16AR21-28

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AR 21:28 - The convoluted controversy over "Jesus' wife"

In this issue:

KING, KAREN - "a career breaker" or just damage-control jitters?

Apologia Report 21:28 (1,301)

August 3, 2016

KING, KAREN

In September 2012, "one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades" was put in motion by Karen King, an "eminent Harvard historian of early Christianity." Her choice of venue? A press conference in Rome. Here she unveiled "a 1,300-year-old scrap of papyrus that bore the phrase 'Jesus said to them, My wife.' The fragment, written in the ancient language of Coptic, had set off shock waves...."

King's motive becomes an increasingly vexing mystery as investigative journalist Ariel Sabar digs up answers. The cover tag-line for his Atlantic feature story, "Solving the Mystery of Jesus's Wife" (Jul/Aug '16, pp64-78), suggests closure. After reading this lengthy piece, one of the most bizarre we've come across (and given our stock-in-trade, folks, that's sayin' something), we tend to agree.

"Karen King is the first woman to hold Harvard's 295-year-old Hollis Professorship of Divinity, one of the country's loftiest perches in religious studies." Significantly, Sabar observes that "The Jesus's-wife fragment fit neatly with what has become her life's work: resurrecting the diversity of voices in Christianity's formative years."

As for background, Sabar reports: "The daughter of a pharmacist and a schoolteacher from a Montana cattle town, King enrolled at the University of Montana, where a course on marginalized Christian texts spoke to her in almost personal terms. 'I already had this sense of not fitting in,' King told me in 2012. 'From grade school on, I was the kid who was picked on,' she said. 'I thought if I could figure out [these texts], then I could figure out what was wrong with me.'

"She earned a doctorate in the history of religions from Brown in 1984 and by 1991 had become the chair of both religious studies and women's studies at Occidental College. Harvard Divinity School hired her in 1997."

King herself acknowledges the risk she has undertaken. "She knew how high the stakes were, for both history and her own reputation. ... 'If it's a forgery,' she told The Boston Globe, 'it's a career breaker.'"

Yet King decided to go into the reveal boldly. "King showed the papyrus to a small group of media outlets in the weeks before her announcement - The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and both Smithsonian magazine and the Smithsonian Channel - on the condition that no stories run before her presentation in Rome." Throwing caution to the wind by not fearing the implications of scholarship married to sensationalism, "King called the business-card-size papyrus 'The Gospel of Jesus's Wife.'"

The stakes are indeed high. "Centuries of Christian tradition are bound up in whether the scrap is authentic or, as a growing group of scholars contends, an outrageous modern fake...."

Consequently, skeptics noted issues bearing on the authenticity of the fragment. "Among the most damning was an odd typographical error that appears in both the Jesus's-wife fragment and an edition of the Gospel of Thomas that was posted online in 2002, suggesting an easily available source for a modern forger's cut-and-paste job."

Sabar adds: "The case for forgery, at first confined to lively posts on academic blogs, took a more formal turn last summer, when New Testament Studies, a peer-reviewed journal published by the University of Cambridge, devoted an entire issue <www.goo.gl/n3JLSq> to the fragment's detractors. In one of the articles, Christopher Jones, a Harvard classicist, noted that a forger may have identified King as a 'mark' because of her feminist scholarship."

Sabar was involved from the beginning. "Smithsonian assigned me a long feature, sending me to see King at Harvard and then to follow her to Rome. I was the only reporter in the room when she revealed her find to colleagues, who reacted with equal parts fascination and disbelief. ...

"With King and her critics at loggerheads, each insisting on the primacy of their evidence, I wondered why no one had conducted a different sort of test: a thorough vetting of the papyrus's chain of ownership." So begins Sabar's odyssey, "a warren of secrets and lies" that took him from southwest Florida to the halls of Harvard and from the Vatican to the headquarters of the East German Stasi secret police.

After Sabar discovered enough to discredit the authenticity of the papyrus's chain of ownership, he learned that "King wasn't interested in talking. ...

"I told her I'd spent months reporting in Germany and the United States. Didn't she want to know what I'd found?

"'Not particularly,' she said. She would read my piece once it was published." You can read Sabar's findings for yourself: <www.bit.ly/34VUbLz>

The Atlantic web site also now includes King's response to Sabar. In it she admits of Sabar's investigation: "It tips the balance towards forgery." However, "King said she would need scientific proof - or a confession - to make a definitive finding of forgery. It's theoretically possible that the papyrus itself is authentic, she said, even if its provenance story is bogus."

She concludes: "I'm finding myself not even really angry" at him [the forger], she said. "I'm mostly just relieved. I think the truth always makes me calm." <www.bit.ly/3nNcOtI>

What is King relieved about? Will this become the "career breaker" that she feared? Might the answer have been different had a bogus chain of ownership discovery happened with a conservative scholar's work?

It's often interesting to see what academia interprets as bias and how its treats conservative scholars differently than its own. For example, search our back issues <www.j.mp/ar-chive> for "Antony Flew conversion" or "Intelligent Design Dembski Baylor." There are still other examples in our database.

Imagine what would happen if a colleague of King's learned of an ancient document that reports on a Jerusalem meeting between the disciples of Matthew, Mark, and Luke in which they celebrate the success of their gospels being circulated and reveling in what their painstaking collaboration has done to insure consistency and accuracy.

Consider the consequences should a colleague of Elaine Pagels find an ancient document which discusses the formation of a complete New Testament canon long before it was previously believed possible.

Throw in some conspiracy for a Da Vinci Code wallop. Suppose someone witnesses a biased academic suppressing such a document discovery by, let's say, burying it in the insignificant clutter of an institutional storage room.

Are you a Christian scholar interested in trying your hand at writing a book of fiction and/or looking for a retirement project? Are there any grad students out there who want a shot at this? Have fun -- with our blessing!

And yet, lest we forget the lessons learned from leaders who have fallen from great heights of service in ministry - but for the grace of God, you or I could be the next one to fail miserably. The heart remains utterly deceitful. We can not guarantee our own fidelity.

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