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

by Ariel Sabar

The panel met with many divinity professors. But the more it investigated, the more its members saw a department on the Yard as the surest path to respectability for religious studies at Harvard—and to excitement from undergraduates. “Harvard, with its rich legacy and immense resources in the field of religious studies, has the opportunity to create a model for the study of religion,” the committee wrote in its final report. “Yet our committee sensed from the president, deans, and others we consulted that, increasingly,” Harvard seemed “underpowered for this task….The absence of a religious studies department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard is, in our view, a troubling omission for a university of such comprehensive distinction across a broad range of the humanities and social sciences.”