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

by Ariel Sabar

What if someone assumed that the Coptic words in Grondin’s interlinear were identical to the English ones Grondin had placed beneath them? It would be an easy mistake. His interlinear’s tidy formatting—with every Coptic word astride its seeming English translation—gave an illusion of perfect equivalence. And that’s when Bernhard saw it. The Wife fragment’s Line 6 was a Frankenstein in Coptic, but almost poetry in Grondin’s English. “The forger was thinking in English, not Coptic,” Bernhard realized. The person, whoever he or she was, had set out to write a simple line, “no man who is wicked brings,” which jammed a negation into a well-known saying of Jesus’s about a wicked man bringing forth wickedness. But because “no man who is wicked brings” doesn’t appear in Thomas, the person had to cobble the words from different places in the interlinear’s English—“no man” from one line, “who is wicked” from another, and “brings” from a third. Then he replaced each of the English words with the Coptic above them. The person thought he could make clean swaps of English for Coptic, not realizing that the Coptic words were fused to their neighbors by a grammatical tissue that Grondin didn’t always translate.