“Jesus said to them, My wife … .”
Written in an ancient script on a 1,300-year-old papyrus scrap, those six words have attracted huge amounts of attention. If true, those words could shatter one of the long-held tenets of Christianity. The announcement alone of the scrap’s discovery at the International Congress of Coptic Studies in 2012, prior to peer-reviewed publication, came as a shock — though what was initially greeted with applause quickly turned to skepticism.
Professor Karen L. King, of Harvard University’s Divinity School, made headlines when she revealed what would become known as “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” In a paper published later in the Harvard Theological Review, King wrote: “On the basis of the age of the papyrus, the placement and absorption of the ink on the page, the type of the handwriting, and the Coptic grammar and spelling, it was concluded that it is highly probable that the fragment is an ancient text.”
But skepticism once quitted began spreading again. In addition to the scrap’s academic doubters, one avenue remained curiously unexplored: where the scrap came from in the first place. That no one had pursued the provenance of the scrap struck some observers as strange.
Importantly, it struck journalist Ariel Sabar as strange. Sabar was one of the first journalists to break the story with his Smithsonian coverage. He had never quite let the mystery go. As he recently wrote in a detailed feature in the Atlantic, there was too much uncertainty — all of the people said to have had the scrap before King had died. King argued, therefore, that despite the unfortunate “lack of information,” uncovering its origin was “impossible.”
