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

by Ariel Sabar

When I took a finer-grained look at the two articles, I noticed telling word changes in some of the duplicate sentences. In the HTR draft she published online in 2012, King voiced a note of caution. The Greek and Coptic words for “companion” in Philip “could,” as one possibility, imply marriage and sex. Five months later, for NTS, she said those same words “often do” imply those things. In less than half a year, an ancient word’s sexual connotation had gone from a possibility to a frequent occurrence. But that wasn’t all. In her draft for HTR, she wrote, “It is therefore plausible to read this passage as a reference by Jesus to Mary Magdalene as ‘his lover.’ ” Five months later, for NTS, she wrote, “It is therefore plausible to read this passage as a reference by Jesus to Mary Magdalene as ‘his spouse.’ ” The reason for the switch from “lover” to “spouse” is unclear, because the footnotes, which exclusively cite the translation “lover,” are identical in both articles.