Tests Show ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’ Is Ancient

Two years after the academic world first learned of the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” and less than one month after the note card-sized document was seemingly proved authentic, a Smithsonian documentary trumpeting the artifact will air tonight. “Damaged and fragile, a fragment of ancient papyrus has unleashed a new interpretation of a religious story we thought we knew,” Smithsonian says of the documentary. “In one of the most startling discoveries in recent memory, scholars confirm that a codex written in the ancient Coptic language refers to the wife of Jesus.” Karen King, the distinguished Harvard professor who first presented the papyrus fragment, intones into the cameras: “This new fragment actually has Jesus saying, ‘My wife.’”



The documentary, which had been on hold for two years, got the green light after King published a blockbuster study in the Harvard Theological Review in April. “I’m hoping now that we can turn away from the question of forgery and talk much, much more about the historical significance of the fragment and precisely how it fit into the history of Christianity and questions about family and marriage and sexuality and Jesus,” King explained. She stated in the study: “I concluded this article by stating it would not be that last word on the subject.”

Indeed, it would not be. Last week, an American researcher named Christian Askeland published findings that scholars say represent the most convincing evidence yet that the ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’ is a forgery. The conclusion hinges on two elements. First, an additional fragment provided to Harvard by its anonymous source was not only likely a forgery — but written by the same hand that had authored the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” Second, it was inked in a dialect that academics say didn’t exist at the time it was supposedly written.



“To me, the odds that I’m going to be hit by lightning twice in the same day means [this fragment] is moving into the realm of the absurd,” Askeland, an assistant professor at Germany’s Protestant University Wuppertal, told The Washington Post. “And it goes on and it gets worse and worse from there.”

A second fragment containing the gospel of John traveled with the Gospel of Jesus's Wife fragment (GJW), and this Gospel of John fragment (GJohn) is clearly a forgery. Because both fragments share the same writing, the GJW must also be a forgery. I am grateful for the input that Alin Suciu, Mark Goodacre and many others have offered concerning the newly available Gospel of John fragment. I will use the present page to post photographs, a comparative transcription and relevant links. Please note, this will be a dynamic page, and I will no doubt update the transcriptions and main points. Over the course of the next week, I will write an article for the June 2014 Tyndale Bulletin discussing the paleography and text of this fragment.

The following transcription represents in green the extant text of the forgery. Mark Goodacre offers an eloquent discussion of how this inauthenticates both this fragment and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife fragment which were created through the same scribal event (font).



The fragment under discussion was carbon-dated twice by labs in Arizona and Massachusetts. The resultant rounded, callibrated two sigma dates are, respectively, 680–880 and 640–800 CE (fract.mod. results: 0.85680±0.0033 and 0.85030±0.00410). Along with the results for the GJW wife fragment, I have graphed the results using OxCal, here:



The most recent discussion of codex Qau may be found in a recent award-winning contribution to the subject of the Coptic versions of John's gospel (esp. pp. 141–143, also 94–105, 195–208). Therein, one learns that the jar and linen cloth which protected this manuscript of John's gospel have recently been rediscovered in Cambridge. The manuscript was apparently buried in a cemetery used "in Predynastic, early Dynastic and Roman times" (Thompson, 1924, ix).



According to the archeological publication, a group of coins was also found buried in a pot nearby, "No. 33 contained the papyrus of St. John's gospel (late fourth century), and 28, 29, contained the hoard of gold coins" (Brunton, Qau and Badari III, 26; cf. also 31). The coin hoard contains mint condition dated coins up to the year 361 CE (ibid., 29–30). The idea that an ancient scribe copied our current fragment from Qau is problematic, given the provenance. Whereas Qau had 33–37 lines per page, GJW-GJohn apparently would have had about 60 lines per page.

In her primary GJW article (p. 154, fn. 107), Karen King has provided the following information:


Unless compelling counter-arguments arise, both this fragment and the Gospel of Jesus Wife fragment should now be considered forgeries beyond any doubt. Furthermore, the inauthenticity of the present fragment draws into question the broader group of documentation surrounding the Gospel of Jesus Wife which the owner provided to Karen King (contract of sale, typed note from Munro, handwritten note). This was already problematic, as the bill of sale is dated to 1999, three years before Grondin's GThomas PDF was available online.

In 2008, scientists at Stanford University proposed that the presence of J1e throughout the Near East could be tied to the nomadic hunter-herders who have dotted the region for thousands of years. In the October 14 issue of the European Journal of Human Genetics, these same scientists – including 23andMe consultants Roy King and Peter Underhill and 23andMe scientist Brenna Henn – test this theory with a little help from the field of linguistics. The authors analyzed the DNA of more than 500 men from nearly 40 locations throughout the Near East. While many of these men belonged to haplogroup J1e, there were small genetic variations within J1e based on exactly where these men lived. For example, J1e samples from Turkey were slightly different from those in Oman.


The boys on the right speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus, Maaloula, Syria.

When the authors examined differences among the ancient peoples of the Near East, they discovered that the languages spoken in different parts of the region were quite distinct. Until the Arabic swept across the Near East more than 1,000 years ago, there were dozens of languages spoken in the region: Aramaic in Syria, Babylonian in Iraq, and Canaanite from Lebanon to Jordan. The majority of these tongues are now extinct, but all belong to the same Semitic language family, to which Hebrew and Arabic also belong. The authors reasoned that the history of these ancient languages may be tied to that of the people who spoke them. The history of these ancient people could be deciphered further by examining their genetic ancestry via paternal haplogroup J1e.



The researchers’ combined analysis of the J1e types and the ancient Semitic languages revealed some startling results. The authors found that J1e arose in Anatolia (present-day Turkey), expanding southward toward Arabia 10,000 years ago. Limited archaeological evidence supports such an expansion, when hunter-gatherer groups, using bow-and-arrow technology and with the help of domesticated dogs, headed south into the heart of the Near East. Soon after they began expanding, the hunter-gatherers took up herding, domesticating animals like cattle and goats.



The linguistic evidence lends additional support. The common ancestor of all Semitic languages, called proto-Semitic, originated about 7,500 years ago, just as J1e was expanding. More importantly, the spread of proto-Semitic coincides with the spread of hunter-herders across the Near East. So what does all this mean? The expansion of haplogroup J1e is closely tied to the expansion of the Semitic languages. And they are both linked to the expansion of hunter-herders, who journeyed from Anatolia southward into Arabia thousands of years ago. We now know just a little bit more about the ancient history of this fascinating region.