CADRE Comments

Yep, it's another article on the so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife, which in a saner world would have been called something more accurately descriptive like the Jesus Wife Fragment. [Updated 8/16/16: a couple of days after my initial post, David Meadows at RogueClassicism provided a very helpful (if a little incomplete) timeline of the various actions and claims made by various supporters and critics of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife, including tracing the biographical details and provenance claims of the fragment's owner Walter Fritz. I only noticed it today, somehow. I provisionally recommend treating his timeline as a corrective where we may differ. One major corrective is that he accounts for more scientific tests on the papyrus than I recalled -- although still much later than the initial marketing push by HDS and SI.] In my previous article , I went pretty far charging Dr. King, and whoever supported this mess at the Harvard Divinity School and the Smithsonian, with...

So, the big news this week in textual criticism studies, is that the guy who actually owns the papyrus fragment which was marketed (and I am using that term very specifically, "MARKETED") as "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife", has been found by an investigative reporter. ( Here's a Cadre article about the fragment from back in Easter season 2014. A number of interesting things have happened since then, but if you want a refresher about the details you can try there and then come back.) Not by just any reporter, but by the reporter originally assigned by the Smithsonian to be present waaaaaay back when Dr. Karen King, the scholar who promoted the piece, first presented her (original) paper on it to fellow scholars in Rome. In fact, Ariel Sabar was the only reporter present -- implicitly the only reporter allowed -- to be in the room ("a few steps away from the Vatican" as Sabar puts it much later, acknowledging tacitly that this was done for marketin...

[Note: last substantially updated Wednesday morning April 16, 2014] Just to be clear -- although clarity is hard to come by on this topic -- the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" text that will be making it to publication for Easter 2014 is the possibly-forged snippet published (at the subsequent hyperlink) as a critical edition article (since a single copy of one snippet with only a few vague words and phrases doesn't need a full book for a 'critical' edition) by Dr. Karen King and Harvard University. This GJW is not the very full text supposedly found (by Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson) in a drawer in a British museum after being supposedly lost/suppressed for 2000 years, which is probably nothing other than a translation of the well-known 1st century romantic poem Joseph and Asenath . Totally and completely different texts, but the marketing histronics around each of them are kind of similar. For details about the non-King GJW, our article from October 2013...