Pattengale: Last rites for the "Jesus' wife" hoax

HOAX!

There is a difference between people who are intelligent and people who are intellectuals. People who are intelligent know a hoax when they see it. People who are intellectuals, people like Harvard's Karen King, are easily taken in by a hoax, particularly when it can be milked to advance a particular agenda or pet project.

The "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" fragment was clearly a hoax and a forgery from the beginning. However, since it fit with Ms. King's feminist narrative for the revision of 2,000 years of Christian teaching, she was all too eager to make a little bit of something out of a whole lot of nothing, being aided and abetted by a willing media.

The papyrus fragment has now been exposed for the giant hoax it is and Ms. King's credibility as a "scholar" ought to be in tatters (but it won't be). Jerry Pattengale of Indiana Wesleyan University understands Ms. King's willingness to advance the story, but wonders why the media were so eager to help her out.

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.

Yet now it appears almost certain that the Jesus-was-married story line was divorced from reality. On April 24, Christian Askeland—a Coptic specialist at Indiana Wesleyan University and my colleague at the Green Scholars Initiative—revealed that the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife," as the fragment is known, was a match for a papyrus fragment that is clearly a forgery.

Almost from the moment Ms. King made her announcement two years ago, critics attacked the Gospel of Jesus' Wife as a forgery. One line of criticism said that the fragment had been sloppily reworked from a 2002 online PDF of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas and even repeated a typographical error.

But Ms. King had defenders. The Harvard Theological Review recently published a group of articles that attest to the papyrus's authenticity. Although the scholars involved signed nondisclosure agreements preventing them from sharing the data with the wider scholarly community, the New York Times was given access to the studies ahead of publication. The newspaper summarized the findings last month, saying "the ink and papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery." The article prompted a tide of similar pieces, appearing shortly before Easter, asserting that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife was genuine.

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."

Having evaluated the evidence, many specialists in ancient manuscripts and Christian origins think Karen King and the Harvard Divinity School were the victims of an elaborate ruse. Scholars had assumed that radiometric tests would return an early date (at least in antiquity), because the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment had been cut from a genuinely ancient piece of material. Likewise, those familiar with papyri had identified the ink used as soot-based—preferred by forgers because the Raman spectroscopy tests used to test for age would be inconclusive.

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. You would have thought Thomas Aquinas might have mentioned it. But this episode is not totally without merit. It will provide a valuable case study for research classes long after we're gone and the biblical texts remain.

What's wrong with this picture?

Hint: It has something to do with the letter in parentheses.

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Yes, this actually did appear in the New York Times today. No, it is not an April Fools joke.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 1, 2013

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into heaven.

Just who is being "medieval" here?

The brief media honeymoon for Pope Francis is apparently coming to an end. LifeNews reports:

The media backlash against Pope Francis may be beginning. After relatively positive coverage last week, ABC and NBC on Monday both highlighted the Argentinean President denouncing his “medieval” views on social issues.

World News’s Ron Claiborne offered no ideological label for the country’s left-wing leader, praising, “Cristina Kirchner stands for a new view of a changing world– embracing gay marriage, sex education in schools, free contraceptives in hospitals.”

He added, “But when [the now-pope] was a cardinal in Argentina, Kirchner described his social views as medieval.” Yet, while Claiborne didn’t call Kirchner a liberal, he made sure to point out that although Francis is “enormously popular,” “what the world is just beginning to learn is how conservative he is on social issues.”

In case viewers didn’t get the point, anchor Diane Sawyer reminded that the Argentinean president “once called his views medieval.”

On NBC’s Nightly News, Anne Thompson parroted similar comments: “As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, the Pope opposed many social programs that Kirchner endorsed, including gay marriage and free contraception.”

Thompson alerted, “She, in turn, had accused him of holding positions that she said were medieval, hearkening back to the Inquisition.”

On the CBS Evening News, Bob Schieffer managed to recount the conflict without discussing Pope Francis’s “medieval” views. Instead, he remarked, “They have differed sharply on several issues in the past, including his opposition to same sex marriage and contraception.”

Consider the number of times the term "medieval" is used to describe the pope's views on "social issues" while reading this report on the trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell:

A medical assistant told a jury Tuesday that she snipped the spines of at least 10 babies during unorthodox late-term abortions at a West Philadelphia clinic.

Adrienne Moton's testimony as part of her guilty plea to third-degree murder, came in the capital murder trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the clinic owner, who is on trial in the deaths of a patient and seven babies.

Prosecutors accuse him of killing late-term, viable babies after they were delivered alive, in violation of state abortion laws.

Gosnell's lawyer denies the murder charge and disputes that any babies were born alive. He also challenges the gestational age of the aborted fetuses, calling them inexact estimates.

Moton, the first employee to testify, sobbed as she recalled taking a cell phone photograph of one baby left in her work area. She thought he could have survived, given his size and pinkish color. She had measured him at nearly 30 weeks.

‘The aunt felt it was just best for her [the mother's] future,’ Moton testified.

Gosnell later joked that the baby was so big he could have walked to the bus stop, she said.

Jurors saw Moton's photograph of the baby on a large screen in the courtroom, which took on a bizarre look Tuesday as she testified near a hospital bed with stirrups and other aging obstetric equipment.

Denied the chance to bring jurors to the shuttered inner-city clinic, prosecutors are instead recreating a patient room in court.

Moton, 35, sobbed as she described her work at the clinic. She first met Gosnell through his niece, a school friend of hers, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Because of problems at home, she had moved in with Gosnell and his third wife during high school.

Later, the 35-year-old medical assistant testified that the abortion doctor helped her terminate two of her own pregnancies and she began volunteering at the clinic in January 2005 sterilizing instruments.

Not before long, the woman with no college education or medical training began administering anesthesia under the tutelage of Gosnell, whom she called 'uncle,' and then assist in abortions, including the doctor's method of 'snipping' the spinal cords of fetuses.

‘I learned it from Dr. Gosnell,’ said Moton in response to a question from Assistant District Attorney Edward Cameron.

‘I never asked why.’

‘Can you say how many you did?’ Cameron asked.

‘I could remember a good 10 times that I did it,’ Moton replied.

She earned about $10 an hour, off the books, to administer drugs, perform sonograms, help with abortions and dispose of fetal remains.

Workers got $20 bonuses for second-term abortions on Saturdays, when a half-dozen were sometimes performed.

She once had to kill a baby delivered in a toilet, cutting its neck with scissors, she said. Asked if she knew that was wrong, she said, ‘At first I didn't.’

Abortions are typically performed in utero. In Pennsylvania, abortions cannot legally be performed after the 24th week of pregnancy.

Moton has pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, which carries a 20- to 40-year term, as well as conspiracy and other charges.

She has been in prison since early 2011, when Philadelphia prosecutors released the harrowing grand jury report on Gosnell's Women's Medical Center and arrested the doctor, wife Pearl and eight current or former employees. Most of them are expected to testify.

Women and teens came from across the mid-Atlantic, often seeking late-term abortions, Moton said. She recalled one young woman from Puerto Rico who did not speak English and appeared to be 27 weeks pregnant.

Karnamaya Mongar, a 41-year-old refugee who traveled to the clinic from Virginia, died after an overdose of drugs allegedly given to her during a 2009 abortion.

Now, just who would any rational person say is being "medieval" here?

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