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

by Ariel Sabar

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.