A link to this story showed up in the Overnight News Digest the other night. It’s not a subject that would be a big deal around here. But this story is so bizarre and so fascinating you may want to give it your attention on a weekend. The Atlantic gave it a massive amount of space, because it is such an interesting story. In the world in which I work, this story is a big deal for a lot of reasons. It involves a piece of 1500 year old papyrus about the size of a business card.
First, here is a little tease, and then some background.
After trawling regions of the Web I hadn’t even known existed, I discovered that Fritz’s wife, under her porn name, enjoyed a measure of fame. Before Yahoo shut it down in 2004, she boasted online, her “Femalebarebackgangbangextreme” discussion group had nearly 50,000 members. The couple’s work belonged to a fetish genre built around fantasies of cuckolded husbands powerless to stop their wives’ lust for other men. The genre is called “hotwife.”
When i mentioned these findings to my own wife, she told me to read The Da Vinci Code. Studied closely, she said, the book could be a Rosetta stone for Fritz’s motives.
Dan Brown’s best seller is fiction, of course, but it draws on the work of feminist religious scholars like King. Its premise is that conservative forces in the Roman Catholic Church silenced early Christians who saw sex as holy and women as the equals—or even the saviors—of men. Threatened by these vestiges of pagan goddess worship, Church fathers defamed Mary Magdalene and enshrined the all-male priesthood to keep women out.
The New Testament contains four gospels, collections of stories about and teachings of Jesus, but there were many others. These were all almost certainly written later than Matthew, Mark Luke, and John, but some not much later. They were mostly lost and forgotten for a long time because they were not actively transmitted as part of a sacred collection. Archaeology has been bringing many of them to light over the past century or two. The most important group of them is associated with a collection of texts known as The Nag Hammadi Library. These manuscripts were found in Egypt in 1945 and date back to the fourth century. They include the now famous “Gospel of Thomas.” What the Gospel of Thomas and other “non-canonical” gospels demonstrate is that beliefs about Jesus in the early church were more diverse than we once thought. “Orthodoxy” was not a pristine beginning in the first century, but the result of hotly contested process leading to formulations like the Nicene Creed and the eventual “canonization” of just 27 pieces of literature in the New Testament by the fourth century.
The center of this story, written by Ariel Sabar, who should win every prize appropriate for this kind of work, is the appearance in 2012 of the piece of papyrus that was dubbed “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” It had come into the possession of Dr. Karen King, a professor of early Christian history at Harvard University, who presented it at an academic conference and vouched for its authenticity. I won’t tell any more of the story, because I can’t do it as well as Sabar. I should acknowledge that I have a professional acquaintance with Karen King and have found her to be an excellent scholar and a fine person.
The most difficult problem in archaeology from the “Ancient Near East” is the provenance of artifacts. Because of intense interest in such items they are potentially very valuable. There is money to be made by those who possess them, and academic careers to be made by those who get access to study them. Among the most famous recent forgeries of recent years are the Baruch seal and the James Ossuary. Objects like this seem to turn up in somebody’s collection. They lack the automatic authenticity of artifacts found in situ, the unearthing of which are carefully documented and photographed. There are scientific tests for authenticity, but forgers know these and can do things to the artifact that make them look authentic. The safe assumption is that anything not found in situ is guilty until proven innocent.
The article seems to demonstrate that Dr. King was the deliberately chosen target of a talented con man who had much of the technical knowledge to produce an artifact that could fool some experts. I am not an archaeologist, but I make use of their findings in my work. I am sometimes frustrated that I learn about an important find only 10-15 years after the discovery, but this is an important process. Careful archaeologists take a lot of time and effort with new discoveries, they show their work to other experts, and they present findings quietly at conferences to get feedback. this is slo, but it avoids big mistakes. What happened at Harvard in 2012 is that the publicity got out ahead of the scholarship. As soon as many expert eyes were on the manuscript fragment, problems began to emerge.
I will leave the rest for you to read. You won’t regret it.
