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

by Ariel Sabar

If the Nile was a sumptuous cradle for papyrus, the desert was a cosseting grave. The parched, nearly lifeless sands sheltered the writings of the ancients from the depredations—insects, rain, air—that crumbled and pulped papyri sent to other parts of the world. Scribes who put pen to papyrus, unlike those who put chisel to rock, harbored no hope of lapidary longevity. Like paper today, papyrus was a throwaway medium. And throw it away Egyptians did, dumping it in rubbish heaps like the one outside Oxyrhynchus or abandoning it to the winds as they left one settlement for another. The irony isn’t lost on papyrologists: the manuscripts that desert refugees most cherished—the ones they carried to new homes in the cities—vaporized under wet skies and the trample of urban life, while the ones they forsook in the desert endured. It was no surprise that the first papyrus Roger Bagnall translated and published, in an eminent journal, was a late third-century hardware receipt. “This papyrus contains a virtually complete order for nails,” the twenty-one-year-old Bagnall began.