Ariel Sabar Credit...Mary Beth Meehan
By Mark Oppenheimer
Aug. 11, 2020
VERITAS
A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife
By Ariel Sabar
In 2012, the Harvard scholar Karen King announced what she believed to be an extraordinary discovery: a second-century papyrus fragment with a text hinting that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” as it became known, tapped into a plot point from “The Da Vinci Code” that had already helped King’s academic treatise on Mary Magdalene become a best seller with a mass audience.
This “gospel” was worldwide news — before skeptical papyrologists and grammarians, in one case drawing on the research of an amateur Coptic obsessive working in his Macomb, Mich., basement, showed it to be a complete fake. King was mum on who the stranger from Florida was who had given her the fragment, but the writer Ariel Sabar, using sophisticated tools like Google, uncovered that it was one Walter Fritz, a former director of the Stasi Museum in East Germany with a fake Egyptology degree whose businesses included charging for online videos of his wife having sex with other men, and who, more than three weeks before King’s bombshell announcement about the papyrus, had registered the web domain gospelofjesuswife.com
Mark Oppenheimer’s book about the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh will be published next summer.
VERITAS
A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife
By Ariel Sabar
416 pp. Doubleday. $29.95
PAYWALL
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