Do you remember what you made of it all in that moment? Weiss-Meyer : In 2012, you were the only journalist in the room in Rome when Karen King revealed the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. I didn’t really feel like I could do any sort of scholarly analysis, but one of the questions that I felt as a journalist I might have the skills to investigate was the question of its origins. There was definitely an overwhelming majority of scholars who thought it was fake, but there was a minority, including Karen King, who continued to think it was authentic. So after the Smithsonian story ran, at the back of my mind was always this question of who is this man, this complete stranger who approached Karen King?Īround 2015, I looked back over the preceding three years of coverage of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife and noticed that scholars were still at something of a standstill. King for information but she was very tight-lipped about it. She also told me that he was a complete stranger. He asked not to be named and she was going to grant that. What convinced you that there was more reporting to be done?Īriel Sabar : The big thing that troubled, or interested, me right from the start was this question of where did the papyrus that Karen King presented to the world in 2012 come from? What was its source? King had told reporters and other people that she was offering the gentleman anonymity. An edited transcript of our conversation is below.Īmy Weiss-Meyer : You reported on the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife for Smithsonian magazine in 2012, when the fragment was first revealed in Rome. I spoke with Sabar about his extensive investigation, the nature of truth, and the future of the contested papyrus scrap. Today he published Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. “He lied to me.” Sabar, for his part, kept reporting. “I had no idea about this guy, obviously,” King told Sabar of the papyrus’s owner. In the Roman Catholic Church in particular, the New Testament is seen as divine revelation handed down through a long line of men-Jesus, the 12 apostles, the Church fathers, the popes, and finally the priests who bring God’s word to the parish pews today.” What if there was evidence that Jesus had seen a woman as worthy of discipleship too?īut Sabar’s Atlantic article prompted King to admit that the papyrus was probably a forgery. Centuries of Christian tradition are bound up in whether the scrap is authentic or, as a growing group of scholars contends, an outrageous modern fake: Jesus’s bachelorhood helps form the basis for priestly celibacy, and his all-male cast of apostles has long been cited to justify limits on women’s religious leadership. “But even without that provocative title, it would have shaken the world of biblical scholarship. “King called the business-card-size papyrus ‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,’” Sabar wrote. Could this man have forged the explosive text? Was King’s discovery too good to be true? The journalist Ariel Sabar covered King’s 2012 presentation for Smithsonian magazine, and revisited the mystery of the papyrus’s origins in a 2016 article for The Atlantic, “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife,” in which he tracked down the owner of the papyrus-a man whose identity King adamantly refused to share with the press. She had discovered a fragment of papyrus that bore a shocking phrase: “Jesus said to them, My wife.” If the scrap was authentic, it had the potential to upend centuries of Roman Catholic tradition. At a September 2012 academic conference in Rome, Karen King, a historian at Harvard Divinity School, made a major announcement.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |