Lo these many years, there have been numerous attempts by so called “Biblical Scholars” to hint, insinuate, suggest, allude or imply that Jesus was married. Thereby, casting doubt on the authenticity of the Bible and Jesus.
The most infamous case involved Professor Karen King of The Harvard Divinity School. For four years (2012-2016), King defended the so-called “Gospel of Jesus's Wife” (a papyrus, the size of a business card that pointed to Jesus having a wife) against scholars who argued it was a forgery. King went as far as to state, to a gathering of scholars in Rome, that written in Coptic was this surprising sentence: "Jesus said to them, 'My wife...’”
In a press release (Sept. 18, 2012) King further stated: "Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim." But, for the first time in 2016, King was forced to say that the papyrus—which she introduced to the world in 2012—is a probable fake.
Quite the embarrassment for one of the top New Testament Scholars in the US to admit she was taken in by a forgery and not a very good forgery at that.
HOW DID ALL THIS HAPPEN? Jump back to 2012 when a Harvard “religious studies” academic named Karen King announced the discovery of a papyrus fragment containing a Coptic text which referred to Jesus having a wife (below is a translation of the entire fragment.) The owner of the fragment (Walter Fritz) had vetted King and discovered that she is a US leftist academician with a background in “Women's Studies” and a member of the Jesus Seminar (what they believe is listed below.) For example, King believes that Jesus was just a man, not God's son, and here Fritz had the "proof" she needed. He knew she would jump at this chance to prove what she so fervently believed and dismiss any criticism of the fragment. Her premature announcement made the front page around the world as Atheists, Agnostics and Purveyors of False Religion thought they finally had the proof that the Bible was fallible and that Jesus was just a man NOT the son of God.
. . . My mother she gave
to me L[IFE]
. . . The disciples said to Jesus
. . . denies. Mary is [not] worthy of it
. . . Jesus said to them [!!!] “My wife”
. . . she will not be able to be a disciple to me and
. . . Let a man the which bad let no T[?]
. . . I myself am with her concerning
. . . an image
The opposite side (not
shown) of the Fragment reads, word-for-word:
...my moth[er]...
...three...
...forth ...
The next two lines of the backside feature illegible ink traces.
WHAT KING IGNORED in her rush to publish "incontrovertible" proof that Jesus married.
(1) Andrew Bernhard demonstrated that a simple job of COPY – PASTE – PRINT had been used to create the forgery, putting together different passages from two sources. Like the fictional Dr. Frankenstein, the forgery took sections of (1) The Digital Gospel of Thomas with help from (2) a 2002 PDF of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. Blending parts or these two copies of the Gospel of Thomas into One (The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife) is often referred to as the “Patchwork Hypothesis.”
(2) The crude Coptic writing resembled neither an Ancient Author, as in the Nag Hammadi codices, nor a Document Author, who one would see in a receipt or personal correspondence.
(3) The script’s Latinized forms suggested a modern effort to look like ancient writing.
(4) While ancient inks contained viscous substance like cedar oil to prevent running, this script resembled a child’s failed experiment with pastel paint, that resulted in watery ink running into pools. In the eyes of Coptology and Papyrology experts, the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife could be readily rejected as a blatant forgery.
(5) Some of King's fellow scholars, who doubted its authenticity, pointed to grammatical errors that native Coptic speakers would never have committed and believed it to have been copied from another ancient text, the Gospel of Thomas.
At this point (2012), pretty much everyone – aside from Dr. King and those desperate to prove the Bible and Jesus as frauds – felt the story was over. It was never clear just where the papyrus had come from and Dr. King professed that she was sworn to secrecy—which leads us to (6).
(6) King did not bother to vet the owner of the papyrus, Walter Fritz. It is important to know the seller, which would help one determine if this person could be someone who reasonably would have an ancient manuscript for sale. Little was known about the fragment’s “provenance,” or history of ownership. It was something King said she “hadn’t engaged… at all.” The donor who had approached King with the artifact insisted on anonymity and King allowed only a few details of its history to enter the public domain. An accurate and complete chain of ownership would have been helpful in ascertaining the authenticity of the fragment.
If King had bothered to look into Mr. Fritz, she would have found that he spent years at the Free University’s Egyptology Institute. What is a "Free University?" "It is an unaccredited, autonomous, free institution established within a university by students to present and discuss subjects not usually dealt with in the academic curriculum."
King did not look into Fritz's formal study of Coptic or lack thereof (the papyrus is written in Coptic) or his work as a PORNOGRAPHER whose star actress was his own wife—a woman who'd written a book of "universal truths" and claimed to channel the voices of angels. He had presented himself to King as a "family man" who enjoyed trips to Disney World and was independently wealthy. King did not find out what so easily could be found out—sounds likes “Plausible Deniability,” which occurs when someone actively avoids gaining certain knowledge of facts because it benefits that person not to know.
King’s problem is that she was so intent on proving that Jesus was just a man, not God, and the Bible contained inaccurate information, that she was willing to accept any evidence, no matter how “thin” (in this case downright Anorexic.) This should not surprise anyone about King when it is known she is a member of the Jesus Seminar.
THE MEMBERS OF JESUS SEMINAR BELIEVE THE FOLLOWING
• Jesus was
born in Nazareth, not in Bethlehem.
• Jesus
practiced faith healing without the use of ancient medicine or magic, relieving
afflictions we now consider
psychosomatic.
• He did not
walk on water, feed the multitude with loaves and fishes, change water into
wine or raise Lazarus from the dead.
• He was
executed as a public nuisance, not for claiming to be the Son of God.
• The empty tomb is a fiction – Jesus was not raised bodily from the dead.
THOSE DESPERATE TO PROVE
THE BIBLE AND JESUS ARE FRAUDS.
Harvard
University
Columbia
University
Smithsonian
Channel
MIT
Although many assumed the scandal had ended almost as soon as it began in 2012, the Harvard Theological Review revived the discussion with an April, 2014 special issue dedicated to publishing scientific results, which demonstrated the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Papyrus Fragment to Be Ancient” (Harvard Divinity School website, April 2014).
Scientists from Columbia University, Harvard University, MIT, and elsewhere provided scientific studies of the papyrus and ink. Sadly, key scientists involved in these ink studies lacked specialized experience with ancient manuscripts. Also, a few scientific tests that failed to detect the forgery were actually performed by old friends of King. In addition, the journal articles did not resolve problems related to the ‘Patchwork Hypothesis’ nor problems with the script, the ink, or the grammar.
Two weeks before Easter, Harvard Divinity School’s website suggested that this papyrus fragment was genuinely ancient—just as the Smithsonian Channel was aggressively publicizing the sensational discovery through a dedicated documentary.
All of these institutions were WAITING and WANTING and WILLING to PUBLISH DISINFORMATION no matter how “sketchy” to promote their anti-Biblical, anti-Jesus view point. King was the catalyst for all that followed her 2012 announcement. She was BLINDED by her Satanic desire to discredit the BIBLE and JESUS.
MISCELLANEOUS INFORMATION from
The Daily Beast, August 13, 2020.
“To be sure, King made
mistakes.
(1) She did not adequately investigate the artifact’s
history.
(2) She consulted with only two other trusted
scholars—Anne Marie Luijendijk (Princeton) and Roger Bagnall (NYU)—both of whom
mistakenly identified it as authentic.
(3) Two of the scientists involved in the technical
analysis had personal ties to King and Bagnall that were never disclosed
to Harvard Theological Review, the journal that published King’s article
on the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.
(4) Two of the three original peer-reviews that she
received in early September 2012, several weeks before announcing the Gospel of
Jesus’ Wife, were strongly negative. The positive review was written by
Bagnall, who disclosed his conflict of interest.
(5) One negative review was the esteemed Coptic
Philologist Steven Emmel’s which had “identified nearly every sign of forgery
that would surface over the next four years.”
(6) The other negative review, by Yale’s Goff Professor of Religious Studies, Bentley Layton, suggested that publishing the piece would be “very embarrassing” for the journal.
The negative reviews raised questions as to why King went ahead with her announcement and why the editors of Harvard Theological Review, allow publication to proceed. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been rejected. The Harvard Theological Review had been spooked but published it in 2014 and without peer-reviewing the scientific data supplied in her article. (The editors at the time have recently been replaced.) King refused to allow a negative response to be published alongside her article in the Harvard Theological Review, and that when she released her story to the press she did so on the condition that they only speak to pre-approved scholars. Had King not been a senior figure in the field, and had the editors of the journal not been her immediate colleagues, the outcome might have been different.
VERITAS (the definitive book on the subject by Ariel Sabar) presents a variety of different explanations for the actions of the academics involved: chief among them are institutional politics and King’s own interest in the role of women in the early church. Certainly, King’s academic focus, on the history of women in Christianity, made her the perfect victim for Fritz’s deception. While Sabar leaves his readers to form their own conclusions, he suggests that King held strong ideological commitments that led her to pursue a particular line of interpretation in the face of persuasive counter-evidence.
Karen King’s webpage at Harvard has a brief reference to her current status: “On leave” as of Sept. 14, 2020.
HOW CAN ONE
FORGE AN ANCIENT DOCUMENT?
1.A determined
forger could obtain a blank scrap of centuries-old papyrus.
2.Mix
ink from ancient recipes.
3.Fashion
passable Coptic script, particularly if he or she had some scholarly training
OR.
4.Use a
High-End Copy Machine to copy actual Coptic text onto ancient papyri.
Here is a brief synopsis of VERITAS.
In 2012, Dr. Karen King, a star professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery at a scholarly conference just steps from the Vatican. She had found an ancient fragment of papyrus in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene "my wife." The tattered manuscript made international headlines. If early Christians believed Jesus was married, it would upend the 2,000-year history of the world's predominant faith, threatening the sacred teachings on marriage, sex and women's leadership. Biblical scholars were in an uproar, but King had impeccable credentials as a world-renowned authority on female figures in the lost Christian texts from Egypt known as the Gnostic gospels. "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife“—as she provocatively titled her discovery—was both a crowning career achievement and powerful proof for her arguments that Christianity from its start embraced alternative, and far more inclusive, voices.
Unfortunately, for Ms. King, the complete title of the book says it all: A Harvard Professor (King), A Con Man (Fritz), and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (the Forgery.)
The definitive article on this subject can be found at: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/closing-case-gospel-jesus-wife/
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