The ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’

In 2012 we reported in these pages the claim of Harvard University professor, Dr Karen L. King, to having discovered the ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’.

On a small ancient fragment she had identified Coptic text in which Jesus spoke of Mary Magdalene as his wife. With the wild conspiracy theories of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code in the air the media were primed to pick up and run with the sensational claim: the church has been covering up the truth about Jesus and his marriage.

Fake news

No scholar claimed that the purported Gospel fragment belonged to the first century. King herself was in no doubt that it was a fourth-century writing. But the implication was that there were alternative traditions about Jesus in the early church and that the orthodox view was only one of a number of rival stories. King wove her claims into a particular feminist narrative which argued that the church had been suppressing the voice of women and the humanity of Jesus for nearly 2,000 years. The ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’ served that purpose.

Within days of Dr King’s announcement, the fragment was identified as a hoax. Independent scholars even managed to track down the source of the text. The forgery was clearly dependent on a loose translation of the Coptic ‘Gospel of Thomas’ that had been published online in 2002. We reported that in Evangelicals Now and the story could have died. However, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

Who would have bought it?

A reporter has recently published his investigation into the background to this hoax and revealed a sordid and disturbing tale. Ariel Sabar in his book Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (2020), has managed to identify the forger and explain how he had succeeded to dupe an eminent Harvard historian.

The man behind the fake turns out to be a German pornography filmmaker living in Florida. Having some knowledge of Egyptology, art, and an eye for business, he was well placed to fool Dr King with the typical techniques of a salesman. Though no doubt motivated by financial gain, his actions highlighted a weakness of the academic community. Using medieval, blank, papyrus and copying Coptic text from an online pdf using homemade ink he also knew it was the content that would gain attention. That the text hinted at Jesus having a wife is what gave it value to a professor and made her blind to the signs of forgery.

Confirmation bias

What the so-called ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’ demonstrates is that there are those in the scholarly community who can lose their critical faculties in order press an agenda. It is a clear example of confirmation bias. King’s desire to promote her claim that an authentic early church tradition had held that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene spoiled her judgment. Even after admitting that the text was a modern forgery she still held that the story it told was one that needed to be heard. Sabar, in the conclusion to his investigation, poses the worrying question: ‘For a historian, didn’t the story need to be true – or at least part of the actual past – before you could tell it?’

Thankfully, this whole sorry episode does have positive lessons. First, the community of scholarship now stretches far beyond prestigious academic institutions to include a wider world of independent academics and thoughtful readers who can give critical scrutiny to sensational claims. Secondly, the desire for a Christianity that elevates the place of women and affirms the value of marriage can be found within the pages of the New Testament. Read carefully, the New Testament tells not only a true story but a better story than the alternatives.