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

by Ariel Sabar

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.”