The "wife of Jesus" papyrus revealed to be a hoax

Dr. Jerry Pattengale executive director of the Green Scholars Initiative, writes in the Wall Street Journal about the Jesus' wife hoax that took the secular media by storm in 2012.

First key quote from the article:

In September 2012, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King announced the discovery of a Coptic (ancient Egyptian) gospel text on a papyrus fragment that contained the phrase "Jesus said to them, 'My wife . . .' " The world took notice. The possibility that Jesus was married would prompt a radical reconsideration of the New Testament and biblical scholarship.

Unfortunately for Dr. King, the fragment appears to be a hoax:

Then last week the story began to crumble faster than an ancient papyrus exposed in the windy Sudan. Mr. Askeland found, among the online links that Harvard used as part of its publicity push, images of another fragment, of the Gospel of John, that turned out to share many similarities—including the handwriting, ink and writing instrument used—with the "wife" fragment. The Gospel of John text, he discovered, had been directly copied from a 1924 publication.

"Two factors immediately indicated that this was a forgery," Mr. Askeland tells me. "First, the fragment shared the same line breaks as the 1924 publication. Second, the fragment contained a peculiar dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before the sixth century." Ms. King had done two radiometric tests, he noted, and "concluded that the papyrus plants used for this fragment had been harvested in the seventh to ninth centuries." In other words, the fragment that came from the same material as the "Jesus' wife" fragment was written in a dialect that didn't exist when the papyrus it appears on was made.

Mark Goodacre, a New Testament professor and Coptic expert at Duke University, wrote on his NT Blog on April 25 about the Gospel of John discovery: "It is beyond reasonable doubt that this is a fake, and this conclusion means that the Jesus' Wife Fragment is a fake too." Alin Suciu, a research associate at the University of Hamburg and a Coptic manuscript specialist, wrote online on April 26: "Given that the evidence of the forgery is now overwhelming, I consider the polemic surrounding the Gospel of Jesus' Wife papyrus over."

Dr. Pattengale concludes his article with the following statements:

It is perhaps understandable that Ms. King would have been taken in when an anonymous owner presented her with some papyrus fragments for research. What is harder to understand was the rush by the media and others to embrace the idea that Jesus had a wife and that Christian beliefs have been mistaken for centuries. No evidence for Jesus having been married exists in any of the thousands of orthodox biblical writings dating to antiquity.

With all due respect to Dr. Pattengale, in my opinion it is unfortunately all too easy to understand why the secular media would accept this without much scrutiny. The hostility of the media towards Christianity has been painfully evident for decades. Lacking the expertise to properly evaluate the controversy themselves, and having no real interest in presenting opposing points of view, I believe many journalists jumped on this story because they saw it as a way to stick it to the hated Christians while maintaining the fiction of disinterested intellectual inquiry.

We have seen this before: journalists trumpeting some manuscript because it supposedly presents proof that Christian beliefs are wrong. The enthusiastic reaction of the media to the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas are just two recent examples of the disturbing journalistic tendency to promote spurious writings as authentic accounts of the life of Jesus. I am not suggesting that these documents are unworthy of discussion and investigation, but some journalistic restraint is in order here. And shouldn't it be the job of journalists to report the news instead of trying to manipulate and control it?