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...

Some readers may remember (or not, it's been four years already) that a sensationalist documentary, Bloodline , came out in 2008 claiming to reveal new evidence that Mary Magdalene traveled to Southern France, that she and Jesus married, and most damning of all that the resurrection was a big hoax. There was just enough to the story to make me worried that this might actually be the real deal, so I did quite a bit of research and wrote a substantial critique soon after the documentary came out. Even back then, the story was already starting to crumble under the weight of very substantial criticisms, which I documented in my critique (not all of the links are still working, this was four years ago after all, nearly a century in Internet time!). But the 'explorer' who had unearthed these 'artifacts', who went by the pseudonym Ben Hammott, kept stringing people along, promising that a full investigation was underway by the French authorities, which however never came ...