The forgery of the Lycopolitan Gospel of John

Introduction

I am grateful for the input that Alin Suciu, Mark Goodacre and many others have offered concerning the newly available Gospel of John fragment.  I will use the present page to post photographs, a compartitive transcription and relevant links. Please note, this will be a dynamic page, and I will no doubt update the transcriptions and main points. Over the course of the next week, I will write an article for the June 2014 Tyndale Bulletin discussing the paleography and text of this fragment.

Photographs

Mark Goodacre has identified clearer photographs which I share, here.

Qau compared

The following transcription represents in green the extant text of the forgery.  Mark Goodacre offers an eloquent discussion of how this inauthenticates both this fragment and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife fragment which were created through the same scribal event (font).

1. Notably, seventeen of seventeen line breaks are the same.  This defies coincidence.  
2. Alin Suciu first announced the relevance of Sahidic ⲉⲃⲟⲗ for Lycopolitan ⲁⲃⲁⲗ.  The Sahidic spelling is not possible given the extant dialectal orthography which, for example, otherwise consistently has the Lycopolitan Alpha in lieu of the distinctly Sahidic Omicron.
3. I note here that the omitted ⲕⲣⲓⲛⲉ results in total nonsense. 
4. Likewise, the one instance where the forger has not copied every second line (verso, ll. 7–8), is an instance in which the intermediary text is a secure stock phrase "they were saying that".  The presence of additional text here is impossible.  The forger erred when he turned from page eight of Thompson's PDF to page nine, having also passed plate 25/26.
5. Naturally, the fact that we are seeing Lycopolitan in a fragment radiometrically dated to the seventh to ninth centuries is a huge problem.  The minor dialects (Achmimic, Lycopolitan and Middle Egyptian) are not present in the extensive documentary tradition from the sixth to eighth centuries.

Conclusion

Unless compelling counter-arguments arise, both this fragment and the Gospel of Jesus Wife fragment should now be considered forgeries beyond any doubt.  Furthermore, the inauthenticity of the present fragment draws into question the broader group of documentation surrounding the Gospel of Jesus Wife which the owner provided to Karen King (contract of sale, typed note from Munro, handwritten note).

Links (suggestions by email welcome)

1. Codex Qau online PDF
2. Harvard spectroscopy results with images
3. Goodacre's summary
4. Suciu's final summary
5. Conan O'Brian's evidence
6. Summary by Carrie Schroeder
7. May 5 Smithsonian documentary