Jesus had an ugly sister-in-law

recto, Jn 5:26-30

Through Gregg Schwendner and Malcom Choat, I have just become aware of something that I should have seen much earlier.  I read all of the Harvard Theological Review articles about the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, and assumed that the links on the Harvard dedicated GJW webpage essentially linked to the same.  However, the website contains a longer version of the Ink Results which offers the pictures of the associated gospel of John fragment here.

verso, Jn 6:11-14

The shocker here is this.  The fragment contains exactly the same hand, exactly the same ink and has been written with the same writing instrument.  One would assume that it were part of the same writing event, be it modern or ancient.  In some sense, this is not a surprise, as the Ink Results indicated that the ink was very similar.  (The ink on both sides of GJohn was identical or similar to one another; the GJW had slightly different ink on both sides.  All of the inks were highly similar.)

Actually, if you are a Coptic nerd, there apparently is a bigger shocker...  The text is in Lycopolitan and apparently is a(n exact?) reproduction from the famous Cambridge Qau codex, edited by Herbert Thompson. What is so shocking about that?  Essentially all specialists believe that Lycopolitan and the other minor dialects died out during or before the sixth century.  Indeed, the forger tried to offer two manuscripts both in Lycopolitan, but made two crucial mistakes.  First, the NHC gospel of Thomas is not a pure Lycopolitan text, but the Qau codex is.  That is we have two clearly different subdialects of Lycopolitan, which agree exactly with published texts.  Second, this GJohn fragment has been 14C dated to the seventh to ninth centuries, a period from which Lycopolitan is totally unknown.

These are my initial thoughts, and I will update this blog within the next hours.  My first assessment is that this a major blow to those arguing for the authenticity of GJW.

UPDATE ...
Alin Suciu has created a reconstruction, demonstrating that the verso follows the line breaks of Herbert Thompson's edition precisely.  Leo Depuydt came to the same conclusion on his own.  All three of us would conclude that this almost certainly marks this GJW-John fragment as a modern fake.  Alin noted also that the transcription only deviates in altering Lycopolitan ⲁⲃⲁⲗ to Sahidic ⲉⲃⲟⲗ.  Given the surrounding dialectal realities, here, this is nonsense, and further evidence of forgery.  Mark Goodacre's reconstruction is the best illustration of the forgery.

For the reader who has not closely followed the story so far, I would underscore the importance of this discovery.  The inauthenticity claims against the Gospel of Jesus Wife fragment have been primarily based upon the fact that the GJW is clearly reconstructed from Grondin's 2002 PDF of the Sahidic (with Lycopolitan influence) Gospel of Thomas, and secondarily based upon the bizarre appearance of the manuscript.  All of us assumed that the Coptic John anchored the GJW with a real group of fragments with a known history, although this history was based upon photocopies of older documents possessed by a mysterious anonymous figure.  These arguments find a perfect parallel with this second fragment.

My prior theory that the GJW was a forgery inserted into an otherwise authentic group of papyri has been shattered.  We must now question whether the anonymous owner is nothing more than a prankster.  I would not be surprised, if said owner vanishes into the aether.  If the owner is not a prankster, he should come forward with the information necessary to reveal the forger (or vindicate the GJW).  I am tempted to think that the forgery has roots in Germany, still, since there is an apparently idiomatically-composed handwritten note in German describing the Gospel of Jesus Wife.  I hope that this will be released by Karen King or the owner.

Mark Goodacre's synopsis post with better images
Mark Goodacre visually illustrates GJW-GJohn forgery
Leo Depuydt responds