Mark Goodacre
By Suzanne O'Keeffe, 700 Club Interactive
CBN.com –A BIG FIND
In September of this year, a historian at Harvard Divinity School by the name of Dr. Karen King received a piece of papyrus from a collector. He was looking for a translation of the writing found front and back. Upon examination of the small piece about the size of a credit card she found eight lines of text and six to seven words per line on the front, while the text on the back was not legible. It appears, if authentic, to have been written around the 4th or 5th century which would place it between three or four hundred years after Jesus. That in itself gives question to the historical reliability. "King's translation shows that line three has the words "Mary is worthy of it." Line four says, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife....'" Line five is "she will be able to be my disciple." Line seven says, "As for me, I dwell with her in order to..." Naturally there was a great flurry of excitement as the news was released that Jesus may have had a wife. "
AUTHENTICITY
After the initial excitement began to wane, questions began to be asked regarding the authenticity of the papyrus. Mark said scholars began to talk and ask questions to decide if it were a genuine fragment or a modern forgery. He said if he were a betting man that he would put money on it being a forgery. He pointed to the most obvious being that it appears that every word looks like it has been copied directly out of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. Mark explained that is exactly what a forger would do as it even includes the exact line breaks. More compelling is the missing m (m+supralinear stroke) on the fragment which just happens to be the same typographical error found in a PDF on the Gospel of Thomas e-list by Mike Grondin. So the thought is that if a forgery, they did not take it from the printed edition of Coptic Thomas but from an internet site.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Currently the papyrus is still at Harvard and Mark said that tests are being run on the ink fragments to see if there are any modern pigments in the ink that would be another piece of evidence pointing to it not being authentic. So, as they wait for the ink testing results, they continue to study the evidence, ask questions and discuss different theories as "this is what scholars do all the time."