Karen King
OOPS!: Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King (inset) translated the papyrus scroll (above). (
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A noted religious scholar doubts the veracity of a papyrus text that purports to reveal that Jesus had a wife — but includes a typo.
The Coptic text from the Gospel of Thomas, translated by Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King, is the centerpiece of “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” a Smithsonian Channel special originally slated to air Sept. 30.
The special, produced by British-based Blink Films, has been postponed until forensic testing on the papyrus — given to King by an anonymous German collector — is completed.
But Mark Goodacre, an associate professor of New Testament at Duke University, says that while King is “beyond reproach,” he’s almost certain that the papyrus is a fake.
“She’s a fine scholar and is first-class in what she does,” says Goodacre, the author of “Thomas and the Gospels.” “No one is accusing her of deception. If [the text] has been faked . . . it looks like it’s been done on the basis of using the Internet.”
King set off a firestorm of controversy last month in Rome when her scholarly paper delivered at the International Congress of Coptic Studies included a line from the papyrus — translated by King to read, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife’ . . .”
The editor of a Vatican newspaper immediately branded King’s find “an inept forgery” and “a fake” — an opinion echoed by many in the academic community.
“My personal view on this fragment, if I had to put money on it, is that I’m pretty sure [the papyrus] is a fake,” Goodacre says. “I could be wrong, and that’s only a provisional judgment, since we’ve only known about this for a month.”
Goodacre says there were questions from the start, when scholars noticed that King’s papyrus fragment was “very closely related” to the Gospel of Thomas. “There were whole phrases taken verbatim, which was already problematic,” he says. “You might say that’s not necessarily a sign of forgery, but it was reason to be suspicious.”
Oxford University’s Andrew Bernhard raised the possibility that a forger may have copied the typo not from a printed text, but from a Coptic-English translation of the Gospel of Thomas that was on the Web — and which accidentally left off the Coptic letter “M.”
“We’re always desperate for more discoveries, and whenever a new discovery is announced, there’s an initial feeling of excitement,” Goodacre says.
“The problem with us ancient historians is that our desire to see new things can sometimes make us too eager to grasp them. We have to temper this with a little skepticism.”