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

by Ariel Sabar

The timing of King’s epiphany about the Gospel of Philip seemed more than coincidence: if she reversed her long-standing view on Philip before scientists exposed the Wife fragment as a fake, the story she wanted to tell about the “alternative tradition” of a married Jesus would have other legs to stand on. NTS published “The Place of the Gospel of Philip in the Context of Early Christian Claims About Jesus’ Marital Status” in its October 2013 issue. Six months later, King’s HTR piece would footnote it no fewer than five times, using it to casually state—as a matter of unqualified, established record—that Philip depicts Jesus’s “marriage with Mary Magdalene.”