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

by Ariel Sabar

IT WAS PERHAPS NOTHING MORE than coincidence, but I noticed later that the date of Fritz’s first email to King—July 9, 2010—was 114 years, to the day, after German scholars announced their discovery of the Gospel of Mary. The figure 114 is instantly recognizable to experts on the noncanonical gospels. It’s the number of Jesus’s sayings in the Gospel of Thomas, the text from which scholars believe a modern forger harvested the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. Thomas’s 114th saying, moreover, happens to contain the most notorious instance of misogyny in early Christian literature: “Simon Peter said to them, ‘Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘I myself shall lead her in order to make her male.’ ” The email’s timing, if deliberate, was a stroke of genius by a man who’d already shown himself a master of minimalism. With a single number that must have been little more than an inside joke, he had linked his fake gospel to the authentic ones with which he’d built it (Thomas) and lured his mark (Mary).