Jesus' Wife and Fakery!

So the whole Jesus' wife thing has been doing the rounds, and it seems that it is a fake. This article, from The Guardian, confirms through textual analysis that it is indeed so. It appears to rely on a modern typo:

The gospel of Jesus's wife: a very modern fake

A typo shows the Jesus's wife text can only be as old as the online document from which it seems to have been copied

It's been fairly clear for weeks that the papyrus fragment known as the "gospel of Jesus's wife" was a modern fake, assembled from phrases found in real gnostic gospels and in particular the Gospel of Thomas, a 4th-century copy of a 2nd-century manuscript. But some astonishing and delightful news has now emerged to show that it was a fake dependent on the most modern technology.

Andrew Bernhard, an American academic, discovered that the Jesus's wife manuscript copies a typo in one of the most widely distributed electronic copies of the gospel of Thomas. Previously, Francis Watson at Durham University had discovered that an unlikely word break in the gospel had been carried over into the Jesus's wife fragment.

Bernhard accepts that the fragment is a cut-and-paste job made from sections of the authentic gospel of Thomas. What he seems to have shown is the exact copy from which the text was taken. This is the interlinear translation made by Michael Grondin, which is freely available online.

The text is available either as a downloadable PDF file, or as a straight web page, and the PDF version is missing one letter in one of the words reproduced in the Jesus's wife fragment. The web version does not have this mistake. But the Jesus's wife fragment does, which shows pretty clearly that it could not have been composed before the PDF was available, no matter how old the papyrus turns out to be on which it was written.

In fact a little poking around in the world of gnostic scholarship shows that there has never been a better time to make your own gospels. Fantastic software tools are freely available: grammars and dictionaries of Coptic and...

Continue reading The Guardian.