In his article in the Wall Street Journal entitled 'How the 'Jesus' Wife' Hoax Fell Apart', Jerry Pattengale concludes with an interesting comment: 'this episode is not totally without merit. It will provide a valuable case study for research classes long after we're gone and the biblical texts remain.'
So, given that the whole debacle is basically over (except for mopping up exercises), what lessons can be learnt?
a) It is possible for a forger to get hold of papyri, mix ink according to ancient conventions, compose a semi-plausible pastiche of a text, and mislead scholars, academic institutions, the media, and the public. Exactly what he (or she) hoped to gain from it is not clear, but if it was simply mischief, then he has probably far exceeded his wildest dreams. Given this possibility it is important that if someone approaches you with an unpublished text which meshes in with your own academic interests, then critical skepticism rather than credulity should control your responses. Nothing is innocent until proven guilty in this scenario. Also the forger will target a scholar who he thinks is persuadable, not a manuscript expert, and who has wider credibility to make the discovery known (remember that in this case Prof King at first didn't respond to the invitation, but the forger didn't go to some other scholar, he waited a year and then went back to reel in Prof King).
b) Get the back story straight and get all the documents involved. Although at the time and in retrospect we may think that the problems of palaeography, subject matter, and textual composition with the Pseudo-Gospel of Jesus' Wife* were sufficient to conclude it was a fake; the additional confirmation of that came from the Pseudo-Gospel of John Fragment and the proof that it was copied from a published form of a text. That conclusive anachronism becomes the nail in the coffin which is universally convincing (just as its demonstrable dependence on a published edition of Mark finally did for 2427). So the people calling for access to the whole collection in 2012 are vindicated.
c) The results of scientific tests need to be carefully interpreted. Don't just read the summaries that are repeated in the press releases. Get hold of the full scientific reports. Again, that was an incidental key step in this process (because the scientific ink report also happened to have a photo of Ps-John).
d) Careful observation of the actual manuscript (or good images) may generate suspicion and even offer pointers to forgery which may be individually persuasive, but generating a consensus requires multiple points of suspicion (and/or clearcut anachronism).
e) Get high resolution images on the internet and let some crowd-sourcing do the critical work. In this episode the scholarly blogs on the subject come out pretty well, while the Harvard folk are looking a little gullible. The blogs sorted in a month what Harvard couldn't. We all know when bloggers get their teeth into something they can be tenacious and feed off each other. Surely there will now be scholarly articles on this mess, in NTS and hopefully in HTR, but I doubt they'll offer more than the blogs have already done.
f) Composing a plausible ancient text by free composition is difficult. Several recent forgeries have involved creating text by copying and adapting existing published texts of similar type (both of these obviously Ps-GJW as Bernhard, Grondin and others showed; Ps-John as Askeland, Suciu, have now shown, and presumably some of the others in the same collection which haven't been made public yet; the lead codices, etc.). So scholars should look, not only at comparing new documentary finds with other ancient texts, but also with published forms of similar texts. Here tell-tale anachronisms (like following the Grondin misprint or having 17 line endings agree except when a page is turned) are perhaps the most generally conclusive bits of the evidence.
g) Forgers invent fake histories, provenance and documents to bolster the authenticity of the forgery, but these are a potential weak link. No surprise that in this case all these documents have been kept from the scholarly community.
h) don't worry if your PhD is in something other people think is obscure (like Coptic manuscripts of John) one day you might have the very bit of information that the rest of us need.
So, given that the whole debacle is basically over (except for mopping up exercises), what lessons can be learnt?
a) It is possible for a forger to get hold of papyri, mix ink according to ancient conventions, compose a semi-plausible pastiche of a text, and mislead scholars, academic institutions, the media, and the public. Exactly what he (or she) hoped to gain from it is not clear, but if it was simply mischief, then he has probably far exceeded his wildest dreams. Given this possibility it is important that if someone approaches you with an unpublished text which meshes in with your own academic interests, then critical skepticism rather than credulity should control your responses. Nothing is innocent until proven guilty in this scenario. Also the forger will target a scholar who he thinks is persuadable, not a manuscript expert, and who has wider credibility to make the discovery known (remember that in this case Prof King at first didn't respond to the invitation, but the forger didn't go to some other scholar, he waited a year and then went back to reel in Prof King).
b) Get the back story straight and get all the documents involved. Although at the time and in retrospect we may think that the problems of palaeography, subject matter, and textual composition with the Pseudo-Gospel of Jesus' Wife* were sufficient to conclude it was a fake; the additional confirmation of that came from the Pseudo-Gospel of John Fragment and the proof that it was copied from a published form of a text. That conclusive anachronism becomes the nail in the coffin which is universally convincing (just as its demonstrable dependence on a published edition of Mark finally did for 2427). So the people calling for access to the whole collection in 2012 are vindicated.
c) The results of scientific tests need to be carefully interpreted. Don't just read the summaries that are repeated in the press releases. Get hold of the full scientific reports. Again, that was an incidental key step in this process (because the scientific ink report also happened to have a photo of Ps-John).
d) Careful observation of the actual manuscript (or good images) may generate suspicion and even offer pointers to forgery which may be individually persuasive, but generating a consensus requires multiple points of suspicion (and/or clearcut anachronism).
e) Get high resolution images on the internet and let some crowd-sourcing do the critical work. In this episode the scholarly blogs on the subject come out pretty well, while the Harvard folk are looking a little gullible. The blogs sorted in a month what Harvard couldn't. We all know when bloggers get their teeth into something they can be tenacious and feed off each other. Surely there will now be scholarly articles on this mess, in NTS and hopefully in HTR, but I doubt they'll offer more than the blogs have already done.
f) Composing a plausible ancient text by free composition is difficult. Several recent forgeries have involved creating text by copying and adapting existing published texts of similar type (both of these obviously Ps-GJW as Bernhard, Grondin and others showed; Ps-John as Askeland, Suciu, have now shown, and presumably some of the others in the same collection which haven't been made public yet; the lead codices, etc.). So scholars should look, not only at comparing new documentary finds with other ancient texts, but also with published forms of similar texts. Here tell-tale anachronisms (like following the Grondin misprint or having 17 line endings agree except when a page is turned) are perhaps the most generally conclusive bits of the evidence.
g) Forgers invent fake histories, provenance and documents to bolster the authenticity of the forgery, but these are a potential weak link. No surprise that in this case all these documents have been kept from the scholarly community.
h) don't worry if your PhD is in something other people think is obscure (like Coptic manuscripts of John) one day you might have the very bit of information that the rest of us need.