The Gospel According to Some Guy with Adobe Reader
September 9, 2015 9:28 PM   Subscribe

"For nearly three years, there has been considerable controversy and confusion about whether a business-card sized papyrus fragment dubbed the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is an authentic ancient artifact or not. The current scholarly consensus already holds that the fragment is forgery. In addition, a recent development has confirmed that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a forgery created using a specific internet edition of the Gospel of Thomas [pdf]. It seems that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife forgery debate has finally come to an end. " [Previously]
posted by Knappster (16 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
Mark Goodacre discussed some of the issues with the fragment in this 2013 lecture.
posted by Knappster at 9:42 PM on September 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


The phrases "cut and paste" in the final link caused some confusion for me-- I imagined someone using Photoshop to make a fake and then printing it out, which wouldn't work for obvious reasons.

The fragment is hand-written on ancient papyrus by a (presumably) modern forger who had access to ancient materials but lacking the expertise in ancient Coptic to make a plausible new text.
posted by justkevin at 9:57 PM on September 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


What I don't understand is why a professor at a divinity school would keep the source of a manuscript secret -- I would have thought she would want it to have been made public and examined by as many people as possible.

I understand that she doesn't own the fragment, but I would never work with any source I wasn't allowed to make public and let others examine.
posted by jb at 10:01 PM on September 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


JB: indeed. The excusereason usually given is that the manuscript belongs to some collector who doesn't want their identity known. This causes all sorts of problems, of course: it enables forgery, but it also enables unlicensed trafficking in antiquities.

Also, there's reportedly a thing going on where dealers buy cartonnage (like papier mâché) mummy masks and dissolve them to extract scraps of papyrus texts that may have been used in their construction. This totally destroys the mask, and also loses potential clues about the age and origin of the texts. Most of these scraps will be valueless, but if they find a scrap of a Gospel it's presumably very salable.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:29 PM on September 9, 2015 [5 favorites]


This is like the Raiders of the Lost Ark of catching students plagiarizing. Somewhere in an ancient but opulently appointed castle in Eastern Europe a shadowy figure is throwing their iPad into the fireplace in rage and vowing to learn Coptic syntax properly next time.
posted by No-sword at 1:48 AM on September 10, 2015 [13 favorites]


Let me guess: the giveaway was that the text on the papyrus was in Papyrus.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:46 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]


Nah, it was the pixels. It's always the pixels.
posted by scruss at 4:49 AM on September 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


Dr. King's Harvard website devoted to the scrap still indicates her claims that the fragment is authentic. The site claims the papyrus and ink are consistent in age, and show no signs of being altered in modern times. The website fails to address, and barely mentions, the opposition.

This Atlantic article is another good layperson's summary of the issue.
posted by blob at 5:34 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


I understand that she doesn't own the fragment, but I would never work with any source I wasn't allowed to make public and let others examine.

Keeping the owner's identity private is pretty common with things like rare antiquities and art, due to the very real threat of theft. And, on the Harvard site, they clearly state that the fragment is available for on-site research by outside parties.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:39 AM on September 10, 2015


How much of a "gotcha" is this fragment if true, in Christian scholarship? I would think that the bigger the "gotcha" (in any discipline) a discovery is, the more likely said discovery is to be fake, eh?

(And if I was an academic, that would be some serious soul-searching trying to weigh the "I want this to be true, how critical am I being" and the attendant career perks vs "this is too good to be true" caution and the possibility that by being too careful you could lose a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.)
posted by maxwelton at 8:17 AM on September 10, 2015


Convincing and embarrassing (for anyone who believed in the wretched thing)—thanks for the post!

> Dr. King's Harvard website devoted to the scrap still indicates her claims that the fragment is authentic.

Wow. Pathetic.
posted by languagehat at 8:58 AM on September 10, 2015


This is really fascinating. I mean, mostly the idea that someone has access to some quantity of 1300-year-old papyrus, a technique of writing in such a way that the ink appears ancient to the most close examination, and a desire to cause havoc.
posted by mountmccabe at 9:01 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


How much of a "gotcha" is this fragment if true, in Christian scholarship? I would think that the bigger the "gotcha" (in any discipline) a discovery is, the more likely said discovery is to be fake, eh?

It's zero of a "gotcha" among scholars. As Christianity developed and spread, there were numerous texts written indicating different takes on the story of Jesus, some more credible than others. A random fragment from 600 years after Jesus died claiming that he had a wife, if authentic, would be a potentially interesting insight to another divergent offshoot of Christianity, but it's not as though anyone should take that as some kind of definitive information about Jesus himself, only about what some minor cult in 7th Century Egypt was saying about Jesus. So,if it were legitimate (which it's not) it would be very cool for people studying the development of religion, but have extremely negligible impact on studies of the historical Jesus.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 10:29 AM on September 10, 2015 [9 favorites]


opulently appointed castle

Does "appointed" mean "has towers with pointy ends"?
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:41 AM on September 10, 2015


Somewhere in an ancient but opulently appointed castle in Eastern Europe a shadowy figure is throwing their iPad into the fireplace in rage and vowing to learn Coptic syntax properly next time.

Oh, they were going to upgrade to the big honkin' iPad Pro anyway.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:52 PM on September 10, 2015


someone has access to some quantity of 1300-year-old papyrus, a technique of writing in such a way that the ink appears ancient to the most close examination, and a desire to cause havoc.

Apparently it's not that hard to get ancient papyrus, especially if you don't need a big piece. It was the paper of its day and you have things like merchants' accounts and so forth that are really cheap. You just need one with blank space on it. Or maybe you can bleach it; I don't know. The ink is reportedly plausibly similar to ancient inks - but maybe the forger got ink from an ancient inkwell, or maybe they were just lucky in their attempt to duplicate it. There's not enough there to date with C14. As for the desire to cause havoc, you would be astonished how many "scholars" try to sneak things like this into the record. This is why provenance is so important.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:10 PM on September 10, 2015


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