A highly trained scholar wouldn’t need to recycle Thomas to fake a text about Jesus’s wife. They would know enough Coptic, and enough early Christian literature, to write something both believable and original. But a person with limited Coptic—someone, say, who could read a little but not write—would need a crutch. When Bernhard thought about the crutches available for texts in ancient languages, there was just one obvious kind: an interlinear translation, in which each line of original text is followed by the same line in translation. Interlinears aren’t the most common form of translation,
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