GJW test results finally in

HARVARD MAGAZINE: The Jesus's Wife Fragment: The Scientific Evidence. Bottom line: the papyrus and "ink" test as ancient and the results are being published in HTR:

Now the scientific dating of the papyrus and the ink (which is not ink at all, but rather lampblack, a pigment often used in ancient Egypt for writing on papyrus) indicate that both are consistent with an ancient origin.

Because the fragment is so small, carbon-dating it proved troublesome. Researchers at the University of Arizona called into question their own results—which dated the papyrus to several hundred years before the birth of Christ—because they were unable to complete the cleaning process on the small sample of papyrus with which they were working, and felt that might have led to spurious results. A second carbon-dating analysis undertaken by Clay professor of scientific archaeology Noreen Tuross at Harvard and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute dated the papyrus, and a separate one (also believed to be of ancient origin) with text from the Gospel of John to approximately A.D. 700 to 800.

The article then mentions the literary context:

Because the text concerning Jesus’s wife is written in Sahidic, a language of ancient Egypt, it may be a transcription of an earlier Coptic text that was based on a Greek copy, as many early Christian gospels are. Given similarities in wording and subject to the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip, the text of the GJW may originate in a time as early as the second half of the second century C.E.

This may be, at least in part, an allusion to the literary-critical arguments by that the text is a forgery based on ancient material published in modern times or even on an online edition of one of the texts. There were also objections to authenticity on paleographic and papyrological grounds.

The article goes on to indicate that the HTR issue contains some dissent, formulated before the test results came in, but not irrelevant to them:

The April 2014 issue of the Harvard Theological Review (HTR) includes King’s article (originally slated to be published in January 2013) discussing the fragment and its importance to understanding early Christian debates about whether wives and mothers could be disciples of Jesus. The issue also contains a counterpoint by professor 
of Egyptology and ancient Western Asian studies Leo Depuydt of Brown University, who writes that he is certain that the text is a modern forgery. Depuydt’s analysis, which predates the scientific findings, points out that a forger could have written with lampblack on ancient papyrus. Infrared microspectroscopic analysis of the ink and papyrus, however, found nothing to suggest that they had been “fabricated or modified at different times.” In a rebuttal, King finds Depuydt’s textual analysis unpersuasive.

One point that does not come up in the Harvard Magazine article is that the date originally proposed for the fragment on paleographic grounds was the fourth century, yet the C14 date for the papyrus is 700-800, some centuries later. Even granting that both kinds of dating are approximate, this is a very large discrepancy. And it took two tries to get a result that was anywhere near the paleographic date or indeed any possible date that involves the text being genuinely ancient. If the C14 dating is correct, either Coptic paleography is a very inexact science (which may well be) or it is not unthinkable that a forger wrote in a fourth-century script on a blank piece of papyrus that was very old, but not quite old enough.

The April 2014 issue of HTR is not yet available online, but I look forward to reading the articles when they come out (and when I have time). But my opinion on this is not particularly important. It will be the evaluations of the Coptologists, paleographers, specialists in radiocarbon dating, and historians of late antique Christianity which matter. I will be looking for clear information on who did the tests (which seems to be given) and replies to the literary, paleographic, and papyrological objections. I would also like to know more about the dating of the lamp black, which is reportedly "ancient" also, but what does that mean? What is the range of possible dates and how does the range compare to the dating of the papyrus?

This round goes to those who think that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment is a genuinely ancient literary artifact. I'm still skeptical, but maybe we did win the lottery on this one. But the really good and important news is that the material is being published in a peer-review journal. Now the discussion can start in earnest.

Background here with many links.

Also, it really doesn't need to be repeated, but I'll repeat it anyway, that if this fragment is genuine, it still tells us nothing about whether Jesus was married or not. At best it preserves speculation from a century or more (perhaps much more) after Jesus' time. That, of course, would be of considerable interest to historians of early Christianity, but not for the study of the Historical Jesus.

UPDATE: More in the NYT: Papyrus Referring to Jesus’s Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say (LAURIE GOODSTEIN). Regarding the ink:

The “Jesus’s Wife” papyrus was analyzed at Columbia University using micro-Raman spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of the ink. James T. Yardley, a professor of electrical engineering, said in an interview that the carbon black ink on this fragment was “perfectly consistent with another 35 or 40 manuscripts that we’ve looked at,” that date from 400 B.C. to A.D. 700 or 800.

At M.I.T.’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering, Timothy M. Swager, a chemistry professor, and two students used infrared spectroscopy to determine whether the ink showed any variations or inconsistencies.

“The main thing was to see, did somebody doctor this up?” Dr. Swager said in an interview. “And there is absolutely no evidence for that. It would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible.”

[...]

A forger could easily create carbon black ink by mixing candle soot and oil, he [Dr. Depuydt] said: “An undergraduate student with one semester of Coptic can make a reed pen and start drawing lines.

But the scientists say that modern carbon black ink looks very different under their instruments. ...”

How about ancient ink recovered from an ancient inkwell and rehydrated with distilled water? One can find inkwells dating to somewhere in the vicinity of the relevant period on eBay, although I don't know if such are ever found with desiccated ink inside.

CORRECTION: The April 2014 issue of HTR is available online here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jodi Magness reports that one of the inkwells discovered at Qumran still "contained the remains of dried ink" (The Archaeology of Qumran and The Dead Sea Scrolls [Eerdmans, 2002], p. 60). So it does happen. (HT private communication from Dan McClellan.)

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: See the blog posts by Christopher Rollston, Larry Hurtado, and Robert Cargill. And further, James McGrath has much linkage.