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.
