In 2012 there was global interest in a small Coptic fragment the size of a business card that records Jesus saying the words “my wife.” The fragment was presented to a group of scholars at a Coptology conference in Rome by Dr. Karen King of Harvard Divinity School, who herself had received it from a private collector. This presentation naturally drew immediate media attention. Very soon after this, it was discerned to be a forgery. But the story of how that was progressively uncovered, and also how some at Harvard, including King, resisted such a conclusion, is nothing short of remarkable. Recently, a journalist named Ariel Sabar, who was there in Rome back in 2012, and who had been chronicling all of the unfolding events for years, finally wrote it all up in a book, called Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (New York: Doubleday, 2020). It’s a remarkable read, full of so many weird twists and turns. Sabar originally wrote a much shorter piece for the Atlantic back in 2016, which contains the original unveiling of the secret identity of the private collector who gave the manuscript to King, who was also quite likely the forger of the document—Walter Fritz. Here is the link to that Atlantic piece.
One of the significant scholarly contributions along the way in determining that the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife was a forgery came from Dr. Christian Askeland, who earned a PhD from Cambridge University in New Testament textual criticism with a focus on the Coptic manuscripts of the Gospel of John. Dr. Askeland was able to definitively prove that a separate Coptic fragment, which also came from Mr. Fritz, was certainly a forgery. In this episode, Dr. John Anthony Dunne and Dr. Logan Williams are joined by Dr. Askeland to discuss his involvement in, and his perspective on, this crazy saga.
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