I en artikkel hos First Things leste jeg i dag:
… (I was) alerted to a fascinating piece of investigative journalism, published the previous day by The Atlantic. The article details Ariel Sabar’s exposure of the provenance of a Coptic papyrus that, some say, proves that Jesus was married. Sabar demonstrates that it is almost certainly a fake.
This artifact was dubbed “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” by Karen King, who staked much of her professional reputation on it. King, an authority on early Christianity and Gnosticism who holds the Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard—the oldest endowed chair at our nation’s oldest university—had announced the discovery of this papyrus at a 2012 Coptic conference in Rome. She published the results of her study of the papyrus two years later in the Harvard Theological Review, a first-tier, peer-reviewed journal of religious studies. If the papyrus turned out to be a forgery, the revelation might be discrediting for King and for others who lent it credence. (As King herself said, “If it’s a forgery … it’s a career breaker.”)
King, however, is not the focus of Sabar’s article. Sabar investigated the seller of the artifact—a shady German fellow named Walter Fritz, whose varied exploits and proclivities make the characters in the Da Vinci Code seem downright conventional. A university dropout and part-time pornographer, Fritz managed to fabricate a Gnostic artifact that duped one of the world’s leading experts on early, extra-canonical Christianity, plus enough of her peers to satisfy the Harvard Theological Review. How did this happen? Perhaps the appeal of Gnosticism, for a certain type of scholar, made this artifact too good to check. …
Artikkelen over viser til en artikkel i The Atlantic, som åpner slik:
For four years, Karen L. King, a Harvard historian of Christianity, has defended the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” against scholars who argued it was a forgery. But Thursday, for the first time, King said the papyrus—which she introduced to the world in 2012—is a probable fake.
She reached this conclusion, she said, after reading The Atlantic’s investigation into the papyrus’s origins, which appears in the magazine’s July/August issue and was posted to its website Wednesday night. …..
Jeg leste også den svært lange artikkelen i The Atlantic, som viser hvordan svindelen ble avslørt – LES DEN HER.
OPPDATERING:
Jeg ser nå (senere 22/6) at Bjørn Are Davidsen skrev om dette allerede 17/6 – SE HER.