Ariel Sabar - Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesuss Wife

On September 18, 2012, a group of international scholars gathered in a building across from the Vatican for an obscure academic conference on Egypts earliest Christians. The weeklong program looked much like those of years past, with highly specialized lectures on Egyptian linguistics, monastery libraries and the wills of abbots. But at 7:00 that evening, the conference lost any semblance of the ordinary. A senior Harvard University professor rose to the lectern to make an astonishing announcement, one that a select group of journalists was at that very moment transmitting across the globe: she had discovered an ancient scrap of papyrus with the power to convulse the Roman Catholic Church.

The professor, a fifty-eight-year-old historian named Karen King, was a well-known and deeply respected figure in the field of biblical studies. Harvard had recently promoted her to its Hollis Professorship of Divinity, the oldest endowed chair in America and one of the most prestigious posts in the study of Christianity. She was familiar to the public, too, as a best-selling author and TV commentator on the first centuries of the faith.

But the events of September 2012 would put her in a brighterand cruelerspotlight than any she had known before. In a room overlooking the dome of St. Peters Basilica, King told the audience of elite scholars that she had already given her discovery a name.

I dubbed itjust simply for reference purposesThe Gospel of Jesuss Wife.

NINE MONTHS EARLIER, a middle-aged Florida man settled into a window seat in the first row of a midday Delta Air Lines flight to Bostons Logan International Airport. In his luggage were four tattered scraps of papyrus, one of them small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.

When he arrived at Harvard Divinity School, Karen King gave him a tour of its Gothic grounds. A highlight, for the man, was a row of windows on the top floor of the theological library. The stained glass depicted a goblet-bearing woman, Cupid aiming an arrow, and a half-naked Jesus beneath riven skiesa peculiar patchwork of symbols from heraldry, classical myth and Christianity. He asked Kings permission to take photographs of inscriptions that loped across the tarot-like panels. She didnt quite know what it meant, he thought. But he had a flair for language puzzles, and he took the liberty of reading some of it to her. The medieval German blackletter, an extravagant script, could confound the eye; but the words themselves were banal, just the names of the windows prosperous donorshusbands and wives, now long departed, from some towns near the Swiss-German border. He also answered her questions on a technical point of Middle Egyptian grammar.

He liked the feeling of knowing things she didnt.

I tremendously enjoyed my meeting with her, the man would reflect later. I feel that over the years weve almost become friends.