98 Time August 17/August 24, 2020
TimeOff Books
For a momenT back in 2012, readers around
the world might have thought that Jesus had had a
wife. Karen King, an esteemed professor at Harvard
University’s Divinity School, made headlines when
she revealed what she named “The Gospel of Jesus’
Wife,” a small fragment of papyrus with eight cryp-
tic, incomplete lines in Coptic, including : “Jesus
said to them, My wife.. .” The journalist Ariel Sabar
was on hand in Rome for her attention- grabbing an-
nouncement, which seized the media’s attention
(including this magazine’s), thanks to the tanta-
lizing possibility of an entirely different Christian
history —one in which Mary Magdalene, the possi-
ble wife in question, was even more central to Jesus’
story. King’s discovery had the potential to upend a
millennia-old, male-centric history.
King said at the time, “My own faith, and the
faith of other Christians, is best built on good his-
tory.” But that’s not exactly what she was present-
ing to the world, as Sabar examines in his new book
Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gos-
pel of Jesus’s Wife. As she had done previously in her
original and acclaimed work on the Gnostic Gos-
pels, King told a brilliant alternate history, neatly
packaged and ready for prime time. But this time
there was one problem: it wasn’t true. Even before
she went public with her discovery, some scholars
and papyrologists questioned the authenticity of
the fragment. Then the furor died down a bit until
2014, when a publication in an esteemed jour-
nal of theological history seemed to confirm that
this papyrus might be real. But by 2016, thanks to
Sabar’s reporting in the Atlantic and a growing list
of rebuttals from Coptic experts and scientists, it
was clear the fragment was nothing more than a bad
forgery cobbled together from publicly available
Gnostic texts with sloppy penmanship. King finally
admitted that she had been duped.
Sabar revealed in his reporting that the text
had originally been brought to King by Walter
Fritz, a failed German student of Egyptology and
director of the Stasi Museum turned Florida-
based wife- swapping pornographer. The mystery
of Fritz—and why King did not fully investigate
the provenance of this scrap—is at the center of
Veritas. It’s a story about journalism done right,
about Sabar’s own capable, dogged sleuthing to get
to the bottom of those famous headlines. Along the
way, Sabar explores the history of alternate Chris-
tian texts, the eccentric scholars who investigate
them and the internal workings of Harvard.
In our moment of truthiness, to borrow a term
from Stephen Colbert, Veritas offers a vital les-
son less about Christianity than about what hap-
pens when a scholar decides that the story is more
important than the truth. King had spent her
career presenting an important scholarly narrative
about the need to re-evaluate and reinterpret the
canonical story of Christianity, to allow for women
to play a central role and to question some of the
central tenets of how established churches told
the world’s most famous story. But in Sabar’s con-
vincing and damning assessment, when it came to
Jesus’ wife, she bypassed the facts, ignored peers
who warned her something was amiss and failed to
thoroughly interrogate how Fritz had come to pos-
sess this stunning artifact.
One can imagine the appeal of the moment:
the chance to inspire a frank discussion about who
gets to be at the center of the story of Christian
truth. By the end of Veritas, the reader is left wishing
King had stuck to her own vision of “good history”
and asked the hard questions before she went
public. Instead, she let a papyrus scrap obscure the
larger point she had been making for decades. NONFICTION
The truth about
Jesus’ wife
By Lucas Wittmann
△
Starting in 2012,
journalist Sabar
investigated
the story of the
infamous Coptic
fragment that
turned out to
be a forgery