Jesus’ Wife?

King had bucked all this criticism and maintained until just a few days ago that the fragment was authentic. In 2003 she had published a book, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle, a study of a Gnostic text that asserted that the Magdalene enjoyed a higher status in the eyes of Jesus than his male disciples. The tiny papyrus fragment that she released to scholars and the public in 2012, which she dubbed “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” not only seemed to support this assertion but fit with Mary of Magdala‘s larger underlying theme: that early Christianity was a hodgepodge of conflicting beliefs about Jesus, including beliefs quite congenial to present-day feminism, and that the Christian teachings we now call “orthodox,” with their pride of place for Jesus’ male apostles, were no more than the theology of the victors in a prolonged political struggle for control of the early church.

On June 15 the Atlantic published online a masterly piece of investigative reporting, “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife,” scheduled to appear in the magazine’s July-August issue, in which writer Ariel Sabar revealed that he had managed to track down the owner of the “Jesus’ wife” papyrus, whose identity King had promised to keep secret. That man, a 50-ish Bavarian-born immigrant named Walter Fritz who lives near Sarasota, Florida, admitted his ownership of the papyrus after Sabar confronted him with the overwhelming evidence he had dug up. Fritz did vigorously deny that he had forged the fragment and continued to maintain, as he had maintained to King, that he had bought it in 1999 from its previous owner, a now-deceased German auto-parts executive, Hans-Ulrich Laukamp.

Fritz, according to Sabar’s reporting, was quite the character. During the late 1980s he had studied Egyptology at the Free University in West Berlin, where he had learned Coptic (facts he concealed from King) and where the two scholars who had supposedly authenticated the fragment and a companion papyrus (according to photocopies of apparent correspondence that Fritz gave King), now also conveniently deceased, happened to teach. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he headed a museum of East German history in the former East Berlin but resigned that position abruptly in 1992. He subsequently talked himself into key positions in two ultimately failed auto-parts businesses during the mid-1990s. One of his partners was Laukamp, who had, according to Fritz, supposedly sneaked into East Germany in 1963, bought six papyri there, and then smuggled them back to the West before eventually selling them to Fritz. Sabar discovered a host of problems with all this proffered paperwork, including dates and even basic facts that didn’t jibe. Furthermore, Laukamp’s stepson and former business partners described him as a minimally educated toolmaker whose main hobby was drinking beer and who had never collected anything in his life, much less antiquities. Besides hustling auto parts, Fritz also got into the art-photography business during the mid-1990s, creating an online “gallery” that included some dubious-looking purported ancient objects.

To top it all off, from 2003 through 2015 Fritz oversaw a slew of Internet-porn sites starring his wife having sex with other men. The year 2003 was, perhaps coincidentally, the year that Dan Brown published his runaway fiction bestseller The Da Vinci Code, whose main theme, like that of the “Jesus’ wife” fragment, was a wedded Jesus who promoted a spiritual dimension to sex. Fritz’s wife, according to Sabar, had her own spiritual side. She claimed to channel the archangel Michael, and in 2015 she self-published a book of “universal truths” in which she claimed, somewhat in the fashion of the ancient Gnostics and also Dan Brown, that churches and the Bible were inferior sources of religious inspiration compared with “what you can give yourself.”

In short, it appears that Karen King got rolled. And most humiliatingly, rolled in a plotline that could have come straight out of a Flannery O’Connor short story: by a silver-tongued huckster of schlock art and fetish-themed pornography with a New Age ditz of a wife. Fritz’s technique had followed Rule No. 1 of the grifter’s handbook: Find a mark whose self-interest you can put to work for you. Fritz’s first email to King in July 2010, according to Sabar, was Mary of Magdala chum: a tantalizing reference to a ancient manuscript in his possession that looked as though it contained an “argument” about the Magdalene between Jesus and one of his disciples—and wouldn’t King like to take a look? It’s a sad story, because King is widely respected, even among theologically conservative scholars, for her capacious knowledge of ancient Coptic and Greek Christian texts. Her downfall, if it was such, can be attributed to several factors that ultimately betrayed her: an ideological commitment to those theories about suppressed early Christian voices that clearly trumped objective assessment of the “Jesus’ wife” fragment; and once the fragment’s authenticity was questioned, a wagon-circling by feminist scholars who shielded her from criticism by accusing the critics of sexism.

In addition, although it’s impossible to read her mind (she has never responded to my requests for interviews or those of most other journalists), King might feel betrayed by Ariel Sabar himself. In an apparent orchestration by the Harvard Divinity School to ensure maximum publicity for King’s 2012 release of the fragment at a conference in Rome, she had shown the papyrus to only two other scholars, one of whom, AnneMarie Luijendijk of -Princeton, had been her doctoral student at Harvard (the other was Roger Bagnall, head of New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World). In addition, the Harvard Theological Review, slated to publish a lengthy article by King about the papyrus right after the conference, had passed around photographs of the scrap to three anonymous academic “reviewers,” two of whom expressed reservations about the scrap’s legitimacy, plus a Coptic linguist, Ariel Shisha-Halevy of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who vouched for the Coptic while pointing out some grammatical irregularities.

In addition, King gave extensive prerelease interviews to three handpicked outside journalists. One of those three was Sabar, writing for the Smithsonian magazine (the other two were religion reporters for the Boston Globe and the New York Times). The Smithsonian Institution had been in on the fragment’s existence for some time. Its Smithsonian Channel had already produced a television documentary starring King that was set to air on September 30, 2012. Sabar followed King around at Harvard and interviewed her extensively, producing an anodyne and pleasantly informative article for the Smithsonian that largely reflected King’s own point of view. After scholarly controversy over the fragment erupted at the Rome conference, both the Harvard Theological Review and the Smithsonian Channel postponed their offerings. Sabar then published a far more critical article about the papyrus in the Smithsonian in November 2012 that probably started him down the investigative trail. By this time, he was already in possession of copies King had given him in September of her email correspondence with Fritz, whose name and other identifying information she had redacted in order to protect Fritz’s anonymity.

The Harvard Divinity School is known in academic circles as a redoubt of the theories of Walter Bauer, a German scholar whose 1934 book, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, pioneered the idea that there was no such thing as “orthodoxy” or “heresy” in earliest Christianity but merely a diverse collection of often-conflicting local “Christianities,” as Bauer’s disciples call them. (Gnosticism was supposed to be the local Christianity of Egypt, for example.) The book was enormously influential, especially after a large trove of Gnostic and related texts surfaced at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. One of its promoters was the German-born New Testament scholar Helmut Koester, a towering figure at the Harvard Divinity School from 1958 until his death earlier this year. Koester supervised the doctoral dissertation of Elaine Pagels, who popularized early Christian “diversity” and its suppression by those who became the orthodox in her bestselling The Gnostic Gospels (1979).

Bauer’s theories influenced the controversial Jesus Seminar of the 1980s and 1990s, whose members elevated The Gospel of Thomas, a collection of Jesus’ sayings with Gnostic overtones, to canonical status alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Karen King was a longtime member of the Jesus Seminar, and she remains a fellow of its parent Westar Institute. Westar’s Polebridge Press published King’s Mary of Magdala. In 2007 King and Pagels collaborated on another bestseller, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. King had made her own translation from the Coptic of that Gnostic text, which had been recently bought from a private collector by the National Geographic Society—a translation that was criticized by other Coptologists for attempting to turn Judas into a good guy so as to accord with her ideas about early Christian diversity. It could be said of King that when she saw the words “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife’ ” on Fritz’s papyrus, she wanted to believe. She was tailor-made for him.

One of the first Coptologists to raise objections—on the day after King’s presentation of the papyrus in Rome—was Christian Askeland (now a professor at Indiana Wesleyan), who attended the conference. He quickly posted a video on YouTube in which he pointed out problems with the writing (it was too crude for a formal gospel). As he explained in a phone interview, he had noted that the letters appeared to have been applied by a paintbrush, which ancient Coptic scribes never used for writing, and the ink, although made of the water and soot that ancient scribes used, looked as though it had been runny, because it hadn’t been stabilized with the gum Arabic that the ancients usually added. Over that weekend and during the weeks that followed, other Coptic experts discovered the word-for-word correspondences, including line breaks, with material from The Gospel of Thomas. Indeed, Andrew Bernhard, an independent scholar in Oregon, maintained in October 2012 that the forger, whose Coptic wasn’t very good, had used a Coptic-English translation of Thomas that appeared online in 2002 to confect his text, even replicating a typographical error from that particular edition of the translation.

In 2014 Askeland found a smoking gun. After the carbon-dating tests confirmed that the papyrus was indeed ancient—if the 8th century counts as ancient—the Harvard Theological Review finally published a shorter and much-toned-down version of King’s original article. She had decided not to call the fragment a “gospel” after all, and she removed references to her previous speculation that some early Christians might have thought Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. (The Smithsonian Channel also aired a modified version of its documentary around that time.) Askeland came across an online draft version of the article with photos of another papyrus fragment from Fritz containing lines from a Coptic version of the Gospel of John that had also been carbon-dated as a control for the “Jesus’ wife” fragment (it was also dated from the 8th century). It happened to be the very companion papyrus that Fritz’s documents said one of the Free University scholars had authenticated. But those photos did not appear in the final version of King’s article and to date have never been officially published. “I found them by pure accident,” Askeland said. “They didn’t know what they had.” Askeland had written his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge on Coptic translations of John, and he recognized the text as an obvious fake: The lines mirrored every other line in a published edition of a codex of the gospel written in a Coptic dialect that had died out two centuries before the papyrus was made. “And it was in the same hand” as the “Jesus’ wife” fragment, Askeland said.

But Askeland made the political blunder of titling a blog post about his findings “Jesus Had an Ugly Sister-in-Law.” Eva Mroczek, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of California Davis, wrote a lengthy article for the website Religion Dispatches contending that the title of the post constituted a misogynist attack on Karen King herself. “This isn’t the first time Karen King’s objectivity and motives have been questioned,” Mroczek wrote—after Askeland removed the word “ugly” at her request. “Top papyrologist Roger Bagnall was also convinced that the fragment was real, but though their conclusions were identical only the female scholar came in for harsh criticism,” she wrote. Feminist New Testament scholars all over America took to social media to give her shout-outs and construct a protective wall around King.

Mroczek’s article highlighted another factor that might have played a part in why it took so long for many academics and journalists to see what most Coptic specialists immediately recognized as a hoax: Askeland and several of the other longtime skeptics of the “Jesus’ wife” fragment—although by no means all—are believing Christians. Mroczek took pains to point out that Askeland is associated with the Green Collection of biblical manuscripts and artifacts. That collection was put together by Steve Green, the evangelical CEO of Hobby Lobby, the crafts-store chain that won a Supreme Court ruling in June 2014 that it didn’t have to pay for abortion-inducing contraceptives under Obamacare. Mroczek’s article appeared on May 6, 2014, while the Hobby Lobby case was awaiting decision, and the very words “Hobby Lobby” were like garlic to a vampire for secular intellectuals. Mroczek complained in her article that the Green Collection was “dedicated to proving the historical authenticity of the Bible.”

By 2014 at least one reporter, Owen Jarus of LiveScience, had pieced together and published some of the problems with the Laukamp narrative on which King had relied. And in July 2015 New Testament Studies, a prestigious journal published (like the Harvard Theological Review) by Cambridge University Press, carried six articles by an array of scholars, including Askeland, laying out the case against the authenticity of the fragment itself. The Harvard Divinity School remained unmoved. In May 2015 it had signed an agreement with Fritz to keep the papyrus, along with the John papyrus, on loan at the Harvard campus for 10 years “for purposes of study and research.” It continues to maintain (as of this writing) an elaborate website titled “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” Neither the Harvard Divinity School nor the Harvard Theological Review has yet published any of the documents Fritz used to persuade King that his papyrus had been sold to him by Laukamp and vetted by two distinguished German professors of Egyptology.

Well, not quite. On June 20, the website included a statement from Harvard Divinity School dean David N. Hempton regarding Sabar’s Atlantic article. It pinpointed the subsequent interview with Sabar “in which Professor King stated that the Atlantic‘s investigation ‘tips the balance towards forgery’ and that the preponderance of the evidence now presses in that direction.” Hempton continued: “HDS is therefore grateful to the many scholars, scientists, technicians, and journalists who have devoted their expertise to understanding the background and meaning of the papyrus fragment.”

So perhaps the immovable object encountered an irresistible force after all.

Charlotte Allen, a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, last wrote on the “Jesus’ wife” controversy in our December 8, 2014, issue (“She’s Back”).

Correction: This story has been corrected. King never showed or gave Ariel Sabar the purported provenance documents.