The truth may be finally emerging about the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife," a highly controversial papyrus suggesting that some people, in ancient times, believed Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. New research on the papyrus' ink points to the possibility that it is authentic, researchers say, while newly obtained documents may shed light on the origins of the business-card-sized fragment.If the tests show the ink to be ancient, that is interesting, but it doesn't necessarily prove anything. Ancient ink sometimes survives in inkwells and such (see the second update to the post). Add distilled water and you have ancient ink.
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This new modern paleographic evidence is potentially important:
After searching public databases in Florida a Live Science reporter uncovered seven signatures signed by Laukamp between 1997 and 2001 on five notarized documents. Anyone can search these databases and download these documents. These signatures can be compared with the signature recording the sale of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife — providing another way to verify or disprove the story of how the "gospel" made its way to Harvard.And this (for context see the article and this post) strikes me as a very unconvincing argument:
King objected to this conclusion in her Biblical Archaeology Review letter, noting that the John fragment could have been copied in ancient times, long after Lycopolitan went extinct, from a text that had similar line breaks.But this is more interesting:
"In our first exploration, we did state that the inks used for the two documents of interest [the John papyrus and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife] were quite different. The more recent results do confirm this observation strongly," Yardley told Live Science.We'll have to see what the peer-reviewed publications have to say. As it stands, the consensus is very much that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment is a modern forgery and many arguments have been advanced to support that conclusion. If Professor King or anyone else want to show otherwise, those arguments will all need to be addressed.
As I've said before, it's always possible that we won the lottery this time and the fragment is genuine. But I don't like to play the lottery.
Background here with many, many links. On the above story, see also Mark Goodacre's NT Blog: The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: A Call for Closure. Guest post by Andrew Bernhard.