Gospel of Jesus' Wife

Eight Broken Lines, and How Far They Travelled

The object is small: a scrap of papyrus about the size of a business card, written on both sides in Sahidic Coptic, with eight fragmentary lines on the front. One of them contains the words that made it famous — a teacher saying to those around him, my wife. In September 2012 K. L. King, a historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, presented it at a Coptic studies congress in Rome, with a paper prepared for the Harvard Theological Review.

King was careful in a way the coverage was not. Her published position was that the fragment, if ancient, was evidence about fourth-century Christian argument over marriage and discipleship, not about whether the historical Jesus was married; she said as much in print, repeatedly, and named the piece with quotation marks around the title she had given it. None of that survived contact with the news cycle. Within days the fragment had been reported worldwide as though a first-century fact about Jesus had been discovered.

What followed was four years of exactly the process that is supposed to happen. Coptologists objected almost at once that the grammar was wrong in specific ways and that the text ran unusually close to a second-century sayings gospel already well known from the Nag Hammadi codices. Laboratory work went the other way: radiocarbon dating of the papyrus, micro-Raman analysis of the ink and infrared microspectroscopy all came back without a sign of modern manufacture. The Harvard Theological Review eventually published King's article in April 2014 alongside those technical reports and alongside a rebuttal by L. Depuydt of Brown University arguing the fragment was a fake.

Where the Case Was Actually Decided

It was not decided in a laboratory. In June 2016 the journalist A. Sabar published an investigation in The Atlantic that did the thing nobody had done: it traced the fragment's owner. He turned out to be W. Fritz, a German living in Florida. K. L. King, who had exchanged many emails with him and met him in December 2011, said afterwards that she realised she had known next to nothing about him: he had not mentioned his years at the Free University's Egyptology institute or his formal study of Coptic, and had presented himself to her as an independently wealthy family man.

K. L. King read the article and, the following day, said publicly that the papyrus was probably a fake. She was precise about why. She would need scientific proof or a confession to call it a forgery outright; it remained theoretically possible that the papyrus itself was ancient even if the story attached to it was invented; but on the whole of the evidence, she said, matters now pressed in the direction of forgery. Asked why she had not investigated where the thing came from, she said the article had helped her see that provenance can be investigated. She also said she was not angry, and that the truth made her calm.

That is the honest end of the story and it is not a story about a fool. King is a serious scholar who had commissioned genuine scientific testing, published the objections of her critics in the same issue as her own article, and changed her position in public the moment the evidence changed. What she had not done — what the discipline as a whole had not been in the habit of doing — was treat the object's history of ownership as evidence that could be checked. The whole case turned on that, and nothing else.

The Lesson Is About Provenance, Not About Marriage

Take the theological question first, because readers will want it settled. Even on the most generous reading, and even taking the material as ancient, this would be a Coptic copy made centuries after the events. The radiocarbon work published alongside the article dated the papyrus itself to roughly the seventh to ninth century, and K. L. King's own proposal was that an eighth-century Coptic copy preserved a Greek composition of the mid-second century — a body of literature that is well known and has never been treated as historical reporting. It would tell us what some later Christians argued about. It would not tell us anything about whether Jesus was married. The New Testament's own datum on the question is oblique and worth reading for itself: in 1 Corinthians 9, Paul defends his right to travel with a believing wife as the other apostles and the Lord's brothers and Cephas do — an argument that only works because Paul, and the reader, know that his own practice was different.

The real lesson is the one the discipline took from it. An unprovenanced fragment can pass every laboratory test available and still be a forgery, because the tests examine the materials and a competent forger starts with genuine old materials. Radiocarbon dating dated the papyrus, not the writing. The chemistry of the ink was consistent with ancient inks, which lampblack in a binder will be, because that is what ancient ink was. Every technical result was accurate, and none of them answered the question being asked.

There is a discipline in that worth carrying into ordinary reading. The speed at which this fragment travelled — from a conference paper with hedges all over it to a worldwide headline about the marital status of Jesus, in under a week — is not a fact about scholarship. It is a fact about how claims move once they leave it. The best protection a reader has is unglamorous: ask where the thing came from, ask who says so, and notice when nobody can answer.

Scripture references

• 1 Corinthians 9:5 — Paul asks whether he has no right to take along a believing wife, as the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas do
• Matthew 13:55 — The family of Jesus as the Gospels name it: mother, brothers, sisters — and no wife
• 1 Thessalonians 5:21 — Test all things, and hold firmly that which is good
• 1 John 4:1 — Don't believe every spirit, but test the spirits

Sources

• ScholarshipK. L. King, "'Jesus said to them, My wife...': A New Coptic Papyrus Fragment" — Karen L. King, Harvard Divinity School · Harvard Theological Review 107/2 (April 2014), 131-159; DOI 10.1017/S0017816014000133. Paywalled. Published in the same issue as the technical reports and as L. Depuydt's rebuttalSupports: The original scholarly publication, its hedges, and the fact that the rebuttal ran alongside it
• ReferenceA. Sabar, "Karen King Responds to 'The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus's Wife'" — Ariel Sabar, The Atlantic, 16 June 2016 · The interview in which K. L. King states her revised position in her own words, one day after the investigation was publishedSupports: King's statement that the evidence presses in the direction of forgery, and her account of why she had not checked the provenance
• ScholarshipL. Depuydt, "The Alleged Gospel of Jesus's Wife: Assessment and Evaluation of Authenticity" — Leo Depuydt, Brown University · Harvard Theological Review 107/2 (2014). The Coptological case against the fragment, published in the same issue as the article it answers. PaywalledSupports: The linguistic and grammatical objections raised by specialists before the provenance was traced
• Holding institutionK. L. King, "Response to Leo Depuydt, 'The Alleged Gospel of Jesus's Wife: Assessment and Evaluation of Authenticity'" — Harvard Theological Review — the journal of Harvard Divinity School, published by Cambridge University Press — carrying K. L. King's reply to L. Depuydt in the issue that published the whole dossier · The issue in which the fragment was published, tested and contested together, including K. L. King's response to L. Depuydt. Harvard's own project webpages for the fragment are still online but refuse automated requests, so they are not linked hereSupports: That the objections and the technical reports were published alongside the claim rather than after it

Further reading

• A. Sabar, "Karen King Responds to 'The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus's Wife'", The Atlantic

Reflect

Every laboratory test on this fragment came back clean, and it was still a fake. What questions are you not asking because the answers you already have sound reassuring?