{"id":1193,"date":"2020-09-29T11:04:29","date_gmt":"2020-09-29T08:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=1193"},"modified":"2020-09-29T11:04:29","modified_gmt":"2020-09-29T08:04:29","slug":"veritas-review-jewish-review-of-books-sept-15-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2020\/09\/29\/veritas-review-jewish-review-of-books-sept-15-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"“Veritas” review, Jewish Review of Books (Sept. 15, 2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Professor and the Con Man<\/h3>\n

By Matti Friedman<\/p>\n

The saga of the papyrus that became famous as the Gospel of Jesus\u2019s Wife began with an email sent to Karen King, a distinguished Harvard professor, in July 2010. The subject line read, simply, \u201cCoptic gnostic gospels in my collection.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cgospel\u201d in question is a fragment of papyrus about the size of a credit card. It contains eight incomplete lines of Coptic script that seem to recount Jesus arguing with disciples about the role of Mary, including an incredible reference to\u00a0my wife<\/em>. The fragment was rolled out to great fanfare in 2012, starring in a TV documentary and on the front page of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>. Exactly a decade after that first email, after dizzying waves of media hype and astonishing twists through some of the darker alleys of biblical studies and the most fetid corners of the Internet, the saga has now brought us\u00a0Veritas<\/em>, a masterful unraveling of the story by the journalist Ariel Sabar.<\/p>\n

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\"The
The Gospel of Jesus\u2019s Wife, recto. (Courtesy of Wikimedia.)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

King, who made herself the patron of the papyrus, touted it as a revolutionary glimpse into early Christianity and an artifact with immense significance for how Christians should think about family, marriage, and sexuality today. This ancient text\u2019s message was the right one for our times: it offered, the Harvard scholar declared, \u201crobust affirmation that women who are wives and mothers are worthy and able to be disciples of Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

At the time, King was known for her work on the early Christian dissidents known as the Gnostics. She held an august position at Harvard as Hollis Professor of Divinity, the oldest endowed professorship in America. The papyrus, to which King attached the flamboyant name \u201cthe Gospel of Jesus\u2019s Wife,\u201d bore her beyond the world of academic religious studies to mainstream celebrity. She staked her reputation on its authenticity. The spectacular failure of that bet is the subject of Sabar\u2019s gripping investigation.<\/p>\n

(Read more here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Professor and the Con Man By Matti Friedman The Jewish Review of Books,\u00a0September 15, 2020 The saga of the papyrus that became famous as the Gospel of Jesus\u2019s Wife began with an email sent to Karen King, a distinguished Harvard professor, in July 2010. The subject line read, simply, \u201cCoptic gnostic gospels in my collection.\u201d The \u201cgospel\u201d in question …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1193"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1195,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions\/1195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}