Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife

by Ariel Sabar

FOR MORE THAN FIFTEEN CENTURIES, Christian authorities had equated sex—and, in turn, women—with sin. For centuries, preachers and theologians taught believers to feel shame and revulsion at the most human of yearnings. If evidence existed that Jesus married and chose his wife as a disciple—or even just that some early Christians believed he did—it would bring unprecedented scrutiny to how and why this vilification of sex prevailed. The celibacy of clergy and the exclusion of women from the priesthood were predicated, in no small part, on the presumption of Jesus’s bachelorhood and on his choice of only male apostles. If a group of early Christians saw Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s wife, it might explain why the Church went to such lengths to recast her as a prostitute—a tearful outcast who washes Jesus’s feet with perfumed hair after repenting her sins.

The expedition was, for Napoleon, a rare military fiasco. Under the cover of an August night in 1799, he slipped onto a frigate back to Europe, leaving Egypt to chaos and his soldiers to privation and mutiny. Napoleon could claim for his misadventure just one triumph: it had opened the land of the Pharaohs to the exploits of Western scholars. Along with arms, ships and soldiers, Napoleon had ferried with him from France some 170 intellectuals, or savants—some of the most luminous scientists, artists and engineers of his day. The savants returned with drawings of Egyptian wonders, from the tombs at Luxor to the zodiac at Dendera. A company of French soldiers expanding a fort near the town of Rosetta, meanwhile, uncovered a slab of polished granite engraved with three parallel blocks of text: one in Egyptian hieroglyphs; one in Greek; and one in demotic, a precursor to Coptic. The slab would become known as the Rosetta Stone. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion used its side-by-side translations to crack the code of hieroglyphics, opening the writings of the ancient Egyptians to the modern world. The savants published their extraordinary finds in a set of twenty-three volumes, Description de l’Égypte, that effectively established the field of Egyptology and lofted Europe into the throes of “Egyptomania.”

Through this fog of venom, it was hard for modern scholars to get a true picture of the Gnostic texts. It was as if, say, every copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses had been destroyed and all a prospective reader could go on—to see if it was any good—were the reviews of critics who hated it. The one certainty was that these second-century bishops succeeded in elevating their model of Christianity to orthodoxy while demoting their rivals’ to heresy. The Roman Catholic Church eventually sainted Epiphanius and Irenaeus, honoring them as “Church Fathers.” The Gnostic gospels they raged against, meanwhile, vanished from places of worship. If anyone in antiquity recorded the means of destruction—whether it was by burning, burial or neglect—their accounts don’t survive.

HOW COULD THE COLLECTOR have missed the translation’s most striking line? Why had his first email pointed to “an argument about Mary,” rather than the showstopping “Jesus said this to them: My wife”? It didn’t matter. The fragment distilled all the themes King found most compelling in the Gospel of Mary, then went them one better. Its twist—about Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s wife and disciple—redeemed the wrongly maligned Magdalene twice over; challenged Church teachings on priestly celibacy and women’s leadership; and filled one of the biggest holes in gospel accounts of Jesus’s life. It was the missing link between texts King had spent decades writing and talking about. She made up her mind before so much as translating the fragment herself: Coptic Papyrus 02-11 was a modern forgery.

For as long as Christians have found God in the written word, the written word has given forgers the power to play God. No doubt some pretenders had the holiest of intentions, like the anonymous second-century author who wrote 3 Corinthians in the name of the apostle Paul. Later fakes, like the Donation of Constantine, were naked power grabs. The Roman emperor’s “inviolable gift” of political supremacy to the Church shaped centuries of history before an Italian literary critic studying its crude Latin in the sixteenth century unmasked it as a medieval forgery.

Jesus speaking of a wife was exciting, to be sure. But King had been around long enough to be wary of artifacts that looked too good to be true. “Okay, Jesus married? I thought, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ ” she said. “Just the idea of it, you know?” But something else unnerved her, too. “The name of Harvard University carries a weight, and so one wants to be very careful about how one uses that kind of influence and prestige,” she said. “I was highly suspicious that the Harvard imprimatur was being asked to be put on something that then would be worth a lot of money.”

The papyrus’s small size reminded Luijendijk of the scraps she wrote her dissertation about, the fragments of private letters that archaeologists had found in fifteen-hundred-year-old garbage dumps outside Oxyrhynchus, a provincial capital built by prosperous Greek settlers. Some ancient might have trashed this papyrus, too, Luijendijk thought, either because its ideas fell out of favor or simply because a scribe made a fresh copy when this one wore out. Luijendijk had recently published a paper titled “Sacred Scriptures as Trash: Biblical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus.” It argued that Christians might have deliberately torn up holy writings to desacralize them before disposal. “That is exactly the look that we have here,” she said of the collector’s Coptic Papyrus 02-11. “It is clear if you look at the edges of this papyrus that these are ancient breaks.” She had come to see the fragment through the “garbological” lens of her latest scholarship. “It would be impossible to forge,” she thought.

The earliest known papyrus manuscript dates to about 2900 B.C. But it wasn’t until Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 B.C. that demand for papyri boomed. The vast territories under Greek—and soon Roman—rule required heaps of paperwork to administer, and no land produced papyrus like Egypt, where the swamp-dwelling plant flourished in full sun on the banks of the Nile. To turn Cyperus papyrus into a writing surface, Egyptians sliced its long triangular stalks into thin strips, moistened them with river water, then pressed a horizontal layer across a vertical one. The plant’s natural glues bonded the layers together, and the sheets hardened in the sun.

If the Nile was a sumptuous cradle for papyrus, the desert was a cosseting grave. The parched, nearly lifeless sands sheltered the writings of the ancients from the depredations—insects, rain, air—that crumbled and pulped papyri sent to other parts of the world. Scribes who put pen to papyrus, unlike those who put chisel to rock, harbored no hope of lapidary longevity. Like paper today, papyrus was a throwaway medium. And throw it away Egyptians did, dumping it in rubbish heaps like the one outside Oxyrhynchus or abandoning it to the winds as they left one settlement for another. The irony isn’t lost on papyrologists: the manuscripts that desert refugees most cherished—the ones they carried to new homes in the cities—vaporized under wet skies and the trample of urban life, while the ones they forsook in the desert endured. It was no surprise that the first papyrus Roger Bagnall translated and published, in an eminent journal, was a late third-century hardware receipt. “This papyrus contains a virtually complete order for nails,” the twenty-one-year-old Bagnall began.

AT FIRST GLANCE, the Gnostic texts have much in common with the books of the New Testament. They deploy many of the same characters: Jesus, the twelve apostles, Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene. They grapple with similar themes: sin, salvation, the beginning and end of the world. But when you zoom in, you see a world that is darker and bleaker, a dystopia of ignorance, alienation and corruption. As the Gnostics would have it, most people drift through life in a dream state, blind to the constructed nature of reality and enslaved by the deception. This counterfeit world, in the Gnostic telling, was built by none other than the God of the Hebrew Bible, the Creator in the book of Genesis who summons heaven and earth “in the beginning.” To the Gnostics, this God is a demiurgic pretender, a lion-faced serpent who debases the world with evil rulers and unjust laws and dispatches his demons, the archons, on sinister errands. The true Supreme Being dwells above the creator God, in an ineffable realm called “the Fullness” or “the Light.” Every human being carries a flicker of the Light—a divine spark—within him or her. But the creator God has jailed the spark within the human body to blind people to “the truth of their freedom.” A believer finds salvation by looking within, finding the spark and reuniting it with its “root” in the Light. But only a spiritual elite has the capacity for such depths of introspection. (Gnosis is the Greek word for “knowledge.”)

In the Old Testament, the material world is God’s bountiful creation; the human body, God’s image. But in Gnostic scripture, both world and body are soul-killing prisons, and this basic premise anchors its theology. If the body plays no part in the divinity of Christians, then martyrdom—as well as human suffering more broadly—does not advance salvation. If Jesus’s physical body is nothing more than a straitjacket for his divine spark, then nothing about Jesus that was holy died on the cross and no flesh was resurrected. “The one into whose hands and feet they are driving nails is his fleshly part, the substitute for him,” Jesus says in the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, a Nag Hammadi text. “I was laughing at their ignorance.”

The turn of the twenty-first century brought proof that Western culture was ready for yet another Magdalene. In March 2003, a little-known novelist named Dan Brown published a thriller about a fictional Harvard professor who uncovers a centuries-old Catholic plot to conceal evidence of Jesus’s marriage to—and daughter with—Mary Magdalene. The Da Vinci Code went on to become a wildly successful international best seller.

The literati turned up their noses at the book’s prose. Scholars bristled at its distortions. And conservative Christians cringed, fumed and published refutations. But the book’s taut plot and clever word games—along with the idea of a mysteriously lost “sacred feminine”—helped move more than eighty million copies, making it one of the best-selling books in history. Though The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, Brown and his wife, Blythe Brown, carried out voluminous research. They took notes from the Gnostic gospels, from dictionaries of codes and symbols and from books about the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar. To lend a veneer of history to the plot’s depiction of Jesus and Magdalene’s marriage, characters quote from both the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary. Brown wanted readers to puzzle over which parts of The Da Vinci Code might be true, a curiosity he stoked with an opening page of historical assertions titled simply “FACT.”

For King, the Da Vinci effect was farther-reaching than any book reviewer had foreseen. It helped turn a scholar whose intellectual passions had been confined to classrooms, academic tracts and the occasional church into a best-selling author with live audiences of hundreds and a television viewership of millions. Yet it put King in a curious bind: On the one hand, The Da Vinci Code was just the latest of more than fifteen hundred years of fictions about Mary Magdalene—and fictions about Magdalene were precisely what King had devoted her career to dispelling. On the other hand, this particular fiction—of Magdalene as Jesus’s wife—had given King a platform bigger than any she had ever known.

A few months earlier the Smithsonian Institution had coined a new slogan, “Seriously Amazing,” to help shake off its musty reputation as “the nation’s attic.”

Religion, like politics, is as delicate a subject for the Smithsonian Institution as it would be at a dinner party. Because of its taxpayer subsidy and the twenty-eight million visits people make each year to its free museums and the National Zoo, the institution fiercely guards its reputation as a scrupulous and impartial purveyor of knowledge. Unlike most cable outlets, the Smithsonian Channel can’t air a new program until it has been scrutinized by a review panel at institution headquarters in Washington, D.C. Smithsonian curators and other subject-matter experts vet each program for both factual accuracy and alignment with the Smithsonian brand.

The top was clean and virtually straight, while the sides were frayed. The bottom, meanwhile, was a snaggle of saw-toothed serrations. If a dealer had, say, purposely resected a rectangle from the middle of a page, why the wildly different cuts? The location of the edges was of no small importance; if the fragment was meant as a window onto the past, the edges were the window’s frame, its viewfinder. They encouraged the eye to begin in one place and to end in another. So it was odd, Lewis thought, that the line about Jesus’s wife was right in the middle, where it couldn’t be missed. It looked less like a random piece from a larger page than like a blank scrap that someone with an eye for framing had later written on. “If this is authentic,” Lewis thought, “it’s the weirdest thing.”

Egyptian scribes stopped using brushes more than two centuries before Christ. By the fourth century A.D., using a brush, rather than a reed pen, to write on papyrus would be like riding a horse on an interstate highway: not impossible, but not likely, either.

Coptic, like other ancient languages, was composed in scriptio continua, with no spaces or punctuation between words. Scholars encountering such texts sixteen hundred years later had to decide whether, say, “madamimadam” meant “Madam, I’m Adam” or “Mad am I, Madam!”—or “Mad? Am I mad?” with the final “am” perhaps the first letters of the next word. In damaged texts missing all their margins, scriptio continua was like a word search puzzle; scholars had unusual freedom to decide where one word ended and the next began. And this was key, King felt, to explaining what most Coptologists saw as Line 6’s impossible double conjugation. If you transposed the “Never does” into a different Coptic dialect, it could mean “Let.” And if you left out the line’s last two letters, the “always does” morphed into an extremely rare Coptic word for “swell.” It took a few tries, but King found an error-free way to parse the text. Line 6 didn’t say, “Never does man who is wicked always does bring.” It said, Let wicked people swell up.

A highly trained scholar wouldn’t need to recycle Thomas to fake a text about Jesus’s wife. They would know enough Coptic, and enough early Christian literature, to write something both believable and original. But a person with limited Coptic—someone, say, who could read a little but not write—would need a crutch. When Bernhard thought about the crutches available for texts in ancient languages, there was just one obvious kind: an interlinear translation, in which each line of original text is followed by the same line in translation. Interlinears aren’t the most common form of translation, but amateur language students sometimes prefer them because they make it easy to link foreign words and phrases, in context, to their English equivalents. Bernhard needed to find a Coptic-to-English interlinear of Thomas. Then he remembered: there was just one. It had been created not by a professional scholar but by an eccentric computer programmer living out his retirement in the suburbs of Detroit.

What if someone assumed that the Coptic words in Grondin’s interlinear were identical to the English ones Grondin had placed beneath them? It would be an easy mistake. His interlinear’s tidy formatting—with every Coptic word astride its seeming English translation—gave an illusion of perfect equivalence. And that’s when Bernhard saw it. The Wife fragment’s Line 6 was a Frankenstein in Coptic, but almost poetry in Grondin’s English. “The forger was thinking in English, not Coptic,” Bernhard realized. The person, whoever he or she was, had set out to write a simple line, “no man who is wicked brings,” which jammed a negation into a well-known saying of Jesus’s about a wicked man bringing forth wickedness. But because “no man who is wicked brings” doesn’t appear in Thomas, the person had to cobble the words from different places in the interlinear’s English—“no man” from one line, “who is wicked” from another, and “brings” from a third. Then he replaced each of the English words with the Coptic above them. The person thought he could make clean swaps of English for Coptic, not realizing that the Coptic words were fused to their neighbors by a grammatical tissue that Grondin didn’t always translate.

That the Wife papyrus was a fragment was perhaps no accident. By creating the impression that it came from a larger manuscript, the forger absolved themselves of having to grammatically link its eight partial lines. Anything larger—never mind a complete gospel—would have left them wholly out of their depth.

Never far from Bernhard’s mind was Secret Mark, seen by many as the greatest Christian hoax of the twentieth century. Debates over its authenticity had scorched biblical studies, turning colleagues against one another and leaving scars that had yet to fully heal. None of it might have happened, Bernhard realized, had scholars moved faster. Morton Smith, perhaps strategically, had waited a decade and a half between disclosing his find and publishing it. By then, the original text had mysteriously vanished. Whether people believed Smith came to hinge more on appraisals of his character and sexual orientation than on the surviving evidence. Some scholars had become so personally invested in Secret Mark’s authenticity that they had begun including it in prestigious anthologies and using it to write history. Bernhard wanted answers about the Wife papyrus before the trail went cold and there was only shouting. His article on Goodacre’s blog came just twenty-three days after King’s announcement. “You’ve got to move before the evidence is disturbed,” Bernhard thought, likening certain kinds of scholarly research to police work. “You don’t want somebody visiting the crime scene and rearranging everything.”

IN THE LATE 1980S and early 1990s, college was essentially free for Germans, who could study at taxpayer expense without ever having to graduate. Some students enrolled for the easy life. A few were so indifferent that they didn’t flip past the first pages of the student catalog before choosing a course of study. Because it began with the German letter Ä, Ägyptologie drew more than its share of goldbricks and dilettantes. What many didn’t realize was that Egyptology was a notoriously complex subject, requiring mastery of thousands of years of ancient history, as well as a command of art, architecture, archaeology and literature, along with multiple stages of the Egyptian language, from hieroglyphics to Coptic. Students hoping to sail through a few diverting lectures on pyramids and mummies were in for a shock. To top it off, job prospects in the field were close to zero. Within a few months a starting class of twenty Egyptology students could easily dwindle to just four or five. A magister’s degree took at least four to five years to complete and required grueling oral exams, a four-hour written test and a lengthy thesis. The Free University might graduate an Egyptology magister’s student just once every couple of years.

IT WAS PERHAPS NOTHING MORE than coincidence, but I noticed later that the date of Fritz’s first email to King—July 9, 2010—was 114 years, to the day, after German scholars announced their discovery of the Gospel of Mary. The figure 114 is instantly recognizable to experts on the noncanonical gospels. It’s the number of Jesus’s sayings in the Gospel of Thomas, the text from which scholars believe a modern forger harvested the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. Thomas’s 114th saying, moreover, happens to contain the most notorious instance of misogyny in early Christian literature: “Simon Peter said to them, ‘Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘I myself shall lead her in order to make her male.’ ” The email’s timing, if deliberate, was a stroke of genius by a man who’d already shown himself a master of minimalism. With a single number that must have been little more than an inside joke, he had linked his fake gospel to the authentic ones with which he’d built it (Thomas) and lured his mark (Mary).

I let him go on for a while, but I was stupefied. I was investigating a suspected forgery, and the man at its center was asking me to “make a lot of stuff up” for a new project in which he’d be my eager accomplice. The proposal was so tone-deaf that I wondered whether he was clueless, incorrigible or up to something I couldn’t yet discern. I reminded him that I was a journalist, not a novelist. I wrote fact, not fiction. Nor could I relinquish research to or accept services from the subject of a story.

what if a scholar were so steeped in its principles that he or she used them in situations for which they were never quite intended? The question of what a phrase like “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’ ” means could well have multiple, equally valid answers for different readers in different eras. But the question of whether the fragment is authentic has only one. Either it was written in antiquity, or it wasn’t; either it was part of some larger manuscript, or it wasn’t. The same was true of provenance. Either the fragment had a previous owner named Laukamp who showed it to Munro and Fecht, or it did not. Yet the more I read of King’s work, the more I wondered how much of a distinction she made between literary analysis and historical investigation.

It wasn’t just that any heartfelt story could be called true. It was that readers could take part in embellishing it, in making it their own. Because so many gospel stories were open-ended, she wrote, they “put pressure” on readers to become “authors and even characters.” They invite the reader—a “writer to be”—“to continue the story, tie up loose ends, fill in gaps, or create side paths,” which included “adding episodes, filling out the fate of characters [and] wholesale rewriting.” She called facts “little tyrants” and accused people who put too much stock in them of “fact fundamentalism.”

Midway through its 1993 book, I discovered, the Jesus Seminar reported a related finding: “Jesus did not advocate celibacy. A majority of the Fellows doubted, in fact, that Jesus himself was celibate. They regard it as probable that he had a special relationship with at least one woman, Mary of Magdala.” A decade before The Da Vinci Code—and two decades before the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife—a group that counted King as its leading light was publicly broadcasting its view that Jesus was married, possibly to Mary Magdalene.

for all of King and Funk’s talk of the liberatory power of history, it wasn’t clear that either of them actually believed in history—not in the way most people did. King wasn’t sure that facts or linear time existed, and Funk argued that all history was fabrication. “The Bible, along with all our histories, is a fiction,” Funk said in his inaugural 1985 speech to the Jesus Seminar. Like all stories, the Bible was a series of “arbitrary” selections by an author who picked characters and events, then forced them into a causal chain with beginning, middle and end. It was only by exposing the Bible’s fictive underpinnings that scholars could conjure a new, better tale.

Brushes with the abyss were a mainstay of her character. Whether hiking alone in unfamiliar mountains, biking solo down the West Coast after college or slipping into communist East Germany to study unpublished transcripts of the Nag Hammadi gospels, “she wanted to see if she had the toughness and intelligence to walk right up to the edge of danger and remain in control,” her first husband, Barry Chandler, said, when we met in Montana. “Seeking experiences, even dangerous ones, was a basic part of her personality.”

“The true con artist doesn’t force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn’t steal. We give. He doesn’t have to threaten us. We supply the story ourselves. We believe because we want to, not because anyone made us. And so we offer up whatever they want—money, reputation, trust, fame, legitimacy, support—and we don’t realize what is happening until it is too late.”

Peer reviewers are academia’s highway patrol—the officers who pull over speeders before they hurt themselves and others. The Harvard Theological Review, like other peer-reviewed journals, sends submitted articles to outside experts before deciding whether to publish. The experts assess an article’s validity, quality and originality, then recommend whether to accept the article, reject it, or ask the author for revisions. The goal is to stop bad scholarship from polluting humanity’s store of knowledge. To guard against malice or favoritism, peer review is often double-blind: editors withhold the author’s identity from peer reviewers, and the reviewers’, from the author.

The Latin word on its seal, “Veritas,” referred not to secular facts but to sacred knowledge. The college was christened Harvard after an obscure thirty-one-year-old minister who willed the school some books and money before dying of tuberculosis in a nearby town. But many colonists called it “the School of the Prophets.”

As Harvard president, Drew Faust had an entire university to run. Brush fires at the divinity school didn’t normally rate her time. But the exodus of prominent faculty—and the public lashings they’d given the school on their way out—had gotten her attention. Particularly concerning was news that two recent recruits from Princeton were already on their way out. When Harvard Divinity School hired Marie Griffith and her husband, Leigh Schmidt, in 2009, it hailed the pair as “two of the very best mid-career historians of American religion active in the academy today.” Faust summoned them to her office in Massachusetts Hall a year or so later to ask why they were unhappy.

THE NEXT MONTH, divinity faculty opened their in-boxes to find a disquieting message from the university’s president. “I write to make you aware that I have asked a group of distinguished scholars and academic leaders from outside the University to offer me their advice on how we can strengthen the study of religion at Harvard,” Faust wrote. The six-member panel she assembled included the president of Bryn Mawr College, the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a former dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School and highly esteemed religion professors at Berkeley, Penn and Princeton. Faust charged them with a top-to-bottom review.

The letter raised immediate alarm. “The Harvard Divinity School was very upset,” said one of the advisory panel’s members, who like the other members I interviewed asked for anonymity to speak freely about a sensitive subject. “They simply did not see any way in which anything we recommended didn’t threaten their control over the study of religion.”

Some divinity professors feared that the ultimate aim was to pave the way for a department of religious studies on the Yard, a move that would dim the divinity school’s candle still further by drawing a bright line between professors who did serious scholarship and those who trained ministers. A stand-alone department, that is, would dismantle the divinity school’s central conceit: that theology and religious studies—faith and reason—depended on and reinforced each other. “If they ceded religious studies as a discipline over to the Yard, the struggle for intellectual respectability would be that much harder,” a former divinity professor told me.

The panel met with many divinity professors. But the more it investigated, the more its members saw a department on the Yard as the surest path to respectability for religious studies at Harvard—and to excitement from undergraduates. “Harvard, with its rich legacy and immense resources in the field of religious studies, has the opportunity to create a model for the study of religion,” the committee wrote in its final report. “Yet our committee sensed from the president, deans, and others we consulted that, increasingly,” Harvard seemed “underpowered for this task….The absence of a religious studies department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard is, in our view, a troubling omission for a university of such comprehensive distinction across a broad range of the humanities and social sciences.”

BUT THEN SOMETHING CHANGED. In January 2012, with the committee’s work only half done, Faust’s assistant began sending it signals to back off. “We started getting real pressure not to recommend what we wanted to recommend,” a member of the panel told me. “I mean real pressure.”

FOR ALMOST EVERY REPORTING PROJECT, I make a timeline. It’s usually just a text file with a chronological list of dates and corresponding events. I thicken the chronology as I come across new material, tucking new items between those already in the list. It’s the easiest way, I find, to illuminate the forces that propel people from one chess square in their lives to the next. A move that seems puzzling in isolation can make sense when one discovers what comes right before or after it.

Did a forgery help save Harvard Divinity School?

where others brawled, King maneuvered. On the rare occasions she entered the fray, she had a plan that was already several steps ahead of the opposition. It was how she persuaded the childhood church she’d rejected to sponsor her senior-year trip to Norway. It was how she used a West German government scholarship to fund research in communist East Germany. It was how, as a professor, she made the leap from second-tier California college to the world’s most illustrious university with just one book to her name: her dissertation, published twelve years after graduation and in the nick of time, by a press in which she was a board member and investor. And it was how she conducted herself at Harvard, including her bid to eject Depuydt’s rebuttal from the Harvard Theological Review on the basis of unspecified “commitments” to scientists whose conflicts of interest she failed to disclose.

Whether or not there was active coordination between King, the divinity school and the president’s office, the timing of Faust’s rebuff of her own panel raises the question of whether she saw King’s history-making discovery as at least partial proof that the school could right itself. If Harvard Divinity School could produce scholarship worthy of the front page of The New York Times, it could do anything. Never in the newspaper’s 161-year history had Harvard Divinity School research been the main subject of a front-page story. This possible secondary motive—survival, her own, her school’s—could explain King’s sudden interest in a papyrus she’d already spurned, as well as her baffling rush to announce in the face of two ominous peer reviews, ones that in any other circumstance might have slowed a scholar down. It could explain other things, too: the refusal to name Fritz or release his provenance documents, even though she was free to do so; the desire to publish in a Harvard journal whose editors she could keep an eye on; the decision to forgo scientific testing ahead of her announcement; the absence of photos at her presentation in Rome; the choice afterward of scientists whose chief qualifications were their undisclosed personal allegiances; the bid to sideline Depuydt and block journalists’ access to outside voices as a condition for exclusives; the failure to release images of Fritz’s Gospel of John fragment, images that surfaced a full year and a half after Rome, by a...

Somewhere in her heart, it seemed, King knew that the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife was dead the moment anyone outside her influence looked too closely at it. Rome made clear just how limited that influence was, how limited anyone’s would have been in the same circumstances. But by then it was too late. The papyrus had grown so freighted with cargo—personal, institutional, ideological—that no one on board had the courage, or strength, to pull the emergency brake.

For five years, a scholar and a con man walked shoulder to shoulder, one in darkness, the other in light, evangelists for a lie. It would be wrong to say they had nothing in common. Both were loners from small towns. Both savored risk and resented authority. Both believed in the salvific power of their own intelligence and saw head-to-head conflict as less effective than tactical surprise. But none of these explained it. The key to their improbable union, rather, was an idea on which they’d both found purchase: that truth is in the eye of the beholder. For a confidence man, the idea’s appeal is obvious. A con depends for his livelihood on the propensity of people to see what they want to see. But for a scholar, a professional truth seeker, the calculus is more complex.

The title “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” was a product not of scholarship but of market analysis—a hunt for words that would “stick” with a “general audience.”

How, then, did King explain her failure to investigate provenance amid multiple warnings from colleagues? Why didn’t she do a single scientific test before launching a publicity blitz for the papyrus? Why didn’t she consult a senior Coptic papyrologist, as Roger Bagnall suggested, after the peer reviewer questioned the fragment’s handwriting? Why did she soft-pedal the implausible eighth-century date, seek to sidetrack Depuydt’s rebuttal, refuse to release provenance documents, and bar reporters from contacting other scientists? If this wasn’t “marginalizing the parts one doesn’t like,” what was?

A part of King saw the Wife papyrus—and perhaps had always seen it—much as she had The Da Vinci Code: it was a fiction that advanced a truth. A lie that got people thinking about “the things that really matter.” A tall tale that could be called “true” because its heart was in the right place. In her 2004 interview on MSNBC, King had rhapsodized about “the services” The Da Vinci Code provided. The fictitious thriller showed people “the enormous diversity of early Christianity.” It got people to ask questions about issues—from women’s roles to the basis of church authority—“all being hotly debated in the early church.” Which made me wonder how tolerant King might be of other fakes offering similar “services,” whether by enlarging the audience for her ideas or by raising the profile of Harvard Divinity School—aims not wholly unconnected.

What the editor of New Testament Studies (NTS) didn’t know was that King’s article wasn’t completely original. In fact, it was in large measure a cut-and-paste of the draft Harvard Theological Review (HTR) paper King published on a Harvard website the day of the Rome announcement—the paper, that is, that HTR had provisionally accepted but wasn’t publishing until the science came back. When I set the articles side by side, I noticed that King had taken nearly nine pages from the HTR article that dealt with the Gospel of Philip. Then, with minimal reworking, she dropped them into her new piece for NTS. The submission appeared to conflict with both journals’ posted editorial policies, which bar consideration of articles that have been submitted elsewhere. John Barclay, a British theologian who was NTS’s editor, told me he was unaware of the article’s origins or its substantial overlap with King’s publicly posted Gospel of Jesus’s Wife draft until I mentioned them in a November 2016 email. King never told him, despite a Cambridge University Press ethics policy requiring authors to “acknowledge and cite” parts of submitted articles that “overlap” with articles submitted or published elsewhere and “to provide the editor with a copy of any submitted manuscript that might contain overlapping or closely related content.” A 2019 update of the policy calls the practice “self-plagiarism.” King did not respond to my questions about the submissions.