Fresh Doubts Raised About Papyrus Scrap Known as ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’
Laurie Goodstein ("The New York Times," May 4, 2014)
New evidence discovered by a skeptical young scholar has raised fresh
doubts about the authenticity of the scrap of papyrus known as the “Gospel of
Jesus’ Wife,” a relic that has provoked fascination and fury since it was
unveiled nearly two years ago by an eminent historian of early Christianity
at Harvard Divinity School.
The latest finding comes only weeks after the Harvard Theological Review
published a long-awaited lineup of articles by experts reporting that
scientific testing and close examination of the papyrus had found no apparent
evidence of forgery. But detractors of the Jesus’ Wife fragment remained
unconvinced, and the contents of those articles gave them new material to
investigate.
Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE
A fragment of papyrus, known as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” has been
analyzed by professors at Columbia University, Harvard University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembled other
ancient papyri.Papyrus Referring to Jesus’ Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than
Fake, Scientists SayAPRIL 10, 2014
A historian at The Harvard Divinity School has identified this ancient
piece of papyrus as the first known piece of writing to reference a wife of
Jesus.A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ WifeSEPT. 18, 2012
Even the historian who first brought the papyrus to public attention,
calling it a valuable clue that some early Christians believed Jesus was
married, said this latest forgery accusation, by an American professor doing
research in Germany, raises significant concerns and merits further
examination,
but is only one scenario and is not conclusive.
“This is substantive, it’s worth taking seriously, and it may point in the
direction of forgery,” Karen L. King, the historian at Harvard Divinity
School, said in a telephone interview, her first since the recent
developments. “This is one option that should receive serious consideration,
but I don’
t think it’s a done deal.”
Dr. King first presented her blockbuster paper on what she called the “
Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” at a conference of Coptic scholars in Rome in September
2012. The faded scrap, smaller than a business card, contained two phrases
that upended traditional Christian beliefs in its eight lines of text on
the front side: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ” and “she will be able
to be my disciple.” Dr. King said it was dated to the fourth century.
In an adjacent room at the conference, a young American named Christian
Askeland says he was presenting his paper on a Coptic version of the Book of
Revelation. After buzzing with colleagues over the Jesus’ Wife papyrus, Dr.
Askeland returned to Germany, where he is an assistant research professor
at Protestant University Wuppertal, and began examining the images that Dr.
King had posted on the Internet in the hope that other scholars would
indeed weigh in.
Dr. Askeland is an evangelical Christian who is also affiliated with
Indiana Wesleyan University, an evangelical college in Marion, Ind., and the
Green Scholars Initiative. That organization was founded by the Christian
owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of arts and crafts stores to study a
collection
of biblical artifacts amassed by the family for display in a Bible museum
they plan to build in Washington.
However, Dr. Askeland said his doubts about the Jesus’ Wife fragment were
not prompted by any concerns about the unorthodox content because “there are
many gospels, many texts, that say all kinds of things about Jesus.”
Instead, it was the appearance of the fragment — the handwriting, the ink, the
letter forms: “Whoever wrote it had different ways of writing the same
letter,” he said.
During 2013 and into 2014, as a steady rumble of skeptics kept posting
concerns about grammatical anomalies in the Jesus’ Wife fragment on the
Internet, Dr. King escorted the fragment, encased in glass, to the University
of
Arizona, Columbia University, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology for testing on the papyrus and ink.
Last month, the Harvard Theological Review published the results, saying
that radiocarbon tests produced a date of 659 to 859 A.D., and examinations
using a technique called micro-Raman spectroscopy found that the ink matched
other papyruses that were dated from the first to the eighth centuries.
The taint of forgery suspicions seemingly allayed, the Smithsonian Channel
announced that it would finally air its one-hour special on the Gospel of
Jesus’ Wife on Monday night — a documentary originally scheduled to air on
Sept. 30, 2012. (Contrary to accusations by some of her detractors, Dr.
King said she has not been paid for her participation in the documentary,
which was confirmed by a spokesman for the Smithsonian Channel.)
Dr. Askeland discovered among the papers published in the theological
review a photograph of a small tattered square of papyrus called the “Gospel
of
John,” which features strikingly similar handwriting in Coptic to the Jesus’
wife fragment and was tested alongside it. Both fragments were given to
Dr. King by the same owner.
It happens that Dr. Askeland wrote his Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge on the
Coptic versions of John’s Gospel, so he decided to compare this square
fragment with another John text called the Codex Qau, an authentic relic which
was
discovered in 1923 in a jar buried in an Egyptian grave site. Amazingly,
the text of the small John fragment replicated every other line from a leaf
of the Qau codex, and for 17 lines the breaks in the text were identical.
It “defied coincidence,” he said.
Dr. Askeland’s theory is that a modern-day forger copied from a photograph
of the Qua codex off the Internet. If the John text is forged, he reasons,
so is the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, which seems to be written by the same
hand.
Not only that, but he found that both these John texts were written in the
Lycopolitan dialect, which experts believe died out before the seventh or
eighth century, when the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife was supposedly written,
according to radiocarbon testing.
Editorials by scholars in The Wall Street Journal, CNN’s Belief Blog and
several academic blogs have pronounced the case closed. But other experts
say, not so fast.
Malcolm Choat, a Coptic expert at Macquarie University in Australia who
cautiously contradicted the doubters in his paper last month for the Harvard
journal, said in an interview that the new evidence was “persuasive,” but “
we’re not completely there yet” — until the John and Jesus wife papyruses
can be studied in person or using high-resolution images to understand
their relationship. Roger Bagnall, a renowned papyrologist who directs the
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, and who
early on deemed the Jesus’ Wife papyrus likely to be genuine, said in an
interview about the skeptics, “Most of the people taking this view wanted it
to
be a fake, and they haven’t asked critical questions about their own
hypothesis.”
Perhaps the copying of these two John texts was done in ancient times, not
the modern era. Perhaps the John and Jesus’ Wife fragments were not written
by the same hand: Indeed, the testing found that the ink is similar but
not the same.
The critics have asserted it would not be hard for a forger to mix a batch
of carbon-based ink that could fool scientists.
But Dr. Bagnall said, “I don’t know of a single verifiable case of
somebody producing a papyrus text that purports to be an ancient text that
isn’t.
There’s always the first.”
The spotlight now turns to the provenance and the owner of the Gospel of
Jesus’ Wife. Dr. King promised him she would not identify him publicly, but
said she knows she is now under pressure to do so
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[RC] Wait a minute, maybe Jesus had a wife after all
BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community Wed, 07 May 2014 16:38:29 -0700
