The saga of the papyrus that became famous as the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife began with an email sent to Karen King, a distinguished Harvard professor, in July 2010. The subject line read, simply, “Coptic gnostic gospels in my collection.”
The “gospel” in question is a fragment of papyrus about the size of a credit card. It contains eight incomplete lines of Coptic script that seem to recount Jesus arguing with disciples about the role of Mary, including an incredible reference to my wife. The fragment was rolled out to great fanfare in 2012, starring in a TV documentary and on the front page of the New York Times. Exactly a decade after that first email, after dizzying waves of media hype and astonishing twists through some of the darker alleys of biblical studies and the most fetid corners of the Internet, the saga has now brought us Veritas, a masterful unraveling of the story by the journalist Ariel Sabar.
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