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

by Ariel Sabar

What the editor of New Testament Studies (NTS) didn’t know was that King’s article wasn’t completely original. In fact, it was in large measure a cut-and-paste of the draft Harvard Theological Review (HTR) paper King published on a Harvard website the day of the Rome announcement—the paper, that is, that HTR had provisionally accepted but wasn’t publishing until the science came back. When I set the articles side by side, I noticed that King had taken nearly nine pages from the HTR article that dealt with the Gospel of Philip. Then, with minimal reworking, she dropped them into her new piece for NTS. The submission appeared to conflict with both journals’ posted editorial policies, which bar consideration of articles that have been submitted elsewhere. John Barclay, a British theologian who was NTS’s editor, told me he was unaware of the article’s origins or its substantial overlap with King’s publicly posted Gospel of Jesus’s Wife draft until I mentioned them in a November 2016 email. King never told him, despite a Cambridge University Press ethics policy requiring authors to “acknowledge and cite” parts of submitted articles that “overlap” with articles submitted or published elsewhere and “to provide the editor with a copy of any submitted manuscript that might contain overlapping or closely related content.” A 2019 update of the policy calls the practice “self-plagiarism.” King did not respond to my questions about the submissions.