Demotic Gospel of Thomas

On page 178 of his Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (GJW) rebuttal, Leo Depuydt informed the reader of a parallel incident from 1990, which never made headlines in North America. In this case, someone forged and disseminated the following proceedings chapter, which Leo Depuydt has kindly shared:

R. S. Walker, “Fragmentary inscriptions in an unknown script from a private collection” Proceedings of the New Orleans Academy of Sciences 1874–1875 (1875): 31–34.

The article and accompanying informal translation “preserve” a Demotic text with snippets from the gospel of Thomas. Depuydt has demonstrated that the Demotic text is a forgery by analyzing the Demotic grammar, showing that the Demotic text contains a prepositional phrase which is explained in the most compelling way by the faux pas of a modern translator relying on the known Coptic text. Whereas one would expect the Coptic text to use the form ⲙⲙⲟϥ with the Greek-Coptic loanword τηρέω, the indigenous Egyptian word (in Coptic and Demotic) requires ⲉⲣⲟϥ, not the equivalent of ⲙⲙⲟϥ (font).
In her response article, Karen King fails to see how this is relevant to the parallel discussion. Depuydt’s argument, however, is fairly simple. He is demonstrating that the literary parallels in GJW (just as in the Demotic GThomas) are best explained by a modern forger, due to grammatical irregularities which only a modern forger would have produced. Whereas this was clear with the Demotic GThomas through the instance cited here, the case is even clearer with GJW, with its repeated errors and the shared error with Michael Grondin’s PDF.

18 May 1991 Financial Times "New Light on the Saying of Jesus"
25 May 1991 Financial Times "Batson comes out of the belfry: The history books may not have to be rewritten..."