During the International Conference on Coptic Studies in Rome in September 2012, Karen L. King, a scholar and professor at Harvard Divinity School, presented a discovery: a papyrus containing an unpublished passage from the Gospel. The document, called the “Gospel of Jesus’ wife” came from a private collection. It had been passed from person to person since being purchased on the antiques market. The previous owner’s name was unknown. Written in Coptic, the papyrus contained a scandalous dialogue between Jesus and his disciples:
Jesus said to them: “my wife […] She will be able to be my disciple”.
The controversial passage of Jesus’ wife
However, the supposed Gospel passage caused an enormous discussion. As well known, the canonical Gospels make no mention of a Christ relationship with a woman. Acknowledging the reliability of the finding would have meant a great scandal and a movement of historical and doctrinal revisionism. Karen L. King claimed that the papyrus, written in black carbon ink, dated back to the 4th century and was a transcription of a 2nd century Greek text1. Scholars established the dating on the basis of historical similarities. On the other hand, there is at least one apocryphal text from that period, the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, which associates the name of Mary Magdalene with Jesus, albeit as koinônós, meaning companion or sister2. However, carbon-14 testing carried out at Harvard University yielded an average date of between 659 and 8693.
Alongside the enormous media exposure the case has received worldwide, the first doubts about the find also began to emerge. Leo Depuydt, an egyptologist at Brown University, claimed that Professor King’s fragment was so fake that it “was ready for a Monty Python sketch“4. Initial doubts arose because the papyrus was not pertaining to excavation works. Contrariwise, it came from the antiquities market, an unusual circumstance.
The “Gospel of Jesus’ wife” is a forgery
As if that were not enough, while the press presented the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife”, another unpublished papyrus appeared, this time attributed to the evangelist John. Christian Askeland, an expert on the Gospel of John, suggested that the author of both fragments was the same person. The “Gospel of John fragment”, moreover, was written in the Coptic Lycopolitan dialect. It was a language that scholars claim died out before the papyrus was dated5. Basically, both the “Gospel of Jesus’ wife” and the “fragment of the Gospel of John” were probably forgeries.
Following around four years of research into the origins of the fragment and a revealing investigation by the US magazine The Atlantic, Professor King admitted that it was most likely a forgery. Journalist Ariel Sabar had discovered that the papyrus had belonged to Walter Fritz, a German-American businessman who had studied Egyptology in his youth. A few weeks before the papyrus was presented at Harvard, Fritz had registered a website called “gospelofjesuswife”6. He was able to create a forgery of such high quality that it fooled several Harvard academics.
Samuele Corrente Naso
Notes
- Karen L. King, Jesus said to them, “My wife . . .”, A New Coptic Papyrus Fragment, Cambridge University Press, 10 April 2014. ↩︎
- Gospel of Philip, 55. ↩︎
- Noreen Tuross, Accelerated Mass Spectrometry Radiocarbon Determination of Papyrus Samples, Harvard University, dipartimento di biologia evoluzionistica umana, 2014. ↩︎
- L. Depuydt, The Alleged “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”: Assessment and Evaluation of Authenticity, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 107, No. 2, 2014. ↩︎
- J. Pattengale, How the “Jesus’ Wife” Hoax Fell Apart, The Wall Street Journal, 2014. ↩︎
- A. Sabar, The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife, in The Atlantic, 19 June 2016. ↩︎
