In September 2012, Karen L. King, a professor of divinity at Harvard University, revealed the discovery of a fourth-century papyrus fragment in which Jesus refers to a wife. It was a big deal at the time. Then scholars questioned its authenticity and the publication of Ms. King’s paper was delayed, as was an already-filmed special for the Smithsonian Channel.
Since then: silence.
So what’s been going on?
I emailed Ms. King in late October of last year. She wrote back to say that testing by independent laboratories was being arranged and that the process would take “several weeks, if not months.” Analysts were specifically looking at the ink to see if it, like the papyrus, dated from the fourth century (the papyrus had already been tested).
I checked again this week with Jonathan Beasley, assistant director of communications at the Harvard Divinity School. He wrote in an email that “we are waiting for final reports to come in on some of the testing, and, depending on the results, for a decision about whether to do further testing.”
He couldn’t provide an estimate of when testing might be completed. Ms. King declined to comment, writing in an email that she had nothing to add to Mr. Beasley’s statement.
In a recent blog post, Mark S. Goodacre also wondered what’s going on. Mr. Goodacre, a professor of religious studies at Duke University, was among those who raised a skeptical eyebrow from the start. Actually, he did more than that: He wrote in his latest post about the fragment that “the case for forgery is overwhelming.” Another scholar, Andrew Bernhard, believes it to be a modern forgery, probably made after 1997.
Larry Hurtado speculates that those “in the know” already realize the fragment is a fake and that they’re hoping everyone forgets about it after a while.
Mr. Hurtado, a retired professor of New Testament language, literature, and theology at the University of Edinburgh, wrote the following on his blog: “Call me naïve, but I still think that the standards of good scholarship require us to keep the record up to date, to admit valid criticisms of our ideas and claims, to admit when we get something wrong, or, in this case, may have been duped, or whatever.”
Such a flashy discovery won’t just fade away. At some point we’ll find out whether or not it was a hoax. In the meantime it’s fair to ask why it’s taking so long.
