King did more than produce a fallback, or understudy, for the Wife fragment, should lab tests or other new evidence unmask it as a fraud. She hastily reversed years of her own scholarship to create a new historical context for belief in its authenticity. The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, it turns out, isn’t the first ancient text to depict a wedded Jesus, she was now saying. The Gospel of Philip is. This reversal was all the more remarkable because the Wife fragment’s chief selling point—the one that vaulted it into the headlines in 2012—was King’s claim that “no extant early Christian writing other
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