconsider everything they took for granted about Christianity.”

Are the decisions made by male bishops under the Roman Emporer in the 4th century what we need for a democratic, pluralistic world today?" King once asked. "What happens if we tell the story differently? What if the earliest Christians don't model for us a fixed and certain path, but instead call us to emulate their struggles to make Christianity in our day?

I hear in this the same spirit that was in Emerson (see notes on First We Read, Then We Write), when he demanded “a religion by revelation to us, and not a history of [foregoing generations’]”.

In acceptance speech for a teaching award at Occidental College (in LA) in 1989,

King made no effort to hide what she called her "sneakier tactic." "To those who walk in with their faith firm, whatever that faith is, with their convictions sure, their moral standards in good condition, I try to take away some of that surety, some of that conviction, some of that confidence," she said.

The spirit of the devil himself is to attack the certainty of salvation.

How was the forgery identified? This 2015 blog post by Christian Askeland explains. Michael Grondin once wanted to write a computer program to look for patterns in the Gospel of Thomas. So, he produced a unique English/Coptic interlinear, making some unusual translation choices so that there was only one English word used for a given Coptic word, regardless of context. The papyrus had some misspellings that match those in this interlinear, and the papyrus owner’s proposed translation shows that he used this interlinear as well.

There is much in this book about the forger, Walter Fritz, who the author interviewed extensively. His motivations were complex, and Dr. King’s were as well. Various relatives and friends of hers were involved in verifying the papyrus, sometimes using new techniques invented for this specific purpose, in one case basically founding a scientific firm at her request. Articles were published about the papyrus under pressure, so the Harvard name would give it more credence. I guess the take-away is that experts are still humans with motivations and biases, and especially bombshell new findings should be looked at carefully.