In September 2012, late in the evening of the penultimate day of the 10th International Congress on Coptic Studies, academic luminary and Harvard professor Karen King announced the discovery of a previously unknown early Christian text that she called the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife (GJW). King’s discovery made headlines around the world because one line of the fragment read “Jesus said to them, ‘my wife…’” and then broke off. Was Jesus referring to his wife?
Although the King himself never claimed that Jesus was married, the option he fed on the hype of the Da Vinci Code about a married Messiah. Some were skeptical from the start about its authenticity, but even as clinical trials and educational analyses played the credibility of the Gospel of Jesus’ wife, a new tale emerged: one in which an amateur pornographer turned forger fooled an Ivy League professor and, briefly, the world.
The only journalist in the room for King’s speech in 2012 was Ariel Sabar, then a freelancer for Smithsonian Magazine. Although the tale was originally delegated to him through a publisher, to Sabar his interviews with King and his interviews in Rome were the beginning of a seven-year adventure that culminated in the publication of his desirable new ebook, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con The Man and the Gospel of the Wife of Jesus. The ebook attests to the price of investigative journalism and is full of shocking and revealing moments.
In his speech, King stated that the fragment of a fourth-century copy of a second-century text on the role of women in the church. A few weeks after the initial announcement in Rome, several scholars (the full revelation, me and my former co-author Joel Baden were among them) had begun to publicly question the authenticity of the small fragment of papyrus credit card. While the world waited for clinical trials to be completed, a small organization of academics – adding Christian Askeland, Andrew Bernhard, Francis Watson, Alin Suciu and Mark Goodacre – began to draw the threads of the document’s importance.
The biggest red flags were careless writing, the many grammatical errors in the text, and the similarities between it and a specific online edition of some other early Coptic Christian text, the Gospel of Thomas. The chances of an ancient papyrus fragment reproducing a typographical error made a millennium and a later part are incalculably low.
To make matters worse, little is known about the origin of the fragment or hitale heritage. It’s something, King told Sabar, that she “wasn’t involved…” The donor who approached King with the artifact insisted on anonymity and King allowed only a few key points of his story to enter the public domain. An exact and entire chain of property would have been helpful in verifying the authenticity of the fragment and, more importantly, its legality (since 2007, the American Society of Papyrologists has condemned the illicit industry in papyrus).
The debate on the Gospel of the Wife of Jesus persisted in 2014 with the publication of the next clinical knowledge about the papyrus era and the ink used on it. Humanities mavens decreed that it was an apparent forgery, while others, such as King, announced a revealing research of the ink. To the inflammation of scholars on both sides, each new series of clinical trials triggered an avalanche of media hypotheses that Jesus was indeed married. This despite the fact that the maximum fragment of the text may come to be revealed is that some other people in the ancient world speculated about the romantic prestige of the most noted bachelor of Judaism of the first century.
In the end, it was Sabar himself who would put the last nail in the coffin. The source data the King had gained was falsified. Years of meticulous studies and persistent maintenance requests, after all, brought Sabar to the door of Walter Fritz, a 50-year-old Floridian who had emigrated from Germany to the United States. Fritz, an aspiring Egyptologist failed from Bavaria, where he had been raised through a single mother in a small town. Three weeks before the King’s announcement in 2012, Sabar discovered that Fritz had registered the domain gospelofjesuswife.com online, employing his non-public data. As i dug deeper, things began to take an unexpected turn.
It wasn’t the only domain call belonging to Walter Fritz. For about a decade, starting in 2003, he and his wife had hosted and run a porn site on the topic “hotwife” that featured his wife as “the number one slut woman in America” (a hot woman, a conscientious Google search will tell you, is a woman who engages in sexual acts with men other than her husband and in front of him). Fritz, after all, was the owner of the papyrus and almost in fact the forger of the writing on it. He had taken fundamental Coptic, had access to genuine ancient papyrus and had a sexually positive anti-Catholic bias. In what appears to be the highlight of an Internet game, “Florida Man Runs Pornography Business and Christian Gospel Forges”.
The incessant search for Sabar’s tale leaves nothing to chance. He explores Fritz’s wife’s interest in almost Gnostic spirituality and mediumship and notes that a (less explicit) film highlighted the Holy Blood, the Holy Grail (the inspiration for Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code) as an accessory. He goes to the church where Fritz claims to have been assaulted by a priest and explores Fritz’s monetary difficulties and the failure of his educational career. The GJW forge seems to be motivated by a pastiche of these elements; Sabar told the Daily Beast: “For me, at least some of these elements locate the expression in a degree or in GJW, either in text form and as a type of improvised explosive device.”
Fritz, however, is not the only one to be subjected to Sabar’s harsh analysis. He devotes so much time to Karen King, Hollis’ professor of theology at harvard divinity school and world-renowned feminist historian of Christianity, who introduced the text to the public in 2012 and defended it in 2014. King is a true giant in the field; her ebook What is Gnosticism?, deeply influential to shape what we think of early Christianity (or Christianity, as she would say). In my interactions with her, she has never been anything yet brilliant and supportive.
To be sure, King made mistakes. She did not adequately investigate the artifact’s provenance. She consulted with only two other trusted scholars—Anne Marie Luijendijk (Princeton) and Roger Bagnall (NYU)— both of whom mistakenly identified it as authentic. Two of the scientists involved in the technical analysis had personal ties to King and Bagnall that were never disclosed to Harvard Theological Review (HTR), the journal that published King’s article on GJW. Speaking of which, two of the three original peer-reviews which she received in early September 2012 several weeks before announcing GJW’s discovery were strongly negative. The positive review was written by Bagnall, who disclosed his conflict of interest. Esteemed Coptic philologist Steven Emmel’s review had, as Sabar puts it, “identified nearly every sign of forgery that would surface over the next four years.” The other, by Yale’s Goff Professor of Religious Studies, Bentley Layton, suggested that publishing the piece would be “very embarrassing” for the journal.
Negative reviews raise questions about why Karen acted in her ad and why HTR editors would have authorized the publication. Under circumstances, she would have been rejected. The HTR had been frightened, Sabar said, but published it in 2014 and without colleagues reviewing the clinical knowledge provided in his article. (The editors of the time were recently replaced.) Sabar adds that King refused to allow a (negative) reaction to be published throughout her HTR article and that when she published her short story to the press, she did so on the condition that they only speak to pre-approved academics. If King had not been a high-profile figure in the box and the editors of the mag had not been his immediate colleagues, the result might have been different.
Throughout the Veritas, Sabar presents a variety of other explanations for the educational movements involved: the main ones are institutional politics and the king’s interest in the role of women in the early Church. Certainly, the king’s educational interest in the history of women in Christianity (which is notoriously difficult to find) made him the best victim of Fritz’s deception. While we, his readers, will draw his own conclusions, he suggests that the king had strong ideological commitments that led him to pursue a specific line of interpretation in the face of compelling counter-proof.
In 2006, the National Geographic Society announced the discovery of the Gospel of Judas, an ancient ebook that featured Judas Iscariot not yet as the traitor of Jesus as his friend. For all who grew up Christians, it was a turnaround. Like GJW, the Gospel of Judas had a superficial provenance, was translated through the most productive researchers, and made waves when it was announced. The challenge was translation. In December 2007, Abril Deconick published an editorial that said that “many of the possible translation options made through the company’s researchers are well off the doors of the practices commonly accepted in this area. These are not trivial mistakes; they replaced the meaning of the text making Judas a demon a hero altogether. The parallels are not very productive (the Gospel of Judas is not a forgery and possible translation options are yet to be debated), but it is an appeal
What makes these instances other than all the others is that those who mislated the Gospel of Judas left their reputation intact. Similarly, those who mistook James’s ossuary (falsified and unproven) with the resting position of Jesus’ brother did not face widespread calls for his resignation, as King did. She has been the subject of swift, sexist and hostile complaint from her peers. King herself questioned her opponents’ motivations. After the fragment turned out to be a forgery, an interview with the Crimson summarized it by saying that the fragment “had been challenged because it opened a discussion about patriarchy, whether women can only serve as disciples, priestly celibacy, and the price of virginity.”
It is expected that scholars will be able to make mistakes and disagree on the interpretation of a text – we are human beings and our field is to refine and progress toward a broad consensus through insightful disagreements and engagement with divergent opinions. The vital thing is to recognize these mistakes and move on (as Luijendijk does in the book). What is it that in the case of the GJW and the Gospel of Judas, these disagreements took a stand in public and affected a broader opinion.
In an interview with the King of the Atlantic in 2016, he admitted that Sabar’s findings “tipped the scales in favor of counterfeiting.” In an interview in the Crimson several months later, she said, “To focus on whether [GJW is] a fake or not is diverting attention from the things that really matter, namely disorders of authority, women’s roles, sexuality, and everything similar to them.”
For those who disagree with the King’s positions – whether in devout classical circles and within the academy – the GJW is a ammunition.
Unfortunately, this took as evidence that those who talk about the role of women in the early church are motivated through a program and paintings without genuine proof. This happened as early as 2013 when Steve Green, CEO of Hobthrough Lobthrough and president of the Bible Museum, said in a speech to the Council for National Policy: “If you mean this piece of papyrus says Jesus had a wife, then I don’t want you because you’re making it up. That’s not what he says” (the king never claimed that this was the case). A year before the debate was resolved and 3 years before Sabar unmasked Fritz. GJW also discussed in the Curriculum of the Bible Museum.
From the outset, therefore, it militarized itself as an exaggeration of the fragile foundations of liberal biblical scholarship. Although I personally agree with Green that there is no evidence that Jesus married anyone, there is sufficient evidence of women holding positions of authority in the early church. It’s frustrating to see the occasions spreading this way.
If the inscription on the fragment had been the genuine agreement and the falsified documents of provenance, then King would still have been a prestigious scholar whose preference for perceiving the fact of the beyond led her to forget the moral considerations concerned with running on fabrics like this. His work, in turn, would have inflated the price of antiques on the black market. The bet of spreading “new warnings” is high. It is tempting and indeed standard to keep studies on the warnings that data make on the data – even more so when faced with hostility and opposition in the afterlife – and move toward publication. If King had tested the falsified provenance more consciously or expected until after the 2012 convention to announce his notice, he might never have released the forgery.
The mistakes aren’t just his, though. Other high-looking educators made the same errors of judgment that she and the editors of a leading magazine were also willing to forget the vital complaint of the peer review process. Even more vitally, it was Walter Fritz who started the saga. As is the case, GJW’s story is an uplifting account of what happens when the narrative is more vital than due diligence. And, unfortunately, the shadow of a pro-woman forgery will unjustifiably weigh on the valid educational and public verbal exchange about the role of women in the early Church for years to come.