It’s a barely believable tale, crazier than a tweed-sniffer in the faculty lounge. “Veritas,” Sabar’s exhausting, madcap, unforgettable book about this fiasco, is for enthusiasts of ancient Christianity, as well as anyone who likes watching snooty academics brought low and readers of idea-driven capers, whether by Daniel Silva or Janet Malcolm. King was mum on who the stranger from Florida was who had given her the fragment, but the writer Ariel Sabar, using sophisticated tools like Google, uncovered that it was one Walter Fritz, a former director of the Stasi Museum in East Germany with a fake Egyptology degree whose businesses included charging for online videos of his wife having sex with other men, and who, more than three weeks before King’s bombshell announcement about the papyrus, had registered the web domain. This “gospel” was worldwide news - before skeptical papyrologists and grammarians, in one case drawing on the research of an amateur Coptic obsessive working in his Macomb, Mich., basement, showed it to be a complete fake. “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” as it became known, tapped into a plot point from “The Da Vinci Code” that had already helped King’s academic treatise on Mary Magdalene become a best seller with a mass audience.
In 2012, the Harvard scholar Karen King announced what she believed to be an extraordinary discovery: a second-century papyrus fragment with a text hinting that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. Powers, a Minnesota native, also reviews for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.VERITAS A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife By Ariel Sabar It would be unfair to tell you, for, in truth, the book is as good as a detective novel, possessing plot, subplots, hidden motives, bees in eccentric bonnets and startling revelations. Why did King suddenly change her mind about the authenticity of the scrap of papyrus and decide to accept it? Why did she move so quickly in presenting it to the world? But there is more to this story than wishful thinking. You could not find a better demonstration of the central truth about forgeries: that historical verisimilitude does not lie in reflecting the sensibility of the past but rather in fulfilling the persuasions and aspirations of the present.
But, oddly enough, that did not diminish its significance for King, who was convinced, whatever the evidence, that Jesus’ married state and Mary’s role as prominent disciple had been covered up by the misogynist Church Fathers. Without revealing the denouement of this astonishing tale, I can say that, thanks to Sabar’s tenacious sleuthing in his new book “Veritas,” we find that the “collector” was a German, a former director of a museum in the former Stasi headquarters in Berlin, an operator who hijacked an auto-parts business, and a pornographer who ran a series of websites featuring his wife (“America’s #1 Slut”) having sex with other men.Įventually - and inevitably - the fragment was proved to be a fake. (“The papyrus fragment seems ripe for a Monty Python sketch,” commented one naysayer.)Ī lot. Shortcuts and expediency reigned: The people who could have vouched for the fragment’s provenance were all dead the papyrus was not subjected to technical analysis peer reviews of her paper were conducted by friendly scholars and dissenting views were suppressed. Her paper on the supposed gospel was rushed into the queue for publication in the Harvard Theological Review. Moving quickly, she prepared a paper for presentation at a conference in Rome - giving the tiny fragment the exalted and decidedly buzzy title, “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” She starred in a Smithsonian Channel documentary on the discovery’s implications. Despite further e-mails, she did not bite - until, seemingly out of the blue, she did. (She had welcomed “The Da Vinci Code” and served as a consultant for the movie.)Īt first it seemed too good to be true and King dismissed the fragment as a modern forgery. Read with a willing eye, they suggested that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that she was one of Jesus’ chosen spiritual leaders - two notions that greatly appealed to King. In 2010 she received an e-mail from a “collector” who claimed to have an ancient fragment of papyrus containing a few incomplete lines written in Coptic from the early Christian era.
Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife by Ariel Sabar
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