What we all need to learn from the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife story

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 4^th 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.

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[1] Nicola Denzey Lewis and Justine Ariel Blount, “Rethinking the Origins of Nag Hammadi Codices” JBL, 133(2), 2014, 399-419.

Pauline Chronology: A study that gets in the way of meaning

There is an odd situation in academic circles at the moment concerning Pauline Chronology. The discussion centers around the use of Acts to construct Paul’s life as opposed to the data found in his letters. The reality is that the vast majority of that data is found in Galatians 1-2, but there are a few other moments found in other letters which are tangentially relevant (2 Cor. 11:32-33; 1 Cor. 15:8; 1 Thess. 2:16; 2 Cor. 12:2; Phil. 4:15; 1 Cor. 16:6). Further, these points are not just in tension between Acts and Paul, also, they are then triangulated with Roman history. The challenges with this is well known and there is no reason to go into depth on the topic here. What is interesting is where these discussions are happening. 3 decades ago, this was a widely discussed topic in academic circles.[1] Now, very few studies are being presented that seriously discuss Pauline Chronology.[2]  What is interesting is not that this topic has largely fallen off the discussion in academic settings, but that it persists so aggressively in educational settings. While very few are discussing Pauline chronology in an academic context, there is very rarely an introduction to Paul or the New Testament that does not have this as one of its anchors to the class. I, myself, was asked to do a thorough study in a doctoral class which was an overview of New Testament interpretative techniques. Why this disconnect? It is not as if the topic has come to scholarly consensus – indeed, if one places Bo Reicke against John Knox, then one will find next to no scholarly agreement.[3] Further, it is not as if topics which have no clear solution – which this does not – are forgotten in scholarship. Consider, for example, how many books are still being written on the synoptic problem or the historical Jesus – simply because there is no clear solution does not stop this from being discussed. Further, why, if this is so frequently cited in educational settings, is it so rare in academic publications? I argue that the reason is the goal of studies. Work son Paul are primarily interested in meaning and social setting. Unfortunately, chronology, being a modern reconstruction putting Acts and Paul together and then mapping it onto Roman history is not primarily about that. Instead, this is used for two possible reasons – apologetics about the inspiration of scripture (in the quest to try and show that there are no historical impossibilities in scripture) or as a case study for why books should be studied on their own – why it is that it is so frequently used in educational settings. The one thing that it is not used for, is to show the meaning of the text. If that is the case, then should we not be more proactive in ceasing from making this as crucial an educational piece? Should we not always focus on meaning rather than apologetics?

First, a few notes should be mentioned about the challenges of any Pauline chronology. Doing this is an incredibly difficult task. Further, the problem of Acts looms large – there is no way to get around it. The modern discussion of the chronology of Paul attempts to reconstruct the historical Paul in order to shed light on both the meaning of his letters and the book of Acts. This study of the modern reconstruction of the chronology of Paul is beset by challenges. First, the relationship between Acts and the biographical details of Paul’s letters need to be addressed. The two resources need to be collated and harmonized or prioritized in some systematic way. Second, a modern reader must use the details of Roman history that are known and apply those to the harmony earlier constructed. Third, one must measure and evaluate the sources of information presented in the study on historical grounds. To do that, one must recognize the rhetorical nature of the texts considered, as well as the modern challenges to authorship. While there are very different reconstructions of the life of Paul, one aspect cannot be avoided even by the most traditional scholars who value the historical approach of both Acts and Paul as well as the more reductive scholars who reject Acts and only build the chronology on Paul’s “firm” letters – any chronology of Paul is a modern reconstruction. Those who want to use all sources and value them unavoidably judge and deemphasize some over against others, and those who try to avoid Acts unavoidably continue to use it given its importance as the only narrative of Paul’s life from the first century. The reason for this is that any chronology is a harmonization in some sense based upon the dictum of John Knox: “The conventional chronology of Paul’s life is arrived at by harmonizing Paul’s intervals with Luke’s incidents.”[4]

The relationship between Paul and Acts can be characterized in basically three options:

1.     The book of Acts and Paul have no tensions which can be explained simply by proper interpretation.[5]

2.     Acts is valuable and should be used at all points where it does not contradict a specific piece of evidence from Paul.[6]

3.     Acts can be used, but only when Paul deliberately agrees with it – at all other times it is suspect and needs to be carefully analyzed.[7]

All of these positions have one major feature in common. They all prioritize Paul’s letters as historically accurate. They argue that while cultural memory can shift over time, Paul writing about himself must be accurate.[8] This makes the conversation less about the dichotomy between Paul and Acts and instead far more about the way in which Acts can helpfully or harmfully supplement Paul. One should note that an odd element of this study is that next to no one questions Paul’s versions of events – apparently Paul is always accurate and therefore any question needs to challenge Acts rather than Paul. This is a very strange position given how occasional Paul’s letters are – especially Paul’s letter to the Galatians.  

The largest critique of the current study is the major gap that lies on one side of the data. It is universally held that Acts is a rhetorical narrative that at the very least emphasizes and includes certain data rather than other pieces of data to further its goals. Therefore, the data presented in Acts is looked at and interpreted rather skeptically. It is surprising, therefore, that the same is not true for Paul’s account of what happened. While it is certainly true that Luke-Acts has theological interests for a particular situation, it is hard to believe that Acts is as specific of a rhetorical situation as Galatians is. Why is Galatians – and particularly the trips to Jerusalem not looked at from the same rhetorical critical angle? It seems that the interest of many scholars to try and avoid some of Luke’s theological interests upon Paul’s work have caused them to uncritically read Paul’s letters. If both Paul and Acts were seen as interpretative challenges which could have some flexibility, perhaps there could be a far more productive study than simply prioritizing one over against the other.

The second critique is less how the chronologies are reconstructed as to how they are used. The goal of the study of the New Testament should be the enlightenment of the meaning of the text. As it stands, too much of the conversation is simply about the historical reconstruction of Paul’s life. The problem is that this is not a study of the New Testament – it is a study behind the New Testament. It is certain that Paul led an interesting life and the more we can know about it, the better we can understand his work. However, it is striking how infrequently such is done in this study. With the exception of the Pauline collection, very little of the analyses overviewed here focus on interpreting Paul’s letters very carefully. They are very quick to show how this study enlightens us to the redactional themes that Luke-Acts is presenting, so why not Paul as well? How would this help us understand passages such as 2 Cor. 11 (is Paul really a poor speaker as he suggests, or is a tremendous speaker as Acts suggests and he is being sarcastic)? Is there much more that can be said? Does Paul’s personal narrative really help us understand his letters?

The answer, of course, to this is that the study of Pauline Chronology – as Knox points out – is not about either Acts or Paul. It is in trying to combine them. People have all kinds of issues where they do this, even if they claim they are not. For example, the “conflict-resolution” between Paul and the Jerusalem Apostles is often described. It should be noted that neither Acts nor Paul ever discuss this. Paul discusses conflict with no suggestion it is ever resolved whereas Acts does not present any substantive conflict in any measure. However, most all scholars will look to some kind of way that the two made peace (usually with the Jerusalem council – particularly for those who think that Paul has presented the Antioch incident out of order in Galatians 2 and that the Jerusalem council occurred after the fact). What should be noted, however, is that in an attempt to try and explain a phenomenon, we are not studying either text. We are reconstructing a social situation we aren’t sure even happened.

This leads us to the question as to why we use this study in our classes. I, myself, have for several years in my Introduction to the New Testament used Paul’s “conversion/call” experience as a case study for discussion – comparing Acts 9 and Galatians 1-2. Why is it that this is done so frequently in class, but not in our scholarship? If it is heuristically valuable for our students, then why not for ourselves? I argue that the solution should be twofold. The reason we use it for our students is because we want them to watch out lest they start conflating the two accounts without thinking about it. A comparative study of Paul shows us we should be careful to do that. The same could be said about the Gospels or any other book of the New Testament. We want them to see the theology of any particular book before doing any comparing and contrasting with other books. We fear that students will naturally harmonize passages and we want to illustrate why this is such a bad idea. Acts 9/Gal 1 is a fun way to do this. However, are we so different now? We should be honest that very few scholars of Paul avoid psychoanalyzing him. The New Perspective is sure that he was a pious Jew who simply received a call to go to the Gentiles. The neo-Lutheran perspective is sure that he saw a failure in the system of the law that most Jews could not see and therefore found a radically new solution. Both of these are trying to present something of Paul’s psyche. Neither of these positions are about the text – they are about the historical Paul. If we are going to play this game, we need to be honest about what we are doing. We are all conflating the two accounts and are trying to reconstruct a historical Paul. Second, we need to focus far less on Paul’s psyche and far more on his letters (or, for that matter Acts’s themes). We should focus on meaning as expressed in the text. Worrying about the psyche of someone we have never met is always going to be very speculative and will simply get in the way of meaning. The more we can focus on texts, the better. The more we do focus on psychologies of authors and, what’s more, chronologies based on precious few data points, the more we confuse our students and ourselves from our primary task of learning how to critical readers of the New Testament.

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[1] The best studies on the topic are: Jewett, Robert A Chronology of Paul’s Life, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979; Knox, John Chapters in a Life of Paul revised edition, edited by Douglas R.A. Hare, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987; and Luedemann, Gerd Paul Apostle to the Gentiles: Studies in Chronology trans. F. Stanley Jones, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

[2] The one recent exception which I am aware of is the following study: Tatum, Gregory New Chapters in the Life of Paul: The Relative Chronology of His Career, Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2006.

[3] Reicke, Bo Re-examining Paul’s Letters: The History of the Pauline Correspondence edited by David P. Moessner and Ingalisa Reicke, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001.

[4] John Knox, Chapters in a Life of Paul revised edition, edited by Douglas R.A. Hare (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 32.

[5] In this camp stands Reicke. Consider his view that the two accounts of the Apostolic council “basically agree” with no further conversation on the topic, Reicke, Re-examining, 17.

[6] This might be the “traditional” view as might be found in George Ogg The Chronology of the Life of Paul (London: Epworth Press, 1968).

[7] For this view see Jewett, Knox, and Luedemann.

[8] The only author closest to suggesting that Paul may not have presented something historically is Luedemann who does not actually argue that Paul has made a mistake, but that we have made a mistake in assuming that Paul’s account of the Antioch incident necessarily chronologically followed his second visit to Jerusalem – Luedemann, Paul the Apostle, 23.