Building on Christian Askeland's argument that the Harvard Coptic John Fragment was textually dependent on Thompson's 1924 publication of the Qau codex (see The forgery of the Lycopolitan gospel of John) Stephen Emmel has recently done a great job on assessing "The Codicology of the New Coptic (Lycopolitan) Gospel of John Fragment"
I was interested to read it because in a comment to Christian's post I had suggested that "It may be worth trying to reconstruct the page (as a reductio ad absurdum)." Emmel has now done that in massive detail and shows how extremely implausible are the results, concluding that "No Codicological Reconstruction of H Is Entirely Credible". Emmel also agrees that if the Coptic John fragment is fake, then the Gospel of Jesus Wife fragment is also fake.
I would say that the end is nigh.
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Stephen Emmel's informative paper is a guest post at alinsuciu.com,
ReplyDeleteand it may be worth mentioning that the comments there further explore the ink and the instrument--pen or brush.
Thanks Stephen,
ReplyDeleteHere is the link: http://alinsuciu.com/2014/06/22/guest-post-stephen-emmel-the-codicology-of-the-new-coptic-lycopolitan-gospel-of-john-fragment-and-its-relevance-for-assessing-the-genuineness-of-the-recently-published-coptic-go-2/#comments