On Fragments & Alleged Forgeries

Originally posted on Larry Hurtado's Blog:

As I predicted, “the beat goes on” further in the rapid-fire blog-postings about the “Jesus’ Wife” fragment, and now also the fragment said to have come in the same batch of items lent to Prof. King, this one a bit of Coptic Gospel of John.

See posts by Christian Askeland here, and more recently here, alleging that the Gospel of John fragment is a blatant fake.  And Mark Goodacre has followed on with a posting about the matter here.

For my part, I was surprised and puzzled to learn that the two items sent for Carbon 14 and ink testing were both from the cache of items put into Prof. King’s hands.  I had assumed that the testing of the “Jesus’ Wife” fragment had been done alongside a fragment of a papyrus of independent provenance, to use the latter as a control-item for testing ink, etc.  Quite…

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