Angelus News | October 2-9, 2020 | Vol. 5 No. 25

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
“The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” papyrus fragment.
Following the money
A journalist uncovers the true-crime tale of a phony piece of
parchment with an anti-Christian agenda
BY JOHN J. MILLER / ANGELUS
When a Harvard professor
needed fast cash to test
the date of a controversial
document that made a startling claim
about Jesus, she knew where to go:
“Funding for the carbon-14 testing
was generously provided by a gift from
Tricia Nichols,” noted Karen King
of Harvard Divinity School in her
2014 article for Harvard Theological
Review.
But who was Tricia Nichols? The
journalist Ariel Sabar wanted to find
out. He’d been covering King even
before she had announced in 2012
the discovery of a piece of papyrus that
quoted Jesus as referring to “my wife.”
Written in Coptic, an ancient Egyptian
language that uses Greek letters,
the fragment is smaller than a business
card and contains eight lines of broken
text. It was supposedly part of a much
larger manuscript, now lost. King gave
the scrap a provocative title: “The
Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” If nothing
else, the name was a brilliant bit of
branding: She made front-page news
around the world.
Yet it was also a fragment of her imagination.
The once-celebrated document
is a forgery, as many scholars
suspected from the start and as Sabar
shows conclusively in his outstanding
book of investigative journalism,
“Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con
Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”
(Penguin Random House, $29.95).
Sabar has written a true-crime tale
that reads like a reverse “Da Vinci
Code”: Whereas Dan Brown’s notorious
novel described the fictional
exploits of a Harvard professor who
battles Catholic reactionaries and
learns that Jesus and Mary Magdalene
were husband and wife, Sabar’s work
of nonfiction tells how a Harvard
scholar was duped into believing the
false claims of a phony document because
they appealed to her professional
ambitions and ideological fantasies.
(I podcasted with Sabar here.)
Tricia Nichols played a minor but
revealing role in the drama. She
donated $5,000 to Harvard Divinity
School to pay for the radiocarbon test
of King’s so-called gospel. Although
King cited Nichols in her academic
article, the Harvard scholar refused
to answer any of Sabar’s questions
about her patron. A determined Sabar
searched for Nichols on his own: “It
was a common enough name, but
after some false starts I found her.”
So who is the person who underwrote
a key study of a bogus text that makes
explosive claims about Jesus? “The
Sen
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30 • ANGELUS • October 2-9, 2020