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

by Ariel Sabar

Coptic, like other ancient languages, was composed in scriptio continua, with no spaces or punctuation between words. Scholars encountering such texts sixteen hundred years later had to decide whether, say, “madamimadam” meant “Madam, I’m Adam” or “Mad am I, Madam!”—or “Mad? Am I mad?” with the final “am” perhaps the first letters of the next word. In damaged texts missing all their margins, scriptio continua was like a word search puzzle; scholars had unusual freedom to decide where one word ended and the next began. And this was key, King felt, to explaining what most Coptologists saw as Line 6’s impossible double conjugation. If you transposed the “Never does” into a different Coptic dialect, it could mean “Let.” And if you left out the line’s last two letters, the “always does” morphed into an extremely rare Coptic word for “swell.” It took a few tries, but King found an error-free way to parse the text. Line 6 didn’t say, “Never does man who is wicked always does bring.” It said, Let wicked people swell up.