Upcoming Conference on Manuscript Forgeries in Kristiansand

On 14-16 September I will participate in a conference at the University of Agder in Kristiansand (Norway), Fragments of an Unbelievable Past? Constructions of Provenance, Narratives of Forgery – conference schedule below (not including coffee and meals).

I will present a paper on the famous 19th-century forgerer Constantine Simonides: “Simonides’ New Testament Papyri: Their Production and Purported Provenance.” Since the Friday is devoted to the Gospel of Jesus Wife saga, including the concluding conversation between Prof. Liv Ingeborg Lied (MF, Oslo) and Ariel Sabar about his his recent Atlantic Magazine investigation, I will also attempt to draw some parallels between Simonides and Walter Fritz – the owner of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife fragment (for our earlier post on Fritz, see here). I look forward to the conference very much.

Conference Schedule

Wednesday

Open lecture at Myren Gård:

18:00– Nina Burleigh (Newsweek), “Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land”


Thursday (A7–006)

9:00 – 9:15 Årstein Justnes (University of Agder), “[An Unbelievable] Introduction”


Session I, chair: Årstein Justnes (University of Agder)

9:15 – 10:15 Nina Burleigh (Newsweek), “The Post-Factual Museum: Curating Ancient History to Influence Politics 101”

10:30 – 11:30 Roberta Mazza (University of Manchester), “Papyrology and Ethics: The Problem of Provenance”

11:30 – 12:30 Nils Hallvard Korsvoll (MF Norwegian School of Theology), “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: How Is Authenticity Dealt with When Provenance Is Not an Issue?”


Session II, chair: Tor Vegge (University of Agder)

13:15 – 14:15 Nicola Denzey Lewis (Brown University), “Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Library”

14:15 – 15:15 Eva Mroczek (University of California, Davis), “The Secret Lives of Texts: The Discovery Narrative as a Literary and Theological Tradition”

15:45 – 16:30 Torleif Elgvin (NLA University College), to be announced

16:30 – 17:30 Kipp Davis (Trinity Western University), “Gleanings from the Cave of Wonders? Patterns of Correspondence in the Post-2002 DSS Fragments”


Friday (A7-006)

Session III, chair: Torleif Elgvin (NLA University College)

9:00 – 10:00 Liv Ingeborg Lied (MF Norwegian School of Theology), “Media Dynamics and Academic Knowledge Production: Tracing the Role of the Media in the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Saga”

10:00 – 11:00 Tommy Wasserman (Örebro School of Theology & Ansgar School of Theology), “Simonides’ New Testament Papyri: Their Production and Purported Provenance”

University Library, 2nd floor

11:30 – 13:00 “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife”: A conversation between journalist Ariel Sabar and professor Liv Ingeborg Lied about his Atlantic Magazine investigation into the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife

See more about the conference on the blog of the organizers, The Lying Pen of Scribes.

More on the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and Walter Fritz

Peter Gurry has just blogged on Ariel Sabar’s Atlantic article on Walter Fritz. Apparently, Fritz admitted in writing that he is the owner of the Gospel of Jesus Wife papyrus. Among other revelations, the article contends that Fritz:

• studied egyptology at the same institution where the GJW was verified in 1982 according to the forged accompanying documents,
• purchased www.gospelofjesuswife.com weeks before Karen King’s Rome announcement,
• approached Sabar about writing a factually erroneous book on “the Mary Magdalene Story,”
• and has a higher regard for the “Gnostic” gospels than the canonical gospels.

Several of us have been convinced since October 2015 that Fritz played some central role in the Gospel of Jesus Wife saga. The first player in identifying Fritz as a person of interest was Owen Jarus of LiveScience, who interviewed Fritz much earlier, and directed me to Walter Fritz and his wife’s “Nefer Art” website. Here, I encountered a picture of the above Nefer Art Forgery (above), written in the sort of minuscule script (complete with accents!) appropriate to a modern printed edition.  The cut along the left hand side resembles one on the GJW. The Greek text, apparently some sort of magical love spell, features a likely image of Venus with Cupid and references the Titan Phoebe and her daughter Hekate. I have not been able to determine the text from which this was fabricated.

This led me to one of blogs related to Fritz’s wife, namely “Cute Art World,” in which she advertises her hand-made pendants embedded with ancient papyrus and inscribed with a Coptic nomen sacrum IC (not Greek). She blogged (31 Aug 2009),

Pendants of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus in her arms. On the picture there is IC with a dash over it, which is the Coptic writing for “Jesus”. The little roundel in the lower part of the pendant contains a small, approx. 1/12” long papyrus fragment with the original black ink on it. I glued these fibers in between the picture and the glass.  These fragments are really old and come from a larger christian papyrus, dating back to the 2nd Century A.D. The larger papyrus was probably part of a gospel or an early christian text, written in the Sahidic Coptic language. Coptic is is the final stage of the Egyptian language and consists of Egyptian words, written in Greek alphabet. Early Christians used the Coptic language, besides Greek, to write down the Gospels and other early texts about Jesus.  |  This is no hoax. I can guarantee that the small fragments in the roundel are indeed over 1800 years old. They date back in a time period shortly after Jesus’ crucifixion. I got these fragments from a reputable manuscript dealer who was restoring a larger papyrus with a christian gospel on it. The fragments were left over and couldn’t be incorporated into the big papyrus any more because they were so small. I have photos of the restoring process.

This was surprising. My guess was that the Gospel of Jesus Wife had been created sometime after the death of Peter Munro (02 Jan 2009), and these images suggest that Hans-Ulrich Laukamp’s business partner has an interest in such papyri. Around the same time, Andrew Bernhard blogged about the Owner’s Interlinear, which conclusively proved his earlier hypothesis about the GJW’s reliance on Grondin’s GThomas PDF. In the wake of this new discovery, I shared some of my findings with Lisa Wangsness of the Boston Globe, who would then become the first individual to discover Walter Fritz’s 1991 article:

Walter Fritz, ‘Bemerkungen zum Datierungsvermerk auf der Amarnatafel Kn 27’ Studien zur altägyptischen Kultur 18 (1991): 207-214.

Walter Fritz thanks Prof. Dr. Jürgen Osing for the concept for the paper, having studied at the FU - Berlin with Osing in the summer of 1990. The article details a difficult reading of a Middle Egyptian Amarna tablet relating to the reigns of Amenophis III and IV, and describing the use of “Quarztlicht,” or UV light, which naturally is only useful when one is working with carbon-based inks.  One has to know about the composition of ancient inks. The GJW and related forgeries all appear to have been written with carbon (=soot) mixtures.

I offer here a timeline of where we have now arrived.

Sept 2012  Karen King announces the discovery of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife papyrus.  Almost immediately, Francis Watson and Simon Gathercole notice a relationship between the GJW and the Gospel of Thomas.

Nov 2012  Andrew Bernhard’s Patchwork Hypothesis proves that the GJW was copied from Grondin’s interlinear.

Apr 2014  The current blog revealed that an accompanying papyrus with the same handwriting was a forgery, calling into question the authenticity of all of the accompanying documents.

Aug 2015  With the revelation of the owner’s interlinear, Bernhard’s Patchwork hypothesis becomes irrefutable.

June 2016  Walter Fritz, a former FU-Berlin Egyptology student, claims to be the owner of the GJW.

[Update: Karen King has conceded that the GJW papyrus is probably a forgery.  Fritz had lied to her, she said, according to Ariel Sabar’s update.]

The Owner of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Unveiled

Walter Fritz, owner of the GJW (photo credit).

Wow. The most recent issue of The Atlantic has an incredible story uncovering the formerly anonymous owner of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife papyrus. His name is Walter Fritz, a German-born man who now lives in Florida with his, shall we say, eccentric wife. Fritz denies forging the papyrus, but the reporter of the story seems unconvinced. And for good reason.

The article is long but well worth reading. It gets stranger at almost every turn. It’s a fine piece of detective work by the journalist, Ariel Sabar.

Here’s a clip from near the end:

One thing did become clear, though. When we first started talking, Fritz had claimed that he had no stake in the papyrus’s message. But I began to see that he in fact cared deeply. As a teenager he wanted to become a priest, he said, but he later came to believe that much of Catholic teaching was “bullcrap.” Particularly flawed was the Church’s claim that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were truer accounts of Jesus’s life than the Gnostic Gospels.

He pointed to the fact that almost no papyri bearing the canonical Gospels have been carbon-dated, because such testing would cause physical damage to the New Testament’s seminal manuscripts—damage that institutions like the Vatican Library would never countenance. But with the new ink tests at Columbia—the ones King had told me about—scientists can date papyri without damaging them. Fritz said these tests could well show that most of the Gnostic Gospels were written before the canonical Gospels, making them better witnesses to the historical Jesus—a view that virtually no serious scholars share.

“All that discussion that the canonical Gospels were way before anything else—that’s utter bulls**t,” Fritz told me. “The Gnostic texts that allow women a discipleship and see Jesus more as a spiritual person and not as a demigod—these texts are probably the more relevant ones.”

My favorite line—and there are many good ones in this story—has to be this one:

He [Fritz] had even more scorn for critics of the Jesus’s-wife papyrus, deriding them as “county level” scholars from the “University of Eastern Pee-Pee Land” who think their nitpicking of Coptic phrases can compete with scientific tests at places like Columbia University and MIT that have yielded no physical proof of forgery.

I trust Christian will be updating his CV accordingly!

Read the whole thing here.