More Charges of Forgery Leveled against Jesus' Wife Fragment

Not long after the papyrus and ink of the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” fragment were dated to AD 659-859 in refutation of accusations of forgery, new evidence has come to light that may once again point to forgery. From the New York Times:

Last month, the Harvard Theological Review published the results, saying that radiocarbon tests produced a date of 659 to 859 A.D., and examinations using a technique called micro-Raman spectroscopy found that the ink matched other papyruses that were dated from the first to the eighth centuries….

Dr. Askeland discovered among the papers published in the theological review a photograph of a small tattered square of papyrus called the “Gospel of John,” which features strikingly similar handwriting in Coptic to the Jesus’ wife fragment and was tested alongside it. Both fragments were given to Dr. King by the same owner.

It happens that Dr. Askeland wrote his Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge on the Coptic versions of John’s Gospel, so he decided to compare this square fragment with another John text called the Codex Qau, an authentic relic which was discovered in 1923 in a jar buried in an Egyptian grave site. Amazingly, the text of the small John fragment replicated every other line from a leaf of the Qau codex, and for 17 lines the breaks in the text were identical. It “defied coincidence,” he said.

Dr. Askeland’s theory is that a modern-day forger copied from a photograph of the Qua codex off the Internet. If the John text is forged, he reasons, so is the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, which seems to be written by the same hand.

Not only that, but he found that both these John texts were written in the Lycopolitan dialect, which experts believe died out before the seventh or eighth century, when the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife was supposedly written, according to radiocarbon testing. [For another problem with the John fragment, see here.]

Dr. King herself is taking this seriously:

“This is substantive, it’s worth taking seriously, and it may point in the direction of forgery,” Karen L. King, the historian at Harvard Divinity School, said in a telephone interview, her first since the recent developments. “This is one option that should receive serious consideration, but I don’t think it’s a done deal.”

A scholar who previously supported the authenticity of the fragment also says more research needs to be done:

Malcolm Choat, a Coptic expert at Macquarie University in Australia who cautiously contradicted the doubters in his paper last month for the Harvard journal, said in an interview that the new evidence was “persuasive,” but “we’re not completely there yet” — until the John and Jesus wife papyruses can be studied in person or using high-resolution images to understand their relationship.

While nothing theological rides on such a late fragment, even if genuine, I’m still interested to see how this turns out and grateful for the public scrutiny, which I hope will discourage future forgeries.

Comments

[WisdomLover]

I doubt this second fragment is a forgery.

The most that its line-by-line identity with the Qau manuscript shows is that it was copied from that manuscript, or vice versa or that the two were both copied from a common ancestor. But let's go ahead and assume that this manuscript is a direct copy of Qau. Just to be as prejudicial as possible, I'm going to refer to the manuscript from now on as the Qau-copy.

That assumption does nothing to imply when the Qau-copy was made. Maybe it was made sometime between 659 and 859 AD...the timeframe established by carbon dating for its 'sister' fragment: the Jesus' Wife fragment.

The other argument against the authenticity of the Qau-copy manuscript (at the other end of the link provided above and here) is the fact that there appears to be a hole in the papyrus at one point that the copyist wrote around. The letter "N" appears to be compressed below a hole. Of course, according to our experts, the only explanation for this is that the Qau-copy was forged, and the forger (who must be assumed to be a sub-moron) first simulated the damage to the manuscript and then wrote on it. And that for every other damaged location, he carefully made it appear that the writing had obliterated the letter, but for this one piece of damage he went ahead and squeezed in the letter just below the hole.

This theory seems very unlikely to me.

At least three other theories seem far more likely:

1. The compressed letter is a result of damage to the original manuscript, maybe a blot of ink, and the original scribe compressed the "N" in below that.
2. The damage occurred later. The first bit of damage occurred right where the compressed "N" is, and a later scribe, or even a reader, repaired the text by squeezing the letter in. After that the damage spread and occurred at other places in the manuscript.
3. Observe these two points:
   • The strokes of the letters are actually pretty thick. On the letter "N", other examples on the same manuscript are thick and blobby (that's a technical term ;-) on the bottom of the letter.
   • Some of the the damage to the manuscript leaves the papyrus, but obliterates the ink.
   Putting these points together, it's possible that the combination of an especially thick-stroked "N" along with such damage left behind a fragment that happens to resemble a compressed "N"

There's also the possibility that the two fragments aren't sisters at all. That they were not written by the same hand. That would mean that the fact that one is a forgery would have little bearing on the claim that the other is a forgery. (Not no bearing, because Dr. King did get both manuscripts from the same source.)

On that front, the 'strikingly similar' handwriting used in the Qau-Copy and the Jesus' Wife fragment probably means next to nothing. I doubt we can really conclude that they were written by the same hand. For starters, I doubt that there is such a thing as a handwriting expert for Coptic texts the way there is for our contemporary scripts. It seems like there just are not enough samples for anyone to learn such a skill. And even if there were, even our contemporary handwriting experts, find it far more difficult to detect differences between writers for printing than for handwriting. I believe it gets even worse for printing in all caps. These manuscripts were both printed in all caps. Bottom-line, I doubt that the two manuscripts are 'sisters'. So even if the Qau-Copy really is a forgery, it means next to nothing about the Jesus' Wife fragment.

(And the Jesus' Wife fragment, while not a forgery, has zero theological impact anyway.)