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

by Ariel Sabar

No one knew it at the time, but King submitted the article to NTS shortly after receiving another jolt of disturbing news about the Wife papyrus. The month before, Malcolm Choat—the distinguished Australian papyrologist whom King had privately consulted—sent her and HTR a report that cast serious doubt on Bagnall’s dating of the handwriting. After spending two days examining the papyrus firsthand—far longer than Bagnall and Luijendijk combined—Choat found no basis for their conclusion that the handwriting dated to the fourth century. In fact, he wrote, the hand bore no similarity to literary (including biblical) papyri “of any period.” Nor did it resemble the hands of fourth-century documentary manuscripts, or those of informal, magical or school manuscripts of any era—an extraordinarily diverse set of styles spanning multiple centuries. Choat, who was one of the world’s foremost Coptic papyrologists, stopped short of calling the hand alone proof of forgery. But in diplomatic prose, he had blown a hole through the main supports for the fourth-century date. When Luijendijk, too, failed to come up with a good match for the script, King dropped her author credit from the HTR article. “I think she was hoping I would find a better handwriting parallel,” Luijendijk said when we met at Princeton in 2017. “I did a lot of work trying to find a good parallel and I never found it.”