As an adolescent, I was riveted by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which followed Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon as he uncovered secret truths about Christianity — most scandalously, that Jesus had a wife and (God forbid!) sex.
Much of the novel’s power came from the fact that, though itself fictional, the idea that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John don’t tell the entire story isn’t at all fictional.
In fact, early Christianity was replete with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of gospels. These ranged from The Gospel of Philip (which includes an assertion that “Jesus kissed Mary on her …” [the papyrus is torn at the pivotal place]) to the Gospel of Judas (which, in contrast to the canonical gospels, paints Judas not as devious betrayer but as close confidante).
Context: The Ancient Tradition of Gnosticism
Although the theory that Jesus had carnal relations is as old as the Gnostic gospels —which were excluded from the New Testament after the early-fourth century Council of Nicaea decided what is (and is not) official Church doctrine — most scholars do indeed view the canonical gospels as more accurate depictions of the historical Jesus than the Gnostic.
This is for many reasons — for example, excepting the Gospel of Thomas, most Gnostic texts were written centuries after Jesus’s death.
More importantly, Gnosticism — as opposed to traditional Christianity — is a fusion of philosophies, especially of Platonism and neo-Platonism with early Judaism. Its adherents emphasized that redemption comes not through the historical Christ, and certainly not through faith, but instead through gnosis — “inner knowledge.” A chief reason that Gnostics like the Cathars found themselves persecuted by the authorities stemmed from their conviction that true wisdom comes not from external authority but from internal authority — i.e., gnosis.
As a side note, Gnostics are also famous for their remarkable emphasis on gender equality. This liberalism stemmed from their quasi-Platonic belief that the physical world is somehow lesser than the material world — that our souls are “divine sparks” that have fallen from a higher world into this world of matter and suffering— and that therefore the package your particular divine spark resides in (black or white, male or female) doesn’t matter whatsoever.
Whatever the case, it doesn’t seem impossible that the Gnostic view on female-male equity helped motivate their persecution at the hands of a Catholic church that was anything but feminist.
Getting Down to Business: How a Harvard Scholar Got Duped by a Con Man
With the above as background, it should now be clear that (a) new gospels have been found before and (b) certain groups have a vested yet understandable interest in promoting certain of those gospels above the more patriarchal canonical gospels.
Most significantly, in 1945 an Egyptian goat-herder uncovered several papyri which were seemingly buried by ancient Christians or Gnostics (likely of the Egyptian Coptic sect), perhaps in an attempt to guard against persecution by church authorities. Because they were discovered in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, these gospels have since been named the Nag Hammadi codex.
In a way, then, a scholar would be irresponsible not to consider a genuine-looking papyri. However, as Ariel Sabar details in Veritas, the line between the boring search for the truth and the exhilarating search for meaning seems to have duped one Harvard scholar into emphasizing the latter rather than the former.
She nearly sank her career in the process.
In 2012, Harvard scholar Karen King announced an extraordinary discovery: a second-century papyrus fragment with text suggesting Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. Titled The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, the discovery tapped into a plot point from The Da Vinci Code that had already helped King’s earlier treatises on Mary Magdelene reach mass audiences.
This “gospel” was initially worldwide news — before skeptical papyrologists and grammarians, “in one case drawing on the research of an amateur Coptic obsessive working in his Macomb, Mich., basement,” showed it to be a fabrication. King was mum on who the Florida stranger was who had given her the fragment, but simple Google searches soon uncovered one Walter Fritz, a former director of East Germany’s Stasi Museum with a fake Egyptology degree whose past businesses included a pornographic enterprise with his wife, and who — three weeks before King’s bombshell announcement — registered the domain gospelofjesuswife.com.
As Mark Oppenheimer of the New York Times writes:
“Veritas,” Sabar’s exhausting, madcap, unforgettable book about this fiasco, is for enthusiasts of ancient Christianity, as well as anyone who likes watching snooty academics brought low and readers of idea-driven capers, whether by Daniel Silva or Janet Malcolm. It’s a barely believable tale, crazier than a tweed-sniffer in the faculty lounge.
Although I agree with Oppenheimer that the book could have been condensed, the extra detail serves a purpose. How did Ariel Sabar — not an expert in early Christianity but a journalist — unearth facts that Karen King, renowned Harvard scholar, considered irrelevant? More importantly, how did King extrapolate from one line — “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’” — on a business-card sized slab of papyrus that (a) the document was authentic and that (b) even if authentic, the line (written in amateurish Coptic) suggested Jesus had a wife? (What if the full line read something like, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife is all of you, my dear apostles!’”)
Fundamental to the long answer is the emerging gap — growing ever larger in modern society, in everything from academia to media to journalism — between our duty to discern truth and our desire to make truth conform to whatever we want it to be. In postmodern fashion, Professor King ignored her duty as a historian to unearth objective truth and instead tried to fit shoddy evidence (a supposed second-century text written on eighth-century papyrus with 21st century ink) into an admirable yet unconfirmed narrative: That women in early Christianity played a much larger role than otherwise supposed — a role so large that one married its founder.
Conclusion: The Dangers of the Harvard Heuristic
I graduated from Harvard Law School in 2016, so perhaps this is uncharitable of me, but I want to make one final note before ending. As I read Sabar’s book, I could not escape just how much power the name Harvard has in modern American society. Scholars like King are able to get their findings into the New York Times precisely because of their association with Harvard.
Unfortunately for the public, not all Harvard researchers and affiliates are (a) infallible and/or (b) operating in good faith. Some have ulterior motives; others, who may have “earned” their Harvard positions as young professionals, have since become less well-practiced than they were in their youth. One of Veritas’s greatest lessons is that, though an assertion might deserve extra credence when coming from a hallowed authority like Harvard, authority alone is no guarantee.
Researchers at respected institutions — from the New York Times to Harvard —have a duty to use the extra credence the public gives them due to their institutional affiliations responsibility.
I’ll put the point this way: Gerald Massey was correct when he warned of making authority a substitute for truth. As he famously wrote:
They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority.
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Previously Published on Medium
