On February 27, 2015,
Salon magazine published
a remarkably inaccurate article about Jesus. The author, Valerie Tarico, (
a non-theist), stated at the outset that Jesus was probably married. The first thing she mentioned as the basis for this claim was “an ancient papyrus scrap” that referred to the wife of Jesus. She was referring to the fragment
which Harvard professor Karen King – the publisher of that papyrus scrap – has labeled
“The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.”
Tarico’s
Salon article is a collection of falsehoods glued together with inaccuracies and wrapped in half-truths, but her claim about this papyrus is particularly misleading. The so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” has been demonstrated to be a
forgery. Yet even after the proof of the
forgery has been placed online where any journalist can access it,
Salon
published Tarico’s claim anyway. If
Salon were a doctor, it would be guilty of malpractice.
The proof
of the counterfeit nature of the Forged Harvard Fragment – abbreviated, for the sake of
convenience, as FHF – does not consist in the date
of the materials out of which it was fabricated. Forgers have plenty of access to ancient
papyrus. Forgers can not only use ancient papyri – say, relatively cheap receipts
– to write upon, but they can also burn ancient materials to create soot as a component of carbon-based ink to write with.
FHF’s carbon-14
date in 650-870 is consistent with the date of another fragment which was in
the same collection of old fragments in which the FHF was brought to Karen
King’s attention: a fragment of the
Sahidic (Egyptian) text of the Gospel of John.
The production-date of the papyrus used for the fragment of Sahidic John
was carbon-dated consistently to somewhere between 640 and 880. This supports the idea that the fragment of
the Sahidic text of John, and the FHF, both come from the same batch of papyrus,
and that the papyrus-material was produced in 640-880. Strengthening the likeliness of this is
Dr. Christian Askeland’s observation that when one looks at the fragment of the
Sahidic text of John, and also at the writing in FHF, “the writing tool, ink and hand” are
“exactly the same.”
This
presents a rather large obstacle to the notion that the FHF was written in the
300’s or 400’s: a writer in the 300’s or
400’s obviously would not have access to papyrus writing-material produced in
the 600’s-800’s. So is the solution to
move the production-date of the texts into the 600’s-800’s? That isn’t feasible either, because by that
time, the dialect in which this particular fragment is written was no longer
being used. The dialect – Lycopolitan
Coptic – is attested rather sparsely; it is known from a manuscript called the Qau Codex (a manuscript of the Gospel of John produced in 350-400) which was
published in 1924 by Herbert Thompson.
When we
look at the Qau Codex and compare its text of the Gospel of John to the
contents of the fragment of John that was made by the same person who made the
FHF, we find something highly incriminating:
the line-endings in the fragment of John correspond to the line-endings in the Qau Codex.
Even without
knowledge of Coptic dialects, this can be seen via a simple comparison, as
shown here. Thus we can practically
reconstruct what the forger who made FHF did as he produced FHF’s sister-forgery: he wrote the text of the Qau Codex, and
simply combined every two lines as a single line.
On
May 24, 2014,
Bart Ehrman wrote about this at his blog: “On the reverse side
of the Gospel of John fragment there is writing (not from John but from another
text).” He also wrote: “The words and letters on the left hand
margin for all of 17 lines in a row of the “new discovery” match exactly those
in the text that was discovered in the 20th century,” i.e., in the
Qau Codex. Both of Ehrman’s statements
are problematic. First, the fragment in
question has text from the Gospel of John on both sides. Second, the left margin of the fragment is
only extant on one side. Third, the
correspondence to the Qau Codex occurs on alternating lines in the fragment,
not on every line. (One wonders if he
ever even saw pictures of the fragment he was describing to his readers.) Hopefully Dr. Ehrman will post again on this
subject in a less confused state. In the meantine, the fragment can be viewed in
the online report submitted to Harvard Theological Review.
Francis Watson has shown that the FHF’s text is similarly derivative: the forger basically pieced together snippets
from the Coptic text of the
Gospel of Thomas (a Gnostic text composed in the 100’s), altering their contents to
make the contents more sensational, but leaving clear traces of his
source.
Stephen Emmel has pointed out a different path to the same conclusion: when one reconstructs the format of the text
of the Gospel of John that would be necessary in a codex in which a page has
the particular passages on the front and back that this fragment contains, the
codex’s pages would need to be either exceptionally tall (if the text were
written in a single column) or exceptionally wide (if the text were written in
two columns). This augments the point
that the person who made the Sahidic fragment of John – the same person who
made FHF – did not carefully think through everything that would be required to
make a convincing forgery.
Mark Goodacre and other perceptive readers noticed that in one
phrase, the FHF reads the same as the text of the Gospel of Thomas usually
does, except for one unusual reading which happens to be identical to a
typographical error that appeared in an online edition of the Gospel of Thomas
– specifically, an edition by Mike Grondin which was first available in
November of 2002. This may indicate when
and where the forger obtained his text of the Gospel of Thomas before using its
component-parts in the process of putting together the text of the forgery. Not long thereafter, Dan Brown’s deceptively marketed and fictitious work The Da Vinci Code was published – which,
as Dr. Francis Watson has noted, may have given the forger the idea of using
snippets of the Gospel of Thomas to create a forgery which conveyed that Jesus
had a wife.
The history of the Forged Harvard Fragment was interesting and illuminating. It showed the value – I mean, the worthlessness – of some “expert opinions,” and the worthlessness of the sort of “peer review” that can occur when the ultra-liberal “peers” thirstily want something to be true. (
James McGrath at Butler,
Candida Moss at Notre Dame,
James Tabor at UNC-Charlotte, and
April DeConick, I’m thinking of you. Candida Moss has finally acknowledged the obvious about FHF, in
a CNN report on February 20, 2015. Why does it seem so hard for the others?
Roger Bagnall, any comment? And
AnneMarie Luijendijk: “impossible to
forge”? Please explain.)
And, inasmuch as
Salon
magazine is
still spreading essays
that treat the Forged Harvard Fragment as something other than a proven forgery,
months after the proof was provided, it also shows that there is a real need,
on the part of people who engineer a sensationalistic mess, to clean up after
themselves with the same level of energy that was expended in the
promotion of a falsehood. Why has there been so little, if any, acknowledgement of the proof the FHF is a forgery from the
Smithsonian Channel and other media-outlets responsible for spreading false claims about this forgery? When will the headline appear in
National Geographic informing its readers that the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” is fake?) This responsibility seems
to be very much lacking in some circles of New Testament academia – which is
rather ironic considering what the New Testament says about honesty.
The Museum of the Bible is scheduled to open in 
