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

by Ariel Sabar

Whether or not there was active coordination between King, the divinity school and the president’s office, the timing of Faust’s rebuff of her own panel raises the question of whether she saw King’s history-making discovery as at least partial proof that the school could right itself. If Harvard Divinity School could produce scholarship worthy of the front page of The New York Times, it could do anything. Never in the newspaper’s 161-year history had Harvard Divinity School research been the main subject of a front-page story. This possible secondary motive—survival, her own, her school’s—could explain King’s sudden interest in a papyrus she’d already spurned, as well as her baffling rush to announce in the face of two ominous peer reviews, ones that in any other circumstance might have slowed a scholar down. It could explain other things, too: the refusal to name Fritz or release his provenance documents, even though she was free to do so; the desire to publish in a Harvard journal whose editors she could keep an eye on; the decision to forgo scientific testing ahead of her announcement; the absence of photos at her presentation in Rome; the choice afterward of scientists whose chief qualifications were their undisclosed personal allegiances; the bid to sideline Depuydt and block journalists’ access to outside voices as a condition for exclusives; the failure to release images of Fritz’s Gospel of John fragment, images that surfaced a full year and a half after Rome, by a...