The Evangelical Universalist Forum

JRP vs The Jesus Wife Fragment and The Axis of Shockery

The libertarian journal Altarandthrone.com, has picked up and republished an article I wrote a couple of weeks ago, criticizing the scandal at Harvard Divinity School and the Smithsonian Institute for intentionally promoting a document that (1) they could and would have fairly easily discarded as a hoax had they been serious about doing their due diligence on it; and (2) would not even possibly have been as important to any history whatsoever (except the history of incompetent Coptic paleography perhaps) as they kept trying to make it out to be.

I’m the first person I know of to have written a summary of the problems which explicitly calls out the scholarly conspirators on (what I call) their “axis of shockery” – other articles I’ve read so far have been politely nice about treating them as victims of the clever hoaxer who tricked them. But I don’t think the evidence as it stands points that way: Dr. Karen King, and her supporters at the HDS and Smithsonian, knew perfectly well they shouldn’t have been trying to market themselves using this thing, even if it had been legitimate, and they had as much reason as anyone, much earlier than anyone else did, to recognize full suspicion of the fragment.

Although the conspirators were trying to make religious (or anti-religious) hay out of their claims, my criticisms aren’t religious – I’m treating it purely as an institutional scholarly scandal.

There are links before, during, and after the article to (in order) a prior article I wrote a few years ago which still serves okay as a quick introduction to what Dr. King et al marketed as “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife”; a prior less focused article a few days before this one which covers a lot of the same material objections in more detail (if for some reason you want to read me rambling on at more length about the central problems of how this hoax was promoted); the bombshell article in the Atlantic Monthly which finally uncovered the (not deductively certain but pretty obviously probable) original hoaxer (not written by me of course, although ironically written by the Smithsonian’s chosen journalist for promoting the fragment originally – who by the way even when exposing the fraud keeps trying to make the original controversy over the fragment vastly more important than it could have possibly been) ; and last but far from least a web journal by a New Testament textual scholar who followed the story for years providing links to analyses and articles pro and con. Many of his friends and contacts contributed a ton of analysis to the puzzle of the fragment’s legitimacy: frankly, for a few months now all that has remained was to find who originally donated the fragment to Dr. King.

Credit goes to editor Justin Fowler for the little photo-asides included in this version of my article!

altarandthrone.com/the-jesus … -shockery/

This raises a couple questions, Jason. Normally, publications of places like Harvard Divinity School or the Smithsonian Institute, usually have editors - scrutinizing the material for publication. How do you think this got past their eyes of scrutiny? My second question is this: has anyone from the Harvard Divinity School or the Smithsonian Institute, responded publicly to your critique?

Thank you, Jason, for those very informative articles. This sort of hoax is infuriating, and it illustrates how the world will seize upon anything, anything at all, if it can conceivably be used to whack the Church.

Ha, I feel pretty secure in doubting that anyone from the HDS or the Smithsonian even know I exist, much less would reply to my critique. :wink: They would barely even deign to reply to major scholarly critiques, except within highly strictured formats (that they themselves could kind-of capitalize on).

As for their own editorial processes, the editors of course would only be checking for typeproofing errors (grammar, punctuation, mis-spell, etc.) The choice to run with this mess and to keep running with it was a managerial decision, and while I can make some educated guesses about their rationales based on how they went about it (i.e. promoting themselves as institutions over-against Christianity per se and institutional Christianity in particular), they haven’t made statements about why they did it so I couldn’t give you particulars.

The Dean of HDS added a short notice to Harvard’s website on the fragment, which acknowledges that Dr. King now thinks (after the article exposing her supplier) that the fragment may be fake and that the supporting docs provided by Walter Fritz are definitely fake; and the Dean added that HDS appreciated the efforts of everyone involved in the controversy (I bet they do, so far as it got attention for HDS) and that they “will continue to treat the questions raised by them with all the seriousness they deserve.” --which by their past behavior doesn’t amount to much!

gospelofjesusswife.hds.harvard.edu/introduction