Did Jesus Have a Wife? On a humid afternoon this past November, I pulled off Interstate 7. Florida pine forest tangled with runaway vines. My GPS was homing in on the house of a man I thought might hold the master key to one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades: a 1,3. King, presented it in September 2. Rome. Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesus. WorldstarHipHop is home to everything entertainment & hip hop. The #1 urban outlet responsible for breaking the latest urban news! Watt's new girlfriend? Five-year-old doesn't approve; plans to Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned on Forbes. 2016 Wealthiest Asian Families: These Families Barely Missed The $3.4 Billion Cut One year since its debut, entry into Asia’s 50 Richest Families rankings has gotten more. Companies Address Diversity After Trump's Election The leaders of some American companies are grappling with workplace diversity in the wake of Donald Trump's election as president. Several CEOs have written letters to their. AskMen's Dating channel offers you all the advice you need to become a Better Man in romance and relationships. Its main point, King argued, was that . Centuries of Christian tradition are bound up in whether the scrap is authentic or, as a growing group of scholars contends, an outrageous modern fake: Jesus. In the Roman Catholic Church in particular, the New Testament is seen as divine revelation handed down through a long line of men. Smithsonian assigned me a long feature, sending me to see King at Harvard and then to follow her to Rome. I was the only reporter in the room when she revealed her find to colleagues, who reacted with equal parts fascination and disbelief. King / Harvard / AP)Within days, doubts mounted. The Vatican newspaper labeled the papyrus . Others deemed the text suspiciously in step with the zeitgeist of growing religious egalitarianism and of intrigue around the idea, popularized by The Da Vinci Code, of a married Jesus. The controversy made news around the world, including an article in these pages. From Our July/August 2. Issue. Try 2 FREE issues of The Atlantic. Subscribe. A year and a half later, however, Harvard announced the results of carbon- dating tests, multispectral imaging, and other lab analyses: The papyrus appeared to be of ancient origin, and the ink had no obviously modern ingredients. A determined forger could obtain a blank scrap of centuries- old papyrus (perhaps even on e. Bay, where old papyri are routinely auctioned), mix ink from ancient recipes, and fashion passable Coptic script, particularly if he or she had some scholarly training. But the scientific findings complicated the case for forgery. Among the most damning was an odd typographical error that appears in both the Jesus. But in 2. 01. 2, she sent me the text of e- mails she. His account of how he. But years later, they still gnawed at me. The American Association of Museums.
But the closest thing he had to corroboration was a photocopy of a signed sales contract. The contract recorded his purchase of six Coptic papyri, in November 1. Hans- Ulrich Laukamp. The contract said that Laukamp had himself acquired the papyri in Potsdam, in Communist East Germany, in 1. The owner also gave King a scan of a photocopy. Munro wrote that a colleague had looked at the papyri and thought one of them bore text from the Gospel of John. The only written reference to the Jesus. Peter Munro died in 2. Hans- Ulrich Laukamp died in 2. King thus declared the scrap. Or just a lack of investigation? The owner, for one, was still alive and had known Laukamp personally, King told me in 2. In one e- mail to King, the owner wrote that Laukamp had . Laukamp had supposedly shown several papyri to an Egyptologist named Peter Munro (bottom) in 1. Loeben )I searched public documents and found just one American city that had ever been home to a Hans- Ulrich Laukamp. In 1. 99. 7, a German couple named Hans- Ulrich and Helga Laukamp had built a single- story stucco house with a swimming pool in the Gulf Coast city of Venice, Florida. I tracked down people who had known the Laukamps, and they told me that the couple were chain smokers with almost no grasp of English; they were loners in a middle- income enclave of bike- riding . In 1. 99. 5, Laukamp and his friend Axel Herzsprung, a fellow toolmaker, went into business together. The company, ACMB Metallbearbeitung Gmb. H, or ACMB Metalworking, won a lucrative contract to make brake components for BMW and was soon drawing profits of about $2. Laukamp, then in his mid- 5. Pontiac Firebird and nudged Herzsprung and his wife to build a vacation home next to his in Florida, where the Laukamps hoped to one day retire. But those dreams evaporated almost as soon as they landed in the Sunshine State. Helga was diagnosed with lung cancer, and Hans- Ulrich took her back to Germany, where she died in December 1. The company filed for bankruptcy in August 2. Hans- Ulrich died four months later, at 5. Looking over his company. Four days after Laukamp. There was a third man, someone named Walter Fritz, who. If Fritz stood out for anything, it was his civic ardor. He wrote eloquent letters to the editor of the North Port Sun. He led neighbors in a successful protest against overhead power lines. He was a regular at the 7: 1. North Port Early Bird Kiwanis Club. And when city commissioners gathered to hash out North Port. In 1. 99. 5, Fritz had founded a company called Nefer Art. Nefer is the Egyptian word for . He had used infrared photography to decode textual minutiae on a 3,4. Egyptian tablet. The journal listed his affiliation as the Egyptology institute at Berlin. I called several prominent Egyptologists, who told me that the article. I planned to knock on his door with some questions. But when I pulled up to Fritz. A twitchy brown dog watched me from beneath a no trespassing sign. I idled my rental car outside the gate, considered my options, and then drove back to my hotel. I called Fritz the next morning and told him I was in town working on a story about Laukamp and the Jesus. He abruptly declined, grew agitated, and made clear he wanted to get off the phone. He had never studied Egyptology at the Free University, he said. He had never written an article for a German journal. Though the Web site for Laukamp and Herzsprung. He had no idea who was. Karen King is the first woman to hold Harvard. The daughter of a pharmacist and a schoolteacher from a Montana cattle town, King enrolled at the University of Montana, where a course on marginalized Christian texts spoke to her in almost personal terms. Harvard Divinity School hired her in 1. Before Karen King went public, an anonymous peer reviewer delivered a punishing critique. Early Christians were a disputatious bunch, with often conflicting views on the meaning of Jesus. But after Constantine converted the Roman empire to Christianity in the fourth century and Church leaders began canonizing the small selection of texts that form the New Testament, Christians with other views were branded heretics. King has been particularly interested in noncanonical, or Gnostic, texts that assign Mary Magdalene a prominent role as Jesus. Proof that some early Christians also saw Mary Magdalene as Jesus. Its text spans 1. She stressed that the fragment was all but worthless as biography: It was composed centuries after Jesus. It showed merely that one group of ancient Christians believed Jesus had been married. Before going public, King asked some of the world. All three thought the papyrus looked authentic. Some of the world. In the summer of 2. Harvard Theological Review sent King. One was supportive, but another delivered a punishing critique of the papyrus. She knew how high the stakes were, for both history and her own reputation. She lifted her glasses and leaned into the computer screen. Bagnall suggested that she revise her article to address a few of the reviewer. In one of the articles, Christopher Jones, a Harvard classicist, noted that a forger may have identified King as a . More scientific tests were under way, and the similarities with the Gospel of Thomas were hardly incriminating. Ancient scribes often borrowed language from other texts, King wrote in the Harvard Theological Review; the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He used antique paper; made ink from historic recipes; and artificially aged his manuscripts with gelatin, chemical solutions, and a vacuum cleaner. But Hofmann was unmasked after a pipe bomb. Young, shy, and self- effacing. He often expressed doubts about his finds, making experts feel they were discovering signs of authenticity that he himself had somehow missed. In some messages, the owner comes across as a hapless layman, addressing King as . He sends King a translation of the Coptic that he says . Also strange is that he tells King he acquired the Jesus. So what kind of forger, I asked, might seek approval from one of the world. A friendly reporter e. Did he by chance know the Walter Fritz who. Did this man look anything like the student he. I wondered why a promising student, a young man who. I tracked down several people who. In 1. 99. 5, he incorporated Nefer Art. Also featured were fragments of two seemingly ancient manuscripts. The Greek one, which bore a drawing of a nude woman, superficially resembled texts from Greco- Roman- era Egypt known as . Loeben)Two experts in ancient Arabic manuscripts told me that the script on the other fragment was backwards, as if someone had photographed it in a mirror. What happened next felt almost too easy. In January, I flew to Germany to search for more. The taxi ride from Tegel Airport into the heart of Berlin was a blind slog through labyrinths of graffiti- clad apartment blocks, in fog and light snow. On a cold Sunday afternoon, my interpreter and I showed up unannounced at the apartment of Ren. Ernest and his wife, Gabriele, led us into their small living room and said they were mystified by what they. As a young man, he fled to West Berlin by swimming across the Griebnitzsee, a lake on the border. Could they picture Laukamp seeking a consultation with a university Egyptologist? The Ernests gave each other a look, then burst out laughing. Laukamp had the minimum schooling required by German law, they said. His milieu was the bar on his street that served as his . In 1. 98. 2, Irmtraut Munro had been learning Coptic and studying papyri while working toward a doctorate in Egyptology. If her then- husband had come across an interesting Coptic papyrus, she said, . He was good- hearted, she said, recalling how he brought breakfast to a homeless man in a park where he walked his dog. He slipped through your fingers. On a campus where student fashions ran to grungy jeans and T. He owned two cars, both Mercedeses.
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