…last week the story began to crumble faster than an ancient papyrus exposed in the windy Sudan. Mr. Askeland found, among the online links that Harvard used as part of its publicity push, images of another fragment, of the Gospel of John, that turned out to share many similarities””including the handwriting, ink and writing instrument used””with the “wife” fragment. The Gospel of John text, he discovered, had been directly copied from a 1924 publication.
“Two factors immediately indicated that this was a forgery,” Mr. Askeland tells me. “First, the fragment shared the same line breaks as the 1924 publication. Second, the fragment contained a peculiar dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before the sixth century.” Ms. King had done two radiometric tests, he noted, and “concluded that the papyrus plants used for this fragment had been harvested in the seventh to ninth centuries.” In other words, the fragment that came from the same material as the “Jesus’ wife” fragment was written in a dialect that didn’t exist when the papyrus it appears on was made.
Mark Goodacre, a New Testament professor and Coptic expert at Duke University, wrote on his NT Blog on April 25 about the Gospel of John discovery: “It is beyond reasonable doubt that this is a fake, and this conclusion means that the Jesus’ Wife Fragment is a fake too.” Alin Suciu, a research associate at the University of Hamburg and a Coptic manuscript specialist, wrote online on April 26: “Given that the evidence of the forgery is now overwhelming, I consider the polemic surrounding the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife papyrus over.”
Main-line “liberal” scholars are now saying this “gospel” is a forgery, besides being only a tiny fragment of parchment rather than a gospel narrative. The only problem is figuring out how to point out the intellectual sins of the modern academy without being mean-spirited. A Harvard professor seems to have let hostility to the authority of Scripture lead her into scholarly error, and the press enthusiastically echoed her. How do we say that in love?
So disappointed. This new theory had completely overturned my previous firm conviction (based on equally solid research) that Jesus was in a “special relationship” with the beloved disciple of John’s gospel.
I am beginning to lose my faith in the kind of scholarship that is being conducted at top universities. In recent decades, I have been assured that The Gospel of Thomas was the key to getting to the truth about Jesus, that Jesus was gay, that Jesus was involved with Mary Magdalene, that the gospel of Judas proved that Judas did not betray Jesus, but that Judas and Jesus were working together. For awhile a few years ago, I was completely convinced that the Knights Templar were the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. I was so excited to hear a couple of years ago that the tomb of Jesus and his family had finally been discovered. I don’t remember exactly what the discovery of the James Ossuary was supposed to prove, but I know it was important for some reason.
Yet each time my hopes get raised by some new discovery, just a little while later they are dashed when the latest revelation turns out to be a “fraud,” a “forgery,” or “just plain wrong.”
At this point, I am so desperate for the truth that I am tempted, almost but not quite yet, to turn to the four gospels of the New Testament as the most likely sources to find out who Jesus was. That would truly be a step of final desperation, but, at this point, what else is left? I mean if we can’t trust the “best” scholars, who can we trust?
The forgers went for the easy targets of the propaganda ministry:
From the linked WSJ article:
[blockquote]But Ms. King had defenders. The Harvard Theological Review recently published a group of articles that attest to the papyrus’s authenticity. Although the scholars involved signed nondisclosure agreements preventing them from sharing the data with the wider scholarly community, the New York Times was given access to the studies ahead of publication. The newspaper summarized the findings last month, saying “the ink and papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery.” The article prompted a tide of similar pieces, appearing shortly before Easter, asserting that the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife was genuine.[/blockquote]
From the original NY Times article by Laurie Goodstein, which has not been updated:
[blockquote]“I took very seriously the comments of such a wide range of people that it might be a forgery,†Dr. King said in an interview this week. She said she is now very confident it is genuine.
“When you have all the evidence pointing in one direction, it doesn’t make it 100 percent, but history is not a place where 100 percent is a common thing,†Dr. King said.
The new information may not convince those scholars and bloggers who say the text is the work of a rather sloppy forger keen to influence contemporary debates. The Harvard Theological Review, which is publishing Dr. King’s long-delayed, peer-reviewed paper online on Thursday, is also publishing a rebuttal by Leo Depuydt, a professor of Egyptology at Brown University, who declares the fragment so patently fake that it “seems ripe for a Monty Python sketch.â€
Dr. King presented the fragment with fanfare at a conference in Rome in September 2012, but was besieged by criticism because the content was controversial, the lettering was suspiciously splotchy, the grammar was poor, its provenance was uncertain, its owner insisted on anonymity and its ink had not been tested.
An editorial in the Vatican’s newspaper also declared it a fake.
…
However, Dr. Depuydt, the Egyptologist at Brown University, said that testing the fragment was irrelevant and that he saw “no need to inspect it.†He said he decided based on the first newspaper photograph that the fragment was forged because it contained “gross grammatical errors,†and each word in it matched writing in the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. “It couldn’t possibly be coincidence,†he said.
A forger could easily create carbon black ink by mixing candle soot and oil, he said: “An undergraduate student with one semester of Coptic can make a reed pen and start drawing lines.â€
But the scientists say that modern carbon black ink looks very different under their instruments. And Dr. King said that her “big disappointment†is that so far, the story of the fragment has focused on forgery, not on history.[/blockquote]
Hang in there, Bill. Don’t do anything desperate. We’ll come up with something . . . there’s gotta be something . . .
Garwood Anderson
NT, Nashotah House
Can’t we have something new by Advent?
It reminds me of a saying I first heard from Ken Bailey — although not original to him — “The Bible is an anvil that has broken many hammers.”
Next!