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

by Ariel Sabar

When I took a finer-grained look at the two articles, I noticed telling word changes in some of the duplicate sentences. In the HTR draft she published online in 2012, King voiced a note of caution. The Greek and Coptic words for “companion” in Philip “could,” as one possibility, imply marriage and sex. Five months later, for NTS, she said those same words “often do” imply those things. In less than half a year, an ancient word’s sexual connotation had gone from a possibility to a frequent occurrence. But that wasn’t all. In her draft for HTR, she wrote, “It is therefore plausible to read this passage as a reference by Jesus to Mary Magdalene as ‘his lover.’ ” Five months later, for NTS, she wrote, “It is therefore plausible to read this passage as a reference by Jesus to Mary Magdalene as ‘his spouse.’ ” The reason for the switch from “lover” to “spouse” is unclear, because the footnotes, which exclusively cite the translation “lover,” are identical in both articles.

No one knew it at the time, but King submitted the article to NTS shortly after receiving another jolt of disturbing news about the Wife papyrus. The month before, Malcolm Choat—the distinguished Australian papyrologist whom King had privately consulted—sent her and HTR a report that cast serious doubt on Bagnall’s dating of the handwriting. After spending two days examining the papyrus firsthand—far longer than Bagnall and Luijendijk combined—Choat found no basis for their conclusion that the handwriting dated to the fourth century. In fact, he wrote, the hand bore no similarity to literary (including biblical) papyri “of any period.” Nor did it resemble the hands of fourth-century documentary manuscripts, or those of informal, magical or school manuscripts of any era—an extraordinarily diverse set of styles spanning multiple centuries. Choat, who was one of the world’s foremost Coptic papyrologists, stopped short of calling the hand alone proof of forgery. But in diplomatic prose, he had blown a hole through the main supports for the fourth-century date. When Luijendijk, too, failed to come u...

The timing of King’s epiphany about the Gospel of Philip seemed more than coincidence: if she reversed her long-standing view on Philip before scientists exposed the Wife fragment as a fake, the story she wanted to tell about the “alternative tradition” of a married Jesus would have other legs to stand on. NTS published “The Place of the Gospel of Philip in the Context of Early Christian Claims About Jesus’ Marital Status” in its October 2013 issue. Six months later, King’s HTR piece would footnote it no fewer than five tim...

King did more than produce a fallback, or understudy, for the Wife fragment, should lab tests or other new evidence unmask it as a fraud. She hastily reversed years of her own scholarship to create a new historical context for belief in its authenticity. The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, it turns out, isn’t the first ancient text to depict a wedded Jesus, she was now saying. The Gospel of Philip is. This reversal was all the more remarkable because the Wife fragment’s chief selling point—the one that vaulted it into the headl...

Over months of reporting, I asked a wide range of Gnosticism experts whether any serious scholar saw the Gospel of Philip as portraying Jesus and Mary Magdalene as actual husband and wife. The question was usually met with a pained look or an awkward silence, even among admirers of King’s other work. “It was mentioned in The Da Vinci Code,” one told me. Like several other scholars, he sheepishly poin...

King’s predicament was that she called herself a historian. She demanded that people be “accountable” to facts and history, though she herself believed in neither.