Veritas : a Harvard professor, a con man, and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author comes the gripping true story of a sensational religious forgery and the scandal that shook Harvard.

In 2012, Dr. Karen King, a star religion professor at Harvard, announced a breathtaking discovery just steps from the Vatican: she'd found an ancient scrap of papyrus in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene "my wife." The mysterious manuscript, which King provocatively titled "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife," had the power to topple the Roman Catholic Church. It threatened not just the all-male priesthood, but centuries of sacred teachings on marriage, sex, and women's leadership, much of it premised on the hallowed tradition of a celibate Jesus.

Award-winning journalist Ariel Sabar covered King's announcement in Rome but left with a question that no one seemed able to answer: Where in the world did this history-making papyrus come from? Sabar's dogged sleuthing led from the halls of Harvard Divinity School to the former headquarters of the East German Stasi before landing on the trail of a Florida man with an unbelievable past. Could a motorcycle-riding pornographer with a fake Egyptology degree and a prophetess wife have set in motion one of the greatest hoaxes of the century? A propulsive tale laced with twists and trapdoors, Veritas is an exhilarating, globe-straddling detective story about an Ivy League historian and a college dropout--and how they worked together to pass off an audacious forgery as a long-lost piece of the Bible.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue: Rome (p. xi)
• Act 1 Discovery
• Solicitations (p. 3)
• Strange Teachings (p. 7)
• The Harvard Imprimatur (p. 17)
• Burning Questions (p. 39)
• The Complication of Mary (p. 58)
• A Brilliant Jewel (p. 72)
• Augustinianum (p. 86)
• Act 2 Doubt
• Epsilon and Iota (p. 111)
• The Kingdom of God Puzzle (p. 118)
• Riding a Tiger (p. 127)
• Act 3 Proofs (p. 131)
• Act 4 The Stranger
• Crossroads (p. 153)
• The Little Darling and the Stasi (p. 172)
• Hotwife (p. 189)
• Don't Want to Know (p. 198)
• The Secret Room (p. 223)
• Invisible Hand (p. 243)
• Feeling of Calm (p. 260)
• Act 5 The Downturned Book of Revelations
• Operational Effectiveness (p. 267)
• The Pro and the Con (p. 284)
• Faustian Bargain (p. 309)
• Epilogue: Services (p. 323)
• Acknowledgments (p. 339)
• Note on Sources and Methods (p. 343)
• Notes (p. 345)
• Selected Bibliography (p. 381)
• Index (p. 387)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

PROLOGUE Rome On September 18, 2012, a group of international scholars gathered in a building across from the Vatican for an obscure academic conference on Egypt's 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 brighter--and crueler--spotlight than any she had known before. In a room over-looking the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, King told the audience of elite scholars that she had already given her discovery a name. "I dubbed it--just simply for reference purposes--'The Gospel of Jesus's 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 Boston's 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 skies--a peculiar patchwork of symbols from heraldry, classical myth and Christianity. He asked King's permission to take photographs of inscriptions that loped across the tarot-like panels. "She didn't 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 donors--husbands 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 didn't. "I tremendously enjoyed my meeting with her," the man would reflect later. "I feel that over the years we've almost become friends." ACT 1 DISCOVERY Do not be ignorant of me. For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. . . . I am control and the uncontrollable. I am the union and the dissolution. --The Thunder, Perfect Mind SOLICITATIONS Dr. Karen Leigh King had reached the summit of her field as a dazzling interpreter of condemned scripture. On her bookshelves at Harvard Divinity School were ancient texts as mysterious as they were startling. Among them were the Sophia of Jesus Christ, the Secret Revelation of John and the Gospel of Judas. The Gospel of Mary--as in Magdalene--was a favorite. So was The Thunder, Perfect Mind, a poem voiced by a female god whose paradoxical self-affirmations King found "incredibly inclusive." Such writings were nowhere to be found in the church-sanctioned collection of sacred literature commonly known as the New Testament. Early bishops had rejected them as heresies and sought their eradication. For hundreds of years, no one knew what became of them. But in the late 1800s, fragments of papyrus bearing traces of these lost scriptures began turning up at archaeological sites and antiquities shops across Egypt. The story they told about the earliest centuries of Christianity would force historians to reexamine almost everything they thought they knew about the world's predominant faith. The more pieces of papyrus the deserts disgorged, the more the official history of Christianity--"the master story," as King called it--began to look like a lie. To King, these newly unearthed texts were the missing pieces of a Bible that might have been, had history taken a different course. In the suppressed writings of ancient believers she saw a Christianity more open-armed and less taken with violence than the one passed down by the long line of powerful popes and Sunday sermonizers. "We are only beginning to construct the pieces of a fuller and more accurate narrative of Christian beginnings," she declared. "The dry desert of Egyptian Africa has yielded a feast for the nourishment of the mind and perhaps for the spirit as well." When colleagues published a book celebrating her scholarship, they titled it Re-Making the World . "In a quiet voice," they wrote, "she has changed the face of early Christian studies." As an eminent Harvard historian of banished gospels, King could pack a college lecture hall nearly anywhere in the world. But students weren't the only ones who sought her instruction. Her work at the fringes of faith drew notice from mystics, conspiracists and mediums, some of whom regarded her as a bearer of secret knowledge. One email correspondent sent her a code he said unlocked the mysteries of the Bible. Another asked for the key to the seemingly random order of Jesus's sayings in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. "Some woman offered me 'True facts about Mary Magdalene,' because, she told me, 'I am Mary Magdalene,' " King recalled. "I get a lot of that kind of stuff." To many orthodox and evangelical believers, the gospels King studied were no less blasphemous now than they had been to the Church Fathers: they were delusions wrought by the devil, detours from the one true way. And this explained the other genre of email King had to contend with--the dark stream of threats and hate. Some messages were so toxic that King quarantined them in a folder she labeled "Poison." "Repent," people had urged her, "while there's still time." July 9, 2010, was a Friday at the end of a long Boston heat wave. At a little before noon, King, who worked at home in the summers, received an email that Harvard Divinity School's spam filters had labeled "SUSPECT." King didn't recognize the sender. But the subject line--"Coptic gnostic gospels in my collection"--suggested someone more credible than the "kooky" strangers who sometimes emailed. The scriptures King wrote about, which dated from the second to fourth century a.d., were sometimes called Gnostic, because of their view that salvation came not from the death and resurrection of Jesus but from personal knowledge, or gnosis, of the divine. Coptic, meanwhile, was the language of Egypt's earliest Christians and of some of the oldest surviving copies of the gospels. Most of the known Gnostic manuscripts were discovered between the 1890s and the 1940s, and many had long since been cataloged and conserved in libraries and museums in Egypt, Germany and the United Kingdom. Were a set of previously unknown gospels to come to light now, it would electrify biblical studies. The field had so few texts for so many scholars that every discovery occasioned a kind of stir--along with sometimes jealous fights for access. The sender introduced himself as a manuscript collector. He told King he had about fifteen fragments of Coptic papyrus, one of which had recently rekindled his curiosity. "Unfortunately I don't read Cop- tic," he wrote. But he had an English translation. It "points," he wrote, "towards a gnostic gospel, in which Jesus and a disciple had an argument about Mary. "Since I read some of your publications you [ sic ] name came to my mind," he continued. "If you are interested in having a closer look, I gladly email photos." King replied that she was very interested. Five hours later, the man emailed images of a dozen papyrus fragments. He called her attention to two. Coptic Papyrus 01-11 was a piece of the Gospel of John he believed dated to the third century a.d. The other--Coptic Papyrus 02-11--was the text about Mary he'd mentioned in his first email. He now called it "an unknown Gospel." A metal ruler, pictured along its bottom edge, showed it to be about three-by-one-and-a-half inches, nearly the dimensions of a business card. Its front side, or recto, was covered with eight lines of thickly stroked Coptic handwriting. Every line was incomplete, a sign that the scrap had probably broken off, or been cut, from the middle of some larger page. King recognized some of the surviving words. The first line, for instance, recalled a verse from the Gospel of Thomas. Other phrases smacked of the Gospel of Mary, a second-century text that depicted Mary Magdalene as superior, in Jesus's eyes, to the male apostles. It happened that King was the world's foremost expert on the Gospel of Mary; her research on it, as a young scholar in California, had first brought her to Harvard's attention in the 1990s. In books and lectures, King had used the text to dispel what she saw as one of the most pernicious falsehoods in the history of Christianity: the portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a repentant prostitute--a slander, sanctioned by popes, whose true purpose, King believed, was to keep Christian women from power as the fledgling Church courted the patronage of patriarchal Rome. The parallels between these familiar texts and the collector's "unknown Gospel" were remarkable. But what riveted King was the one line lacking any known precedent: " peje Iēsous nau ta-hime " was Coptic for "Jesus said to them, 'My wife.' " The phrase was so extraordinary that King didn't quite believe it. But the surrounding words seemed to leave little doubt. Just before Jesus speaks, the disciples pose a question about the worthiness of a woman named Mariam, or Mary. "My wife . . . ," Jesus replies, ". . . she is able to be my disciple . . . / . . . Let wicked people swell up . . . / . . . As for me, I dwell with her in order to..." It was a portrait of Jesus--married, living with his wife Mary Magdalene, cursing her detractors--unlike any known to history. Excerpted from Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife by Ariel Sabar All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Journalist Sabar (My Father's Paradise) has written a true story of mystery and intrigue. In 2012, Karen King, professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced that she learned of an ancient papyrus fragment in which Jesus referred to Mary Magdalene as his wife; this discovery challenged conventional wisdom about not only the life of Jesus but also biblical teachings in general. Sabar wrote an article on the announcement yet felt there was more to the story. His research led him around the world before he discovered the true nature of this fabricated document. Blending religious history with a tale of deception, this account also describes the work and research of King and explores how she, despite impressive credentials as a biblical scholar, believed a contrived manuscript was a historical document. Sabar continues by examining the motives of all involved, and detailing his ongoing search for the truth. VERDICT This is a well-researched, engrossing backstory of failed discovery from a noted scholar. Best suited for readers interested in biblical studies and papyrology.--Jacqueline Parascandola, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Publishers Weekly Review

In this entertaining outing, journalist Sabar (My Father's Paradise) tells the story of a mysterious scrap of papyrus and the scholar who staked her professional reputation on it. As a writer for Smithsonian magazine, Sabar investigated the story of Harvard professor Karen King and her so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife, supposedly discovered in 2012, which quoted Jesus as calling Mary Magdalene "my wife." If it was in fact an authentic document, it would have unsettled conversations about Jesus's life, ministry, and relationships. King's fall comes after carbon dating established the papyrus to be of medieval origin and an article of Sabar's forced King to retract her claims of authenticity for the "gospel." In the second half of the book, Sabar allows himself to emerge as a character in his own right--the hero who ferrets out fraudster Walter Fritz, who fabricated documents of authenticity for the papyrus fragment and had fooled some of the brightest minds in biblical studies. Sabar's narrative can be challenging to follow at times, in part because of the large cast that spans centuries, and also due to a frustrating aimlessness about exactly what mystery Sabar sees as central to his narrative: how the fraud happened, or the reasons--political, financial, and psychological--people were carried away by it. Still, this meticulous account is packed with enough intrigue to keep readers piqued. (Aug.)

Booklist Review

In 2012, a papyrus fragment in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene his wife made headlines worldwide. Karen King, a Harvard expert on Gnosticism, introduced and championed the piece as an alternative look into Christianity's beginnings, but she didn't practice proper due diligence as to its provenance. There was pushback at the time, and, after several years of examination, even King acknowledged that the so-called Gospel of Jesus's Wife was probably fake. Sabar, an award-winning journalist, was there at the beginning; unable to let the story go, he's produced an exhaustive examination of the whole affair in a work of exemplary narrative nonfiction. Fitting neatly into the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction category, the story hops from Berlin to Rome to Nowheresville, Florida, and finally to Harvard Yard, introducing in the process con-man Walter Fritz, both an internet pornographer and a forger of ancient texts. Sabar details his time with Fritz, trying to cut through the man's many obfuscations, but the real focus is on King. Sabar makes the case that King's determination to validate women's role in early Christianity led her to cut corners while pushing her Gospel. But Sabar also seems to have an agenda, often going out of his way to throw shade at King. (A note reveals she wouldn't speak to him for this book.) Provocative and probing, this will entice readers interested in the history of early Christianity.

Kirkus Book Review

Intriguing religious/true-crime story involving a possible wife of Jesus. News outlets came alive in 2012 when Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King announced the discovery of a papyrus fragment suggesting that Jesus may have had a wife. The fragment, soon dubbed "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife," stirred interest as well as controversy, as scholars across the world warned it may be a fraud. King, who had obtained the fragment from a mysterious and anonymous collector, doggedly defended the ancient piece of papyrus even as the evidence of its authenticity grew weaker. Journalist Sabar--whose book My Father's Paradise (2009) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography--happened to be following the story from the beginning, and he shares a sometimes-riveting, occasionally odd tale of academia gone awry. Though the author goes to great pains to portray King in a positive, compassionate light, a central reality emerges: The professor's excitement over the social impact of the fragment blurred her sense of what was historically accurate. After introducing King biographically as a brilliant and respected scholar, "a dazzling interpreter of condemned scripture," Sabar moves on to the story of how King came across the fragment and decided it was most likely legitimate. Her debut of the fragment at a conference in Rome led to a storm of media attention. Over time, however, other scholars began to see signs of forgery in the way the document had been created, and the media tide turned against King. The sordid source of the fragment--a former student of ancient languages--turned-pornographer--overshadowed King's hopes that what it represented for women in the church was worth believing in, above the papyrus' actual authenticity. "Her ideological commitments," Sabar concludes, "were choreographing her practice of history. The story came first; the dates managed after." A lengthy yet fascinating tale of how one scholar was duped, both by a con man and by herself. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

ARIEL SABAR is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, The Washington Post, and many other publications. He is the author of My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.