Moss on the GJW

CANDIDA MOSS: The ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’ is Still as Big as Mystery as Ever. Scholars had concluded that a papyrus referring to Jesus’s wife was a clever forgery—until new evidence re-opened the case. Is there any way to figure out the truth? (The Daily Beast). Professor Moss sums up the issues well. Excerpts:

The biggest problems were the grammatical errors in the text and the similarities between GJW and another early Christian Coptic text, the Gospel of Thomas. Francis Watson argued that all of the fragmentary sentences preserved on the papyrus are also found in the Gospel of Thomas. He tentatively suggested that the text is a pastiche compiled by a modern forger with an elementary grasp of Coptic.

Even more damning was the argument that one of the typographical errors in the fragment appears to have been copied from an erroneous online edition of the Gospel of Thomas. The sixth line of the GJW nonsensically seems to read, “Evil man habitually does not he does habitually bring [sic].” Interestingly, precisely the same error appears in a 2002 online edition of the Gospel of Thomas. The chances of two independent texts making the same grammatical error are remarkably small. (You just can’t trust the internet for anything these days.)

[...]

In the absence of clear evidence, the debate is still where it was over a year ago. On the one hand, tests designed to prove that the text is a forgery failed to establish its inauthenticity. On the other hand, the grammatical errors and similarities to the Gospel of Thomas are still a problem. A modern forger with the right materials could still have made this text.

And let none of this be forgotten in the excitement over the test results. It really comes down to two possibilities. The first is that we happened to find a very old unprovenanced text that says exactly what the Zeitgeist of the second decade of the twenty-first century would like to hear about Jesus. This text happened to be written in what looks like a fourth century Coptic script, even though the papyrus it is written on tests (at least on the second try*) some centuries younger than that. Moreover, the text is more or less based on the Gospel of Thomas, which luckily we already had, and the ancient scribe even made the same copying error as an entirely independent modern editor of an internet edition of the Gospel of Thomas. So it's possible that the fragment is a genuine ancient(-ish) artifact, but we sure won the big-time lottery on this one!

The second possibility is that a forger did a good job of obtaining ancient blank papyrus and obtaining (or mixing up a reasonable facsimile of) ancient ink and used them to create the artifact. Unfortunately for the forger and fortunately for us, the Coptic script used by the forger was some centuries too early for the papyrus, the forged text is rather too close to its Gospel of Thomas template, and there was a pesky typo in the Gospel of Thomas edition which the hapless forger copied.

Those seem to be the options. I blog, you decide.

Background here and links.

*The first try at a C-14 test gave a date range that was even earlier — before the birth of Jesus.

UPDATE: Christian Askeland at ETC highlights an attempt in 1990 to forge a Gospel of Thomas manuscript. Leo Depuydt also debunked it on grounds very similar to the objections to the authenticity of the GJW: Demotic Gospel of Thomas.