In the weeks since Harvard historian Karen King unveiled the papyrus fragment dubbed “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” evidence rapidly mounted that the scrap could be a forgery. The latest discovery: The fragment, which contains snippets from the Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas, replicates a small error found in an online version of that text.
Andrew Bernhard was, from what I understand, the first to suggest that the fragment was based on that version; he explains his findings in some detail on his website (PDF). Here’s the quick overview from Duke professor Mark Goodacre:
One of the difficulties with the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife fragment is that it appears to be dependent, on every line, on words and phrases from our one extant Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas (See Francis Watson’s articles; see too Leo Depuydt’s forthcoming report; see also Andrew Bernhard). The difficulties that this poses for the authenticity of the fragment are serious (see my reflections).
Now, one of the questions that this has raised is how a forger might have gone about his or her business. A week or so ago, Andrew Bernhard raised the intriguing possibility that the forger might have been dependent not on a printed edition of Coptic Thomas, as many of us had thought, but on Michael Grondin’s Interlinear Coptic-English Translation of the Gospel of Thomas.
For a while, this was no more than an interesting piece of speculation. But in the interest of exploring it further, I raised questions on the Gospel of Thomas e-list about places where the fragment might show knowledge of Grondin’s Interlinear, including [a dropped character] on the first line of the fragment. This is an oddity that was difficult to fathom. Why was the fragment’s author missing out this direct-object marker, especially if he was dependent on Coptic Thomas which includes it?
Go here for the rest of Goodacre’s post and here for Bernhard’s full argument.
October 11th, 2012 | 2:37 pm
This is something it doesn’t take a Coptic scholar to understand. It made me think of the 60 Minutes report on the Chinese company Huawei in which it was said, “Cisco Systems once accused Huawei of copying a network router, complete with design flaws and typos in the manual.” It’s pretty difficult to deny you have copied something when your version has the same typos in it as the original!
I admit to being disappointed that it now appears extremely likely that the fragment is a forgery, not because I think it would have changed anything at all if it had been genuine, but because it seemed to me so many people desperately wanted it to be a forgery for foolish reasons, and now they feel vindicated. I can certainly see why a great many Christians would not want to see evidence that Jesus had been married, but this fragment, had it been indisputably authentic, would not have been evidence that Jesus was married. Karen King said that emphatically from the outset.
October 11th, 2012 | 4:38 pm
[...] saw this at First Things: Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: Forgery Confirmed? Thursday, October 11, 2012 Anna Williams In the weeks [...]
October 11th, 2012 | 5:12 pm
[...] Stuff « Wow! The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife…October 11, 2012 By Mark Shea 3 Comments…is now a confirmed forgery. Replicates blunders from an online version of the gospel of Thomas it was ripped off from.Will the [...]
October 11th, 2012 | 5:29 pm
To me, this is just proof that Karen King, like most of her generation, doesn’t even understand technology enough to hide the traces of plagerism.
October 11th, 2012 | 7:39 pm
[...] Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: Forgery Confirmed? – Anna Williams, First Things/First Thoughts [...]
October 12th, 2012 | 5:31 am
[...] See Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: Forgery Confirmed? » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog. [...]
October 12th, 2012 | 8:34 am
A forgery of a forgery would be a forgery.
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