In September 2012, on the night of the penultimate day of the 10th International Congress of Copmatic Studies, Harvard educational luminaire and professor Karen King announced the discovery of a paleo-Christian text unknown in the past that she called the Gospel of the Wife of Jesus (GJW). King’s announcement made headlines around the world because a line from the fragment read, “Jesus told them, “My wife…” and then interrupted. Jesus was 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 while clinical trials and educational analyses played the credibility of the Gospel of the Wife of Jesus, a new tale emerged: one in which an amateur pornographer turned faker fooled an Ivy League teacher and, briefly, the world.
The only journalist in the room for the King’s speech in 2012 was Ariel Sabar, then a freelancer for Smithsonian Magazine. Although the tale was originally delegated to him through an editor, 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 (full revelation: me and my co-author Joel Baden were among them) began to publicly question the authenticity of the small fragment of papyrus in the length of a credit card. As 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 filming the threads of the document’s importance.
The largest 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 Paleo-Christian Coptic 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 “didn’t engage…” 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 papyri trade).
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 stranded from a small Bavarian town. Three weeks before the king’s announcement in 2012, Sabar discovered that Fritz had registered the domain gospelofjesuswife.com employing his non-public data. Digging 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 individual subjected to Sabar’s piercing analysis. He devotes equal time to Karen King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School and world-renowned feminist historian of Christianity, who brought the text to the public in 2012 and defended it again in 2014. King is a true giant in the field; her book What Is Gnosticism? has been profoundly influential in shaping what we think about early Christianity (or Christianities, as she would put it). In my interactions with her, she has never been anything but brilliant and supportive.
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Negative reviews raise questions about why King acted on his ad and why HTR editors would authorize publication. Under circumstances, she would have been rejected. HTR had been frightened, Sabar reveals, yet published it in 2014 and without colleagues reviewing the clinical knowledge provided in his article. (The editors of the day have recently been 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 she speak only to pre-approved researchers. If King had not been a prominent figure in the box and the editors of the mag had not been his colleagues right away, the result might have been different.
Throughout Veritas, Sabar presents a variety of different explanations for the actions of the academics involved: chief among them are institutional politics and King’s own interest in the role of women in the early church. Certainly, King’s academic focus on the history of women in Christianity (which is notoriously difficult to retrieve) made her the perfect victim for Fritz’s deception. While Sabar leaves his readers to form their own conclusions, he suggests that King held strong ideological commitments that led her to pursue a particular line of interpretation in the face of persuasive counter-evidence.
In 2006, the National Geographic Society announced the discovery of the Gospel of Judas, an old e-book 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 commonly accepted practices in the field.”
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 was the subject of a 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 in the Crimson several months later, she said that “Focusing 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 that’s connected to them.” for those who were addicted to the “facts” of the Da Vinci Code and the promise of tangible evidence of women as a devout married government in the early Church, the disorders themselves would probably not be enough.
For those who disagree with the King’s positions – whether in devout classical circles and within the academy – the GJW is a ammunition.
Sadly, it has taken as proof that those who discuss the role of women in the early church are driven by an agenda and working without real evidence. This happened as early as 2013 when Steve Green, CEO of Hobby Lobby and president of Museum of the Bible, said in a speech before the Council for National Policy: “If you want to say that this piece of papyrus says that Jesus had a wife, then I don’t have use for you because you are making that up. It is not what it says.” (King never claimed that it did.) This was a year before the debate had been settled and three years before Sabar would unmask Fritz. GJW was also mentioned in Museum of the Bible’s Bible Curriculum.
From the outset, therefore, it was militarized 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. The most vital is 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.