Recently, Ariel Sabar wrote an article for the Atlantic that traced the origins of the
brief papyrus fragment the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife (hereafter GosJesWife) which
all but proved it was a forgery (we allow the “all but” only because in good
academic discourse, you always allow at least a slim possibility that
everything we think we know could be mistaken). Since this release of this
article in the July/August issue of the Atlantic (found here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-unbelievable-tale-of-jesus-wife/485573/),
the popular world took notice of something that it had forgotten about since
2012 when the manuscript fragment was first made public. The popular outcry
among lay Christians has ranged from a triumphant attitude about the ivory
tower academics who accepted something too quickly without questions asked, to
calls for all academics – particularly Karen King who originally published the
fragment and since has suggested it is probably inaccurate (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/21/a-harvard-professor-made-the-gospel-of-jesuss-wife-famous-now-she-thinks-its-likely-a-fake/)
– to completely disavow it. There was even a recent move to try and get the
Harvard Theological Review – who published the first article on the topic to
“pull” the article from its 2014 issue (how that would be done is difficult to
fathom) (http://retractionwatch.com/2016/06/21/coptic-cop-out-religion-journal-wont-pull-paper-based-on-bogus-gospel/).
The importance of this strange chapter in academics is not
actually whether or not scholars have egg on their face. Instead, the far more
important discussion has to do with the way manuscripts come to us, and how
manuscripts are discussed and distributed. The dark world of black market
antiquities dealings makes the reception history of this manuscript – while it
seems ridiculous to those unfamiliar with manuscript production – unfortunately
is far too common.
This is a problem that spans the gap between “liberal” and
conservative evangelical scholarship – everyone wants manuscripts so long as
they can control them and make money or prestige off of them. To do that, one
needs to obtain manuscripts which, if they were found after 1970, is officially
illegal without going through the proper channels in their country of origin,
based upon the UNESCO agreement for the trafficking of cultural artifacts.
Where then are these manuscripts arising? Some are from finds from before 1970 when travelers could simply
put whatever they found in their own suitcases and have kept them in private or
public collections without ever having been published, others have been
properly excavated and many of those documents are in the museum of antiquities
in Cairo, and then the most common “new” manuscripts that arise are illegally trafficked out of
the country through very dark circumstances and then the owners simply claim that they have been in private
collections since before 1970.
Usually on the way to scholars, a manuscript will change
hands at least 4-5 times under rather questionable circumstances. Then some
antiquities dealer will hold out for a lot of money that the scholarly
community struggles to come up with. Codex
Tchacos for example (which among its contents is the Gospel of Judas) was held by an antiquities dealer for nearly 30
years because he demanded 10 million dollars for his manuscript. Further, the
dealer (who we only know by a pseudonym) would not answer questions about the
provenance of the text – it was a simple caveat
emptor to its fullest extent. The scholars – when they finally did get
someone with enough money to buy the manuscript could either buy it “as is” or
have nothing at all.
Further complicating matters, good antiquities dealers know
what they are actually selling. They won’t allow scholars to read through and
look carefully at the manuscripts that they are selling. They know that the
most valuable thing they have is the unique information in the manuscript
itself. If scholars know what it contains and are able to write a transcription
of the text (or even a summary), the value of the manuscript itself declines.
Usually, scholars are allowed brief periods to look at a manuscript and make a
very fast recommendation to their sources of funding as to whether this should
be bought or not. For example, the 4 scholar team who looked at the Gospel of Judas had only 2 hours and
they were not allowed to take any notes. Not surprisingly, they struggled to
identify all the texts (particularly those which they had never seen before).
Therefore, when scholars are buying these manuscripts, they are buying
something on no questions asked as to where it came from and even no real questions asked as to what the manuscripts contain.
The final element of these antiquities deals which is often
not appreciated is the patience of antiquities dealers. The owner of the gospel
of Judas waited nearly 30 years for someone to come up with his price.
Currently, the British Museum has shoeboxes full of fragments of the
Oxyrhynchus papyri which remain unpublished and that they demand steep prices
to publish. The popular idea that there are armies of graduate students
scouring libraries and publishing everything that they see is simply
inaccurate. It is a business that requires a lot of money and a lot of trust –
or possibly not actually “trust” but often a strong stomach that allows one to
take something without asking any questions.
This is what happened to Karen King when she was presented
with this GosJesWife fragment. The owner said that it was a fragment of a
larger whole and he was willing to allow her to borrow the manuscript for 5
years and publish on it in order to advertise the “larger whole” which the owner
would then demand a very high sum for. Karen King then had to make a decision –
do you go forward with this or not? Given the “no questions asked policy” – she
did what a good scholar would do – she presented the piece to two experts
(Roger Bagnall and AnneMarie Luijendijk) who felt the manuscript was plausible
enough to move forward with the publication. Before we judge any of them too
harshly (even though there were some elements they missed), we should note that
this is not very different from most manuscript purchases. What did the Tchacos
group really know about the provenance of the Gospel of Judas? Truly, very
little until after they purchased it. Further, the CEOs of Hobby Lobby who are
currently buying up any and every manuscript they can get their hands on to
create an evangelical museum are asking few questions – according to Candida
Moss, so few that they are actually under investigation for breaking the UNESCO
agreement (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/can-hobby-lobby-buy-the-bible/419088/).
So, while we can critique Karen King on a lot of things, her
taking this manuscript without knowing “all the details” is really not a very
fair one. If scholars were to wait for that, things would never get published.
One of the things that this recent Atlantic article has shown is that it is
certainly possible to learn more
about manuscript origins than we have probably done so in the past, but if one
looks carefully at Sabar’s article, you will quickly see why it is that it is
more a theoretical possibility than
an actual one. Look at how many trips Sabar took to Europe and how many people
he ran into and he wore down over the course of four years of investigating. How much did that cost? Are scholars
able to come up with that? We happen to know the provenance well now of two
documents: The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and
Codex Tchacos – which of course
includes the Gospel of Judas. Both of
these manuscripts were bestsellers and created a media frenzy. National
Geographic and the Atlantic took notice. There was money to be made in learning
about this. Can the same be said of Zostrianos?
Or worse yet any small fragment from later than the 4th century of a
New Testament text? It won’t be a “foundational” fragment for our present New
Testaments, so why bother the expense? Further, notice who it was that did this investigation. In both cases, experienced
and trained investigative journalists (Herbert Krosney and Ariel Sabar). With
all of that, though, if you read carefully Sabar’s narrative, the entire story
falls apart if Walter Fritz doesn’t start giving information. Could scholars
really be expected to do this? They tried with the Nag Hammadi library – a team
of scholars, most notably James Robinson worked hard to try to find the origins
of the Nag Hammadi library and came up with the now infamous story of a certain
Mohammed Ali who was digging for fertilizer in the Fayum of Egypt and hit
something hard. This then went through a series of misfortunes (in which some
of the manuscripts were destroyed) before they findall found their way to
scholars’ hands. This investigation, though, was not as thorough as Krosney’s
and has been questions. Nicola Denzey with her graduate student Justine Blount
recently challenged nearly the entire narrative.[1] Is it really fair to ask Karen King to
do something that very few scholars have the time, resources, or skill to do?
The second great cry recently has been the “serves you
right, you liberal scholars” trope. This is the more disturbing of the
discourses. The call for shame and even for asking the article to be removed
from scholarly discourse is simply not how manuscripts are distributed. All
manuscripts are not distributed before they are published. Some try to do this
to make money (like the National Geographic with the Gospel of Judas) and others really want to make very little money,
but they do want the academic credit to be attached to their name – this is
most notorious with John Strugnell who had a stranglehold on the Dead Sea
Scrolls for many years. In order for something to be distributed, it has to be
published. Further, scholars of course want
credit for their publications. Scholars are required to publish original work,
the gift of a “new” manuscript is that it is automatically original. Scholars therefore do want to publish it.
Further, publishing a manuscript like this is a lot of work. Usually manuscripts are in pieces and deciphering them
is far easier said than done (handwriting alone makes it difficult).
However, we should not confuse publication with a “ringing
endorsement.” When King published the article in 2012 through Harvard
Theological Review, there were immediately questions. The handwriting seemed
wrong. It seemed to have been made with a brush or a stick. We had no examples
of this being done in antiquity. There were real questions as to the contents –
it was discover very quickly that it was dependent upon the Gospel of Thomas. How did it get access?
Relatively shortly thereafter, it was discovered that a different manuscript in
the same collection seemed forged – it was a fragment from the Gospel of John
which seemed to be organized precisely the same way as the columns of a
critical edition – which of course was not created until modernity. Then the
scribal mistake was noted in the transcription of the Gospel of Thomas which
was identical to a scribal mistake in an online version of the Gospel of
Thomas. All of this made scholars nearly completely positive that the
manuscript was a modern forgery on ancient papyrus.
What is important to recognize was that all of these
discussions took place in published
documents. This was done initially in blogs, but also in academic articles.
New Testament Studies dedicated an
entire volume to the GosJesWife papyrus. It was all printed and discussed.
Karen King was part of that discussion. While she still held out some hope that
the document could be original – until the investigation of Sabar – it wasn’t
as if there was some kind of “cover up” conspiracy, or that without asking those “tough questions” from the author that
scholars were so unanimously supporting this as authentic. Instead, they were
coming to some of the same conclusions that Sabar did, just from the academic
angle.
Scholars have discussed and debated documents for some time
that are probably forgeries. The most infamous is the Secret Gospel of Mark, that a majority of scholars think is a
modern forgery (possibly forged by Morton Smith its “discoverer” himself).
However, that does not stop scholars from discussing it. However, it should be
noted that I am unaware of any discussion
of either the GosJesWife or The Secret
Gospel of Mark that does not make authenticity one of the primary points of
conversation. In King’s original article, before she suggests where this
document could fit within Christian history and what the main themes might
mean, she spends time discussing authenticity. The volume of the New Testament Studies was almost
entirely dedicated to the question of authority. Therefore, the “serves you
right” chastisement really is misplaced – what Sabar has done is provided
scholars with an excellent data
source that will inform any further conversation about this text (and yes, I do
believe there will be further conversation). But Sabar did not open and close
the book on this topic – it was up for discussion since 2012 when it was first
revealed.
The lesson to all of this is that first, while the reception
of history that Sabar uncovered for the Gospel of Jesus Wife seems unbelievable,
one should compare it with the gospel of Judas – are they really all that
different? If one compares the stories, really the only difference is that the
one ended up being authentic and the other a forgery. The antiquities markets are
awful places and very shady deals are made. Is it really better for scholars
not to participate at all and the documents get destroyed due to lack of care
(as happened with the Gospel of Judas)? The second lesson is that Sabar has
given us a gift – he has done the hard work and spent the money to find the
history of this manuscript. All we can do is wish and hope that it might be
possible to do this with other manuscripts whose histories we know far less
poorly. Being an outsider looking in (as I am not a manuscript expert), it is
easy for me to demand more transparency – but is that really fair? Yes, we are
all upset with the John Strugnells who wouldn’t allow anyone but his students
to see the Dead Sea Scrolls and delayed their publication. However, the flip
side is those manuscripts that remain in museums and libraries that no one has
published at all.
The Gospel of Jesus’
Wife was a modern forgery, but it did the scholarly world a kind of
service, it helped people care about manuscripts and has the potential to teach
us all about the world of how manuscripts which are authentic have arisen for
us.
[1] Nicola
Denzey Lewis and Justine Ariel Blount, “Rethinking the Origins of Nag Hammadi
Codices” JBL, 133(2), 2014, 399-419.
