Jesus’ Wife Gospel — Forger’s Fingerprints Found

Nigel Tomes, Oct. 16, 2012   

Almost a month ago, Harvard Professor, Karen L. King, announced the discovery of the (so-called) “Jesus’ Wife Gospel.” The credit card-sized papyrus scrap bore the Coptic words, “Jesus said to them ‘My wife…’.” Dr. Albert Mohler described the media’s response, “the little piece of ancient papyrus with its fragmentary lines of text…in the hands of the media, [was] transformed into proof that Jesus had a wife, and that she was most likely Mary Magdalene. Prof. King will bear personal responsibility for most of this over-reaching. She has called the fragment nothing less than “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” —a title The Boston Globe rightly deemed ‘provocative’.” [Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Thurs., Sept., 20, 2012]

Prof. King’s announcement unleashed a media feeding frenzy; her claims launched a thousand news columns and video clips. To echo Winston Churchill’s words, “never in the field of early Christian literature has so much ink been spilled over such a small papyrus fragment.” The US TV networks vied with each other with breathless overstatements. CBS’s Allen Pizzey claimed this discovery, “challenges the very foundation of Christian thinking.” Not to be outdone, ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas hailed the “Jesus’ Wife fragment” as a “Real-life Da Vinci Code. Christianity's biggest mysteries [were] about to be solved. The tiny scrap of paper that could prove Jesus had a wife. Why this faded fragment might solve an age-old question”—was Jesus married?

Scholars Skeptical: “I…knew it was a fake.”

Scholars in the field of Coptic & Papyrus studies greeted Dr. King’s spectacular claims by questioning the fragment’s authenticity. Leading Coptic grammarian Dr. Leo Depuydt, Prof. of Egyptology & Ancient W. Asian Studies at Brown University (US) recalled, “That evening, when I saw it online [on the Times website] before it was in print, I already knew it was a fake.” Some entertained the possibility the fragment was genuine, but “to him the answer is obvious: the fragment is a forgery,” graduate student Mary-Evelyn Farrior reported. [“Divorcing Mrs. Jesus,” Mark Goodacre’s NT Blog, Wed., Oct., 10, 2012]

Dr. Leo Depuydt

Within days, Prof. Depuydt wrote a 14-page report, denouncing the fragment’s authenticity.  “There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the text …is a patchwork of words & phrases from the published & well-known Coptic Gospel of Thomas… It is therefore clear that the [Jesus’ wife] text is not an independent literary composition at all,” Depuydt wrote. He asserts that most of the fragment’s text is taken directly from Thomas’ Gospel. Its grammatical errors lead Depuydt to conclude that, “An ancient native speaker of Coptic who can select & combine words & phrases from the Gospel of Thomas with any understanding could not possibly have produced said grammatical blunders.” Hence Dr. Depuydt believes the fragment’s author is a modern forgery, Mary-Evelyn Farrior reports [Mark Goodacre’s NT Blog, Wed., Oct. 10, 2012] Prof. Depuydt’s report denouncing the “Jesus Wife” fragment as a forgery will appear in The Harvard Theological Review Jan. 2013, alongside Prof. King’s article if tests of the scrap’s ink tests prove inconclusive in terms of dating.

Jesus’ Wife: Forger’s Textual Fingerprints

Francis Watson

Several scholars argued that Prof. King’s (so called) “Jesus’ Wife Gospel” is dependent upon and fabricated from the only surviving Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic gospel penned in 4th-century Egypt. Pride of place belongs to Prof. Francis Watson at Durham University [UK] for making this connection. Dr. Watson also argued that a rare word break in the Gospel of Thomas had been carried over unchanged into the Jesus' wife fragment. The equivalent in English would be a hyphenated word (due to a line break) being copied exactly onto the copyist’s text. Only a person lacking rudimentary English skills would leave the hyphen intact when the word’s two-halves were united; that’s essentially what’s happen here. It suggests a forgery. Evidently Dr. King’s “Jesus’ Wife Fragment” is a cut-and-paste job made from sections copied from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas and rearranged in order to depict Jesus as married.

Evidence of a Modern Forgery

Now Andrew Bernhard of Oxford University has found further evidence of forgery. Andrew Brown, writing in The Guardian, (UK) explains the findings. Bernhard “discovered that the Jesus' wife manuscript copies a typo in one of the most widely distributed electronic copies of the gospel of Thomas.”

Prof. Michael Grondin

What Bernhard “seems to have shown is the exact copy from which the [Jesus’ Wife] text was taken. This is the interlinear translation [of Thomas’ Gospel] made by Michael Grondin, which is freely available online.” Prof. Grondin made the text “available either as a downloadable PDF file, or as a straight web page, and the PDF version is missing one letter in one of the words reproduced in the Jesus' wife fragment. The web version does not have this mistake. But the Jesus' wife fragment does, which shows pretty clearly that it could not have been composed before the PDF was available, no matter how old the papyrus turns out to be on which it was written,” Andrew Brown explains. [A. Brown, The Guardian, UK, Tues., 16 Oct. 2012] It’s possible that the papyrus material itself is 4th century; but what about the Coptic text? The replicated “typo” shows the Jesus' wife text can only be as old as the online document from which it seems to have been copied,” says Brown.

“The Final Straw…the Smoking Gun”

As far as Duke University’s Dr. Mark Goodacre is concerned this latest finding showing that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment reproduces a typo from PDF of the interlinear of Coptic Gospel of Thomas is the straw that broke the camel's back. Taken together with previous evidence linking the “Jesus’ Wife Fragment” with the Coptic version of Thomas’ Gospel, he concludes that the Jesus’ Wife Gospel is a very recent forgery. Employing another metaphor, Dr. Goodacre asks “Is this the smoking gun? It certainly looks like the author of the …Jesus’ Wife fragment betrays his or her knowledge of Mike Grondin’s interlinear by reproducing this one, rare typographical error, resulting in strange Coptic.” Dr. Michael Grondin first posted the PDF version on Nov. 11, 2002; hence that is the earliest possible date for the fragment’s fabrication. Based on this accumulated evidence many scholars conclude that the text of the “Jesus’ Wife Gospel” is not a product of the 4th century; rather, it is a forgery, produced within the last decade!

Internet Facilitates Forgery

Andrew Brown points out that the availability of online tools for analyzing Coptic (and other ancient languages) makes forgery easy. Brown’s survey of online “Gnostic scholarship shows that there has never been a better time to make your own gospels. Fantastic software tools are freely available: grammars & dictionaries of Coptic & ancient Greek; keyboard layouts to enable them to be easily written on a modern computer; word-by-word translations of the ancient texts so that you can copy (or paste) their styles.” [A. Brown, The Guardian, UK, Tues., 16 Oct. 2012] The “bottom line” is that, given the online tools available, producing a fragment like “Jesus’ Wife Gospel” is simple for anyone with a basic knowledge of the Coptic language—the Internet facilitates forgery. If, as seems likely, ink tests confirm that the Jesus’ Wife text is fake, “it would represent an extraordinary tale of how an amateur with [virtually] no knowledge of a long-dead language could fool some of the world's leading experts by using a readily available Internet tool,” writes Jeremy Hsu [J. Hsu, Tech News Daily, 16 Oct., 2012]

Spectacular Claims require Spectacular Evidence

Given this situation the onus ought to be upon scholars, like Prof. King to prove authenticity of documents such as the “Jesus’ Wife Gospel” beyond all reasonable doubt prior publicizing their claims. Here (as elsewhere) “spectacular claims require spectacular evidence.” Moreover Harvard University ought to require that level of evidence before publicizing or publishing research results. Thus far Prof. Karen King has fallen far short of that standard.

Harvard’s “Jesus’ Wife” Debacle

Brown observes that the “Jesus’ Wife Gospel” “will surely not be the last fake gospel fragment to be published, though it may well be the last endorsed by a Harvard professor.” [A. Brown, The Guardian, UK, Tues., 16 Oct. 2012] Andrew Brown is hopeful that Prof. King & Harvard University have learned something from their “Jesus’ Wife debacle.” Time will tell.