"Jesus said to them, My wife."

June 16, 2016 3:53 AM

The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus' Wife is an article by Ariel Sabar about his quest to trace the providence of a manuscript fragment in which Jesus refers to his wife. The trail leads from Harvard through old East Germany to the Floridian swingers' scene.
posted by Kattullus (57 comments total)

About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Take my wife - please!"
posted by thelonius at 3:55 AM on June 16, 2016 [25 favorites]

"my wife ... thinks I just went out for figs. That was three years ago."
posted by wabbittwax at 4:33 AM on June 16, 2016 [11 favorites]

"Again I tell you, it is easier for my wife to leave the house on time than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God."
posted by officer_fred at 4:34 AM on June 16, 2016 [23 favorites]

Previously.
posted by Dr Dracator at 4:38 AM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Jesus said "my wife" but in that funny Borat voice
posted by dismas at 5:05 AM on June 16, 2016 [39 favorites]

"Verily I say unto thee, marriage is a fine institution. But who wanteth to live in an institution?"

Also previously.
posted by No-sword at 5:12 AM on June 16, 2016 [4 favorites]

That is the craziest article I will read all month. Seriously, read it.
posted by mwhybark at 5:30 AM on June 16, 2016 [15 favorites]

16 And the LORD said unto Pilate, "I didn't kill my wife."

17 But Pilate's heart was hardened, and he said unto Him, "I don't care."
posted by officer_fred at 5:40 AM on June 16, 2016 [18 favorites]

Hah. I've been following discussions about the manuscript, and this explains a lot.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:44 AM on June 16, 2016

This article is amazing.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:48 AM on June 16, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm Jesus and so is my wife.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 5:52 AM on June 16, 2016 [5 favorites]

My wife ... thinks I'm in Oslo -- Oslo, France, that is.

(Great read...thanks for posting!)
posted by Toecutter at 5:59 AM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

But why hadn’t she at least released her copies of Fritz’s papers, as many scholars had requested?, I asked.

“I don’t think they’re good data,” she said. Nothing useful could be gleaned from a scan of a photocopy, which was, after all, just “an image of an image.”

What a great read and what a rabbit-hole. For me, and upsettingly, it's Karen L. King's rep that comes out of this less than intact: Fritz is a con artist with a long list of shit motivations, but this is just adding to the growing heap of disreputably-got (and in some cases just disreputable) manuscripts on the market. I'm reminded of the new fragment of Sappho, and that at least got us a new fragment of Sappho. This just nets us a questionable early-Christian fragment and a fresh ream of "MY WIFE... PLEASE" jokes (though those are at least original).

Don't touch it if it's got dubious or even foggy provenance! It just tarnishes the scholarship that makes it seem worth it.
posted by monster truck weekend at 6:03 AM on June 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

For me the most interesting implication is that Fritz didn't forge it for money but to advance a theological position. I don't know if that's quite proven in the article, however.
posted by Emma May Smith at 6:23 AM on June 16, 2016 [10 favorites]

Taketh my wife. Verily!
posted by Thorzdad at 6:48 AM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

People are crazy.
posted by -t at 6:58 AM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

I take a short cut through the Harvard Divinity School section of campus occasionally, (do hunt down the guardian rhinoceros's), there's a modest labyrinth. The area has an air of quiet respectability as any location anywhere. So what better crowd to have a erudite discussion of the provenance of a bit of paper that if established as archaic could only be certain that some unknown writer wrote something long ago, were there no archaic Dan Browns?

Oh my goodness there are certainly certain topics in this story NOT to google, nope nope nope.
posted by sammyo at 7:16 AM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

John Prine is the only primary source I need for apocryphal Jesus histories.
posted by Doleful Creature at 7:17 AM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think the Comic Sans font should have been taken as a clue.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:32 AM on June 16, 2016 [4 favorites]

Beginning in 2003, Fritz had launched a series of pornographic sites that showcased his wife having sex with other men—often more than one at a time.

You couldn't make this stuff up. Or, what -t said.
posted by Melismata at 7:44 AM on June 16, 2016

That was an excellent article. Definitely one of the craziest stories I've read in a while
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:48 AM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Once again, truth is much stranger than fiction. Fantastic story.
posted by uncleozzy at 8:14 AM on June 16, 2016

Great piece. It was just plain fun to read.
posted by klarck at 8:41 AM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

For me the most interesting implication is that Fritz didn't forge it for money but to advance a theological position.

Yeah. To advance a theological position or to get funds after they stopped his wife's pornography career or to get back at the ivory-tower academics to sneered at his Coptic or because he had lived a tough West German life. I was fascinated by how his story just kept changing, culminating in his batshit offer to Ariel Sabar to make the whole thing into thriller fiction.

Just, WHAT
posted by monster truck weekend at 8:49 AM on June 16, 2016 [12 favorites]

MetaFilter: a combination of bumbling and sophistication.
posted by rdone at 8:52 AM on June 16, 2016 [6 favorites]

entwhistle fan, is all
posted by j_curiouser at 9:06 AM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

I see Sydney Greenstreet as the German tool-maker and Peter Lorre as Fritz.
posted by valkane at 9:06 AM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

[Walter Fritz] had first met Hans-Ulrich Laukamp in Berlin in the early 1990s, at a talk by the best-selling Swiss author Erich von Däniken, who’d become famous in the late 1960s for his theory that space aliens—or “ancient astronauts”—helped build the pyramids, Stonehenge, and other landmarks that seemed beyond the capacities of “primitive” man.

Somehow I am not surprised that the guy peddling "Jesus was totes married" stories was also into "ancient astronaut" stories too.
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:24 AM on June 16, 2016

On the face of it there's nothing really particularly amazing about the idea of Jesus having a wife. Assuming that there really was a Yeshua Ben Yosef who really was a radical rabbi stirring up trouble in Israel back the, well, isn't marriage one of the mtizvot?

Marriage was normative for a man in that time of his station and religion.

This doesn't mean he had to have been married of course, but the idea of Jesus being married always seemed rather unremarkable to me.
posted by sotonohito at 9:41 AM on June 16, 2016 [8 favorites]

Of course that has zilch to do with the authenticity of this fragment.
posted by sotonohito at 9:42 AM on June 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

This all sounds freakishly similar to the plot of Irving Wallace's 1972 novel The Word. There was a mini-series shown over four days in 1978. A new gospel, written by Jesus's brother James appears. After a bunch of events, it appears to be a modern forgery...
posted by Xoc at 9:44 AM on June 16, 2016

Taketh my wife.
I think you mean 'Takest thou my wife.'
(Or Takest Thou my wife, depending on to whom you are speaking)
posted by MtDewd at 10:09 AM on June 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

And even if it is authentic, it's still something written centuries after Jesus' life. But I guess "Some dude in 700AD thought Jesus had a wife" doesn't have the same ring to it.
posted by ymgve at 10:24 AM on June 16, 2016

After a bunch of events, it appears to be a modern forgery...

Though in fact, there is a Infancy Gospel of James among the apocrypha.

And even if it is authentic, it's still something written centuries after Jesus' life.

Or perhaps just copied later. The earliest surviving MS of Homer dates about four hundred years after his stuff was composed, so there's that.
posted by BWA at 10:33 AM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Actually, there are extant copies of the original edition.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:39 AM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

"She stressed that the fragment was all but worthless as biography: It was composed centuries after Jesus’s death. It showed merely that one group of ancient Christians believed Jesus had been married."

So this is "evidence" that Jesus was married in pretty much the same way that The DaVinci Code is evidence that Jesus was married.
posted by straight at 10:40 AM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

More like this, please. :)

This was a riveting read!!!
posted by Dressed to Kill at 10:45 AM on June 16, 2016

More like this?

Peter Biro and the Jackson Pollock fingerprints.

The White Salamander Murders.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 11:09 AM on June 16, 2016 [11 favorites]

Wow, that had some unexpected twists. By the end I felt sorry for Karen King whose career will likely suffer for this.
posted by TedW at 11:39 AM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Fun article. Can anyone explain why King wouldn't want to talk with the reporter about his/her evidence? I can understand putting more credence into an ink analysis than a reporter calling out of the blue, but still, if someone says "I spent X months in Florida and Germany doing due diligence and here's what I found?" - why wouldn't you want to know? King acknowledges that her professional reputation is on the line if she's wrong -- other than greed or hubris (neither of which sound like the woman portrayed), what does she have to lose by taking the meeting?
posted by Mchelly at 11:52 AM on June 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

what does she have to lose by taking the meeting?

What does she have to gain by talking to a reporter? At best she's the credulous victim of a con artist. At worst, she's an accomplice. Talking to the journalist absolutely will not help save her career. It'll only be an opportunity to inadvertently say something to make the situation worse.
posted by muddgirl at 12:32 PM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

Can anyone explain why King wouldn't want to talk with the reporter about his/her evidence?

If what Ariel Sabar has quoted of her is true, then I am afraid that the most charitable reason is intellectual laziness. She cares more about what the fragment will do for her career than she does its legitimacy, and therefore legitimate scholarship. I'd love to see more from her re: these accusations so that she could exculpate herself, but at best this is a person so desperate to publish that she didn't take the time to do the thing properly. At worst it's corruption. It sounds priggish, but honestly, anyone working with artifacts has the moral duty to vet them.
posted by monster truck weekend at 12:40 PM on June 16, 2016

The above link to The White Salamander Murders is part two. Here is part one.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:38 PM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

Additional alternative gospel: "Blessed are the dumbfucks."
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:41 PM on June 16, 2016

For me the most interesting implication is that Fritz didn't forge it for money but to advance a theological position.

I have no idea whether the Coptic in the fragment is actually plausible, but from the article it seemed more plausible that he was trying to cover for having stolen it getting the Stasi museum...
posted by ennui.bz at 4:56 PM on June 16, 2016

Now King says, based on the Atlantic reporting, that the papyrus is likely a forgery.
posted by Cash4Lead at 5:00 PM on June 16, 2016 [6 favorites]

Can anyone explain why King wouldn't want to talk with the reporter about his/her evidence?

King's behavior surprised me from the very start. I felt that she was deflecting and perhaps even stymieing inquiries into the provenance of the text. I speculate that she may have been worked on by Fritz; or perhaps she knew the likely outcome of any investigation. There's no way to tell.

If there's one good thing that comes out of this it will be a greater awareness of the importance of provenance, because it looks as though forgery is not very hard. If Fritz had been a bit smarter he'd have just written a few lines from the Gospels on a papyrus or parchment that could be dated to (e.g.) the year 80 CE. Bang, oldest bit of the Christian Bible ever found, worth a huge amount.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:09 PM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

Joe in Australia: " If Fritz had been a bit smarter he'd have just written a few lines from the Gospels on a papyrus or parchment that could be dated to (e.g.) the year 80 CE. Bang, oldest bit of the Christian Bible ever found, worth a huge amount."

My experience with articles like this is that he would have used a verb conjugation, or a letter shape, or a pen angle, or something else which existed in the later-dated source he copied from, but did not yet exist in 80 CE.
posted by Bugbread at 5:29 PM on June 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

I know; it's extraordinary how often that happens; but look how far he got with a totally bogus text!

If he were smarter he could have literally copied the text from a number of scholarly reconstructions of (say) the Q document and kept the amount copied short (to further reduce errors). That's assuming he didn't have an ulterior theological motive in mind, of course.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:51 PM on June 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

Somehow I am not surprised that the guy peddling "Jesus was totes married" stories was also into "ancient astronaut" stories too.

Cash4Lead - the article states Fritz didn't buy von Däniken's theories, it was Laukamp, who wasn't peddling anything save auto parts but was being taken advantage of.

What a fantastic article. I think I'll go after the rest of the author's work.

For me personally the clairvoyance and automatic writing add a particular twist, which make this story all the more interesting, if a little disturbing.

Only two things perhaps remain to say:

1. How do you write "what the fuck" in some Coptic script
2. If anyone has similar articles beyond what dances_with_sneetches already linked (thanks!) that would be amazing
posted by iffthen at 7:35 PM on June 16, 2016

I asked why she hadn’t undertaken an investigation of the papyrus’s origins and the owner’s background. “Your article has helped me see that provenance can be investigated,” she said.

My blood pressure just skyrocketed! What an unbelievably fatuous thing to say. The investigation of provenance has been an international bottom-line, not just concern, for fucking years. Fritz is a conman and an asshole and was a total dick for pulling King into his weird-ass web, but Christ.

"Provenance can be investigated", forsooth! I need a Gaviscon
posted by monster truck weekend at 1:05 AM on June 17, 2016

I just noticed that autocorrect had changed my intended 'provenance' to 'providence' in the post text (probably because of my misspelling). Which is a nice little error, given the subject.
posted by Kattullus at 2:02 AM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

The illustration for this article is really great
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:43 AM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

I suspect King saw the reporter as just another sensation-seeking journalist who probably had little to add to the story but who might take a skeptical view of the document and give her negative publicity in spite of the sketchy work. If she knew the full story she would have spoken to the reporter, just to get ahead of the worst publicity.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 4:14 AM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

Similar articles can be found among this trove.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:25 AM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Sad that nothing has been done with the domain gospelofjesuswife.com. However, Harvard has their own sub-sub domain for The Gospel of Jesus's Wife, which only lists research that supports the age of the material and the source of the ink, with responses to Q&A supporting the fragment as real. Maybe they'll update it in light of King's recent comments.

Wikipedia has an article on the fragment, which includes a translation of the text, and links to prior skepticism and criticism, such as this comparison of the Gospel of John fragment to the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment, which both have strikingly similar writing, and the GoJ fragment is by all indications a forgery, and thus so is the GoJW fragment.

Assuming it is a fake, I'd love to see what the forger had written as the complete text of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:02 AM on June 17, 2016

I just noticed that autocorrect had changed my intended 'provenance' to 'providence' in the post text (probably because of my misspelling).

I read the post text and immediately got in a debate with myself about to what degree it would even be useful or non-shitty to make a note of this given that the context was clear, and what my odds were based on my mental model of you on it being a typo, an autocorrect issue, or just a genuine error, and whether and how I should structure a probably-jokey comment about it if I were to make one, and and and. And I was still sort of rolling around in that internal mudpit when I got to your comment and felt great relief.
posted by cortex at 8:01 AM on June 18, 2016 [3 favorites]