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

by Ariel Sabar

The top was clean and virtually straight, while the sides were frayed. The bottom, meanwhile, was a snaggle of saw-toothed serrations. If a dealer had, say, purposely resected a rectangle from the middle of a page, why the wildly different cuts? The location of the edges was of no small importance; if the fragment was meant as a window onto the past, the edges were the window’s frame, its viewfinder. They encouraged the eye to begin in one place and to end in another. So it was odd, Lewis thought, that the line about Jesus’s wife was right in the middle, where it couldn’t be missed. It looked less like a random piece from a larger page than like a blank scrap that someone with an eye for framing had later written on. “If this is authentic,” Lewis thought, “it’s the weirdest thing.”