I Want a New Left

A Plausible Explanation for Some of the Strange Behavior of Liberals

I have talked of my befuddlement on their behavior already (here). And now someone has proposed what I think is a plausible explanation. This comes from a commenter named Altai who commented at this site. Someone had mentioned that the University of Chicago’s English department announced that it would “only accept students interested in working in and with Black studies.” Altai pointed out the following:

It’s not that they’re necessarily in favour of all this, [because] if they were, they’d have already been doing it. It’s that they’ve lost the ability to argue against it.

We can apply this to many things. The liberal mayor of Minneapolis wasn’t in favor of having so much destroyed on Lake Street, because if he and the other liberals were in favor of it, they would have already done it. But they couldn’t think of any good reason to prevent it that wouldn’t make them seem like out-and-out racists. That is, they couldn’t think of any good reason that would be acceptable to other liberals. Those of us on the right can of course think of plenty of good reasons, one of them being that all of this will hurt blacks more than it will help them. But to say that is something that liberals can’t say, so they don’t.

Ditto for corporations and athletic teams. They none of them want to go along with Black Lives Matter, but they can’t think of any good way to avoid doing so.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Maybe There Is Systemic Racism After All

I’ve been talking on this blog as though systemic racism is nothing but an excuse to avoid facing the hard reality that today’s progressives don’t want to face, which is that the “acting white” syndrome (together with other acts of self-sabotage) means that there are few blacks coming through the pipelines into high-status jobs. The people doing the hiring for those jobs would be happy to have blacks, but they seldom see any black candidates, so they either give up or occasionally hire a foreign black, who come from less self-destructive environments. I have based this view on my observations of academia, on what I have seen and heard.

But now I learn from an article in the Washington Post that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had 120 law clerks throughout her time, and only one of them was black. See here. Is this because there were no blacks coming through the pipeline? No, because Kavanaugh has already hired a black as a clerk. And of two other black clerks working in the Supreme Court at the time that article was published (almost two years ago), both clerked for him when he was a judge in the Court of Appeals. The author of the Post article says that Ginsburg was a familiar type to blacks, someone who espouses racial justice but doesn’t carry through, and that she might as well say, “I support racial diversity everywhere except in my chambers.”

What could she possibly have been thinking? Maybe one or more of the following:

1. “I know I’m not racist, but that isn’t true of most other people, so it’s ok for me to impose rules on them that I won’t impose on myself.” This may have been true when she was young, but it is hardly true today.

2. “I happen to like opera, and I choose my clerks on whether they like opera. It’s not my fault that few blacks like opera.” This is what’s called disparate impact.

3. “Gosh, I just never noticed. Sorry.” Then we would expect her to change her ways. Did she? I don’t know.

4. “What’s important is that I am helping blacks with the judicial decisions I make. My hiring practice is unimportant.” I’ve noticed this tendency among liberals and leftists. They make declarations about what they think is important and unimportant, and then they think that their opinion is supposed to be the final word on the matter, even though others fervently disagree with them. She should have been canceled.

I’d also like to know why she received almost no flak for her hiring record, aside from the article at the Post. Surely others knew about her record, yet they said and did nothing to force her to change her ways. Why?

Is academia, to take the segment of society I am most familiar with, rife with people like Ginsburg? Let’s try a parallel issue: worker exploitation. Academia is filled with people who rail against the exploitation of workers, yet there is exploitation of workers in academia. So, maybe academia is filled with people like Ginsburg, who say they aren’t racist, but then never choose to hire blacks. That isn’t what I am hearing from the people I know in academia. It seems to me that academics with habits like Ginsburg’s retired ages ago, to be replaced by people who have less hypocritical practices.

Anyway, to hear academics talk these days, academia is permeated with racism. And so the president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, has declared that Princeton is racist, and in response, as I’m sure many have already heard, the Department of Education is now going to investigate them because a racist institution cannot receive federal funds. See here. And I hope they put Princeton through the wringer. What colleges and universities should be saying is that unlike other segments of society, they are relatively free of racism and that blacks can easily get a job in academia, if only they will do the hard work that is necessary to get them.

I Don’t Care About Your Pain At All, Dems

First, what exactly did Ruth Bader Ginsburg do for people like me? I’m a white male from the lower-middle class who was up against richer people (presumably, all of them white) in academia. They had no qualms about squashing me like a bug, even though I was producing good quality articles, and even though they were (presumably) liberals or leftists like me.

Second, the feminists who are upset that abortion might be overturned are not at all bothered by the fact that the Dems want to support Iran, even though the current Iranian regime is against abortion. In fact, they overturned a liberal abortion law instituted by the Shah in the last couple years of his rule. Doesn’t that put them beyond the pale? So, make up your minds, Dems. If you are that devoted to legalized abortion, why not regard Iran as a horrible regime? Why make deals with them?

A Welcome Surprise: Fighting Back

Usually, when we hear about students making demands, commenters on the right chastise them for it, but that is all. Yesterday, however, I saw something new: lots of commenters demanding that the students be expelled. YES!!!!!! See here. Make them understand that a lot of us are not happy with what they are doing and that they need to suffer some consequences for their behavior. We need to see more reactions like this.

More Comments on Ariel Sabar’s Book “Veritas”

I decided to read this book partly because I’m interested in Biblical scholarship and partly to see how people, in this case a woman named Karen King, manage to become professors at Harvard. We know the story of Elizabeth Warren, and it turns out that King’s is not much different, though it’s possible that Warren has a better claim to being there than King does.

King’s story starts in a way I didn’t expect, namely she grew up in a small town in Montana, was the daughter of a pharmacist, rode horses, and wanted to go hunting with her father. (I expected a childhood in Boston attending private schools.) She went to the University of Montana where she had a stroke of luck. A professor there, John D. Turner, had been chosen to be part of a team of scholars responsible for translating the Nag Hammadi codices (see here) into English. “Turner’s students had the singular privilege of studying the English translations in draft form, a few years before they were published” (47). King changed her major from pre-med to religious studies. She then went to graduate school at Brown University and while doing her dissertation, got a grant to study in West Berlin, though in reality she was sneaking across to East Berlin to study with some Nag Hammadi experts there. It seems that she somehow slipped under the radar because when one of these experts looked at his file after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there wasn’t any mention of this American woman visiting him (52). (Was she somehow connected with the secret police?)

In 1984 after finishing her Ph.D. she got hired by Occidental College in Los Angeles where she won teaching awards and was made chair of religious studies and women’s studies. A decade later Harvard offered her a year’s fellowship for teaching and research at their divinity school, and that led a couple years later to her applying for a permanent job there. At that point she had only one article published, though she had just published a book. Interestingly, both were published by an outfit called Polebridge Press that she herself had helped to found (55). In other words, she likely had friendly referees. She wasn’t exactly Harvard material, but she had a few things going for her. The first was that this was a job with the divinity school, which is looked down on by the other departments. Second was that she had a lot of experience with non-canonical texts of early Christianity, and the third was that she was fully in step with feminism and postmodernism compared with the other candidates. So, she got the job (55).

Now I want to talk about the missteps she took in connection with the fake papyrus but also just generally in her career:

• Long before this business began, King was part of something called the Jesus Seminar, a group devoted to taking Jesus back from the fundamentalists. They looked at the New Testament and other writings with the tools of modern scholarship and decided that most of what Jesus is recorded as saying were things he did not say. They excluded the Gospel of John completely. They also even more controversially decided that Jesus had not been resurrected.

King’s part in all of this was to insist on the importance of women in Jesus’s life, and so they ended up saying that Mary Magdalene was an early witness to the Resurrection, even though they denied that the Resurrection had happened.

• Later on, she was in a similar project for a new New Testament. The founder of this project wanted to include all works up to the year 175. King wanted it extended to 205 so it would include a work by a woman, the Diary of Perpetua, and she managed to get everyone else in the project to agree. The founder, Hal Taussig, noted that if 205 were the cutoff date, then people like Irenaeus and Tertullian would have to be included, and no one wanted them, so they went back to the date of 175.

• Regarding the fragment, she preferred a very contentious interpretation. As I mentioned in the last post, since the fragment breaks off before we learn what comes after the words “my wife,” it is premature to insist that what comes next must refer to Mary Magdalene. There really needs to be a lot of supporting evidence here from other texts, and there just isn’t.

• When King received the papyrus, she showed it to two other people and relied only on their judgment. She ought to have showed it to many people.

• Neither of those two people were the most expert of experts. Roger Bagnall, for example, was an expert on Greek papyri, but not Coptic papyri. The other expert, AnneMarie Luijendijk, eventually backed away from her judgment that it was genuine since she could never find anything similar to its handwriting.

• To his credit, Bagnall advised King to seek out those with such expertise, but she didn’t, at least not initially. When she eventually did, the person in question, Malcolm Choat, was very suspicious of it, and all but declared it a forgery. Later, he came back to Harvard for a more extended look and found evidence that it had been a forgery, namely that the writer was aware of a right margin, even though the right margin had been broken off, which an ancient writer wouldn’t have known about (149).

• Two of the three experts consulted by the Harvard Theological Review were highly critical of her article, and the one who wasn’t turned out to be one of the experts she had consulted. (This was Bagnall, and he had told them he wasn’t neutral on her article, but they chose him anyway.) Yet, she never really addressed the concerns of the two skeptics.

• Her announcement in Rome was accordingly premature. She hadn’t consulted with those with the greatest expertise. She also hadn’t waited for the scientific results.

• She made the announcement in Rome at a Catholic institution, the General Curia of the Order of Saint Augustine (97). That happened to be where the conference was held. Still, it is hard to imagine that King herself would want some outsider to make an announcement at an institution she had founded asserting that the institution was guilty of having suppressed important information, thereby oppressing some group. She could have waited to make the announcement at a conference held at a more neutral site.

• Of four scientists she chose to test the papyrus, two turned out to have a connection with her. One was someone she had known since childhood, while the other was the brother-in-law of Bagnall.

• She ignored the fact that the scientific dating really didn’t establish much. It showed it wasn’t an obvious forgery, but beyond that it couldn’t establish that it was genuine. It’s comparatively easy to get ancient pieces of papyrus and to use charcoal to manufacture the ink used back then, and there was some evidence that that is what the forger did (168). For a related example of this kind of thing, a professor of Chinese art that my wife studied under said that it is always possible to prove that an alleged painting from the Song dynasty was faked, but one could never prove that it was genuine.

• What the scientific dating did show, however, was that it was likely to be from the eighth century rather than the fourth. This was a severe problem for King, but she paid little attention to it. In her article for the Harvard Theological Review, she merely said that it opened “a new line of inquiry.” Actually, it blasted her thesis to smithereens. It was bad enough that the papyrus had been dated by one of her two experts to as late as the fourth century, but the eighth takes us beyond the early Christian to the Islamic period.

• When it became clear that the text had several major grammatical errors, King was not troubled by these, even though others thought they pointed to forgery.

• She called it a gospel. As Elaine Pagels observed, we don’t have 99% of this document, so we can’t be sure what it was. Calling it a gospel was indefensible.

• When the scientific results came in, she wanted to prevent the NY Times and the Boston Globe from talking to other scientists (297). Anyone who was certain of the results wouldn’t mind if reporters sought out other opinions.

• She tried to prevent the editors of the Harvard Theological Review from printing a skeptic’s article, even though they had already promised that person, Leo Depuydt, that it would be included (299).

• She had no interest in the provenance, which is quite remarkable. The provenance, when it was examined, showed it to be a fake.

• She and her supporters had perhaps naive views about what forgers are like. Their assumption was that if the forger was careful enough to get X right, then he would have gotten Y right, too. So, if the forger got the ink right, then surely he would have made sure that there were no grammatical errors. Therefore, any grammatical errors must have been made by genuine people back then. Never mind that no one from that era made such errors. Likewise, everyone who looked at the fragment thought the handwriting was awful, like that of a beginning Coptic student of today, yet King and friends decided that a forger wouldn’t have been that careless. In fact, though, people engaged in criminal activities often screw things up.

• King claimed that the fourth-century date was not a problem because texts are in conversation so the fragment must have related back to something from the second century when the issue of Jesus’s celibacy first arose. But that isn’t the end of the issue, and in fact it’s just the beginning. It provides a possible reason for thinking it might relate back to the second century, but that would have to be supported by other evidence. She didn’t provide this. In fact, as the author (Ariel Sabar) notes, the second-century authors made it clear why they were bringing up the topic of Jesus’s celibacy. It was because they wanted to clarify that his being celibate didn’t mean that the average Christian had to be celibate. It had nothing to do with Jesus’s having had a wife. (70, 277-8)

• She used a speculative methodology: speculation upon speculation upon speculation (91-2). I think that there is nothing wrong with this if it solves important outstanding puzzles in the field, though there are plenty who dislike it even then. (The author quotes an unnamed scholar who said, “I used to tell my students that ‘maybe,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘maybe’ does not mean ‘surely.’”) It’s less valuable if it merely connects a lot of dots since those dots might be just a bunch of coincidences. (The worst conspiracy theorists are always connecting dots this way.) But if it just backs up a lot of wishful thinking, even I will say it’s worthless, and that is what King seemed to do.

• Finally, she was a postmodernist, and so her views on history are strikingly different from those of the average person (and for that matter, of almost every historian who lived prior to our era). Postmodernist historians tend to think that chronology isn’t that important, which seems just plain bonkers at best and slimy and very deceptive at worst. She thinks history is more about power relations than finding out what happened. She thinks the Catholic Church set up a certain narrative by suppressing texts written by people who didn’t agree with that narrative, and that it was her job to create a new narrative. Whether she thinks that her narrative is the truth or is just another narrative isn’t quite clear. The author, Ariel Sabar, accuses her of having a double standard:

But King wanted it both ways: she sought to expose the Church’s “facts” as positions while promoting her own positions as facts. She needed a double standard – one that permitted stories she judged virtuous to pass as true, regardless of the evidence, while denying the same to narratives she found unethical or “operationally ineffective.” The criteria that guided these case-by-case decisions were a mystery. King had never “put in writing [a] self-conscious assessment” of how her religious beliefs – her “own Christian subjectivity” – shaped her judgments about truth, according to one close colleague. The colleague called it a major omission – a “significant epistemological lacuna” – particularly for a scholar who saw all facts as self-serving points of view. (334)

Sadly, postmodernists are taking over historical studies in our colleges and universities. In addition, I always wonder about people who want Christianity to be something it isn’t: why not leave Christianity and found your own religion? This is also true of specific branches: there are numerous liberal Catholics out there who could leave Catholicism for another, more liberal branch, but instead they want Catholicism to be liberal. Why bother? King is not Catholic, but she doesn’t have to remain Christian at all, yet she does.

Getting back to King and the fragment, let me sum up by saying that the author never used the word “manipulative” in connection with her that I can recall, but all these items sure add up to that, particularly the first two.

The problems with King’s method of doing scholarship, in which one has a political agenda and looks for evidence that one’s agenda was suppressed back then, are numerous. Morton Smith, who may have faked an ancient letter quoting from a secret gospel of Mark, nevertheless noted that “historians usually find what they are looking for,” and then added, “a fact that makes me uneasy” (The Secret Gospel, 96). That is, someone like King can find evidence for her view that early feminism in the Church was suppressed. But others can find evidence for their views, too. If you think that the role of women in the early Church was suppressed by patriarchal men, someone else can come along and insist that the real suppression was of patriarchal men and that what survived was more feminist than patriarchal.

It’s really better just to see where the evidence leads rather than to have an agenda. I pointed out in my post on Plato’s Third Man argument (here) that we were all led astray because we had agendas. There were Platonists, and there were Aristotelians. Neither side turned out to be completely right, though each was partially right.

Not having an agenda would have helped us all.

Comments on Ariel Sabar’s “Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”

When I first heard back in 2012 about the finding of a fragment of papyrus from the fourth century that hinted that Jesus had had a wife, I immediately dismissed it because I thought, “Anyone could say anything they liked by the fourth century.” I then forgot about it. If I ever heard anything more about it, I just can’t remember because I had already relegated it to my mental dustbin. This book tells the story about this fragment, and one should be able to guess from the title how it all turned out.

By the way, I have to say that the author, a journalist who has written for various outlets including the NY Times and the Washington Post, has done an amazing job of uncovering the whole story.

The fragment was on a piece of papyrus that appeared to be from something larger since all four sides, but especially the right side and bottom, are ragged. The writing is in Coptic, the language used by Egyptians at that time. The important part says:

... me not. For my mother she gave to me the ...
... The disciples said to Jesus this ...
... abdicate, Mary be worthy of you ...
... Jesus said to them: My wife ...
... she can become a disciple to me and ...

One possible, though contentious, reading of this is that it concerns Mary Magdalene, who is declared to be Jesus’s wife. But there is plenty of doubt that that is the way it is supposed to read. The two words “my wife” could be filled out in any of a number of ways, such as “my wife is the church” or “my wife? I don’t need one.” Since the right edge is cut off, we can only guess as to how it will end. But a scholar at Harvard, Karen King, decided that the contentious reading was the right one. Moreover, the dating to the fourth century didn’t bother her since she claims that texts are in conversation with one another, and since the issue of Jesus’s celibacy was raised in the second century, then that is when this is from, even though a scholar she knew dated the handwriting to the fourth century. Presumably, she means that it was recopied from something in the second century. Not that it matters, however.

That’s because it turns out the whole thing was faked. As I said above, I had stopped paying attention so I had not heard of this development. Nor had another person I talked to who remembered the original announcement, but not the later developments. Much of this seems to parallel the book by Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code, even though King had problems with the book (because it made Jesus’s wife nothing but a childbearer rather than a spiritual leader). And just as I ignored the announcement of the papyrus about Jesus having a wife, I ignored the hubbub created by Brown’s book because it got so many facts wrong.

Anyway, the story of the papyrus starts in Germany with a young man named Walter Fritz. Sabar managed to figure out who he was from hints that King, the professor at Harvard, gave him. He had a somewhat rough childhood and was possibly sexually abused by a Catholic priest. As an adult, he was a student at the Egyptology Institute at Berlin’s Free University where he had learned a little Coptic, although he was not good at it. However, he made a fatal mistake when he took some ideas of one of his professors and published them. He thought this would ingratiate him with the professor in question – he did cite him as the source of the ideas – but the professor thought it should have been his publication and not the student’s. Fritz dropped out of the program and disappeared completely. A few years later he was made head of a museum in the old East Berlin that was devoted to the history of East Germany. Employees there told the author they thought that Fritz had stolen objects in the museum, including works by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, and that this had led to his being forced out.

After that he joined up with a couple of machinists who had formed their own company. He took over and eventually ran it into the ground. Meanwhile, he moved to Florida. For a while, he and his wife ran an online sex ring. At one point, desperate for money, he cooked up this scheme to sell Harvard some fake fragments of papyrus, one of which alluded to Jesus’s wife. He latched onto a professor there, Karen King, as a likely dupe. King has strong feminist leanings and also studies non-canonical writings of the Bible, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gnostic writings. At first, when she got Fritz’s email, she dismissed what he was peddling as a likely fake. A year later she finally bit, perhaps because her own school at Harvard, the divinity school, was under threat to be dissolved. If she could make a big splash with a big discovery, that would keep her school’s enemies at bay.

And so she asked to see this fragment of papyrus. She then showed it to two people more knowledgeable than she was about such things, and while their initial reaction was that it was probably a fake, they eventually decided that no one trying to fake such a thing would be so clumsy, so they decided it was real. One of them, a professor at Columbia named Roger Bagnall, dated it to the fourth century. King, as I already mentioned, was undaunted by the late date. Moreover, she decided to call the complete document which the fragment was from by the grand name the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. She wrote up something on it and then submitted it to the Harvard Theological Review, which is put out by the divinity school where she is employed. They sent it to three referees, and while one said to go ahead, the other two were quite skeptical and pointed out big problems in the grammar of the fragment.

King was rather stunned by the reports from the two skeptics, but she dashed off an email to Bagnall, and he said he was unconvinced by some of their objections, though as one of the objections concerned the bad grammar of the papyrus, he urged her to try to find parallels in other documents and also to contact someone more knowledgeable about Coptic than he was. She, however, decided to go ahead and make an announcement about the fragment at a big international scholarly conference in Rome. This was before she had had any scientific tests done, by the way.

When she made the announcement, there were plenty of skeptics in the room. However, King had contacted people from the NY Times ahead of time, so very quickly it was announced to the world. She held a press conference the next day, and seemed fully in control of the situation. But the reporters sought out other experts, who voiced skepticism about the whole business, and for a while that was the impression the world received. Both Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart cracked jokes about it. Another eminent scholar, Elaine Pagels, expressed dismay at the way that King called the fragment a “gospel.” Since the only thing they knew about the full document was a minuscule part, she thought that seemed premature. The Harvard Theological Review decided to wait for scientific evidence and an opinion from the most knowledgeable experts they could find regarding Coptic papyri before publishing her article. One skeptic said the author of the fragment was a modern “who might have benefitted from one more semester of Coptic.” Another scholar, named Francis Watson, gave a more substantive clue about the source of the forger’s work, saying that it looked like the fragment had been cut and pasted from the Gospel of Thomas.

At this point, something happened that King was not at all expecting. When she made the announcement in 2012, she was fifty-eight, and like many other scholars of her era, she paid little attention to the Internet. She expected things to happen the way they had always happened for academic elites: at scholarly conferences, in journals that came out at most a few times a year, and very rarely, at press conferences. Instead, it turned out there were non-academics out there who were interested in all of this. One of them was a retired computer programmer named Mike Grondin, who learned Coptic so that he could search for hidden meanings in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. He set up a website for people interested in it, and at some point he put the entire Gospel of Thomas on it, but in such a way that it was an “interlinear”; that is, under each line of Coptic was his own translation of it into English.

Another non-academic (though he had learned Coptic at Oxford), Andrew Bernhard, took a look at the fragment and agreed that it was from the Gospel of Thomas, though at first he wasn’t convinced it was a forgery. But when he saw the photos of the fragment, he wondered if a possible forger had used an interlinear to help. He knew of only one, Grondin’s. So, he found it on the Internet, and noticed very quickly that a forger had almost certainly used Grondin’s interlinear, relying on his English and then using the Coptic on the line above. What the forger hadn’t counted on was that Grondin had made a very idiosyncratic translation, so the forger’s Coptic and English translation were like a fingerprint. There were grammatical mistakes similar to Grondin’s, plus on another line the forger had left out a word, presumably because Grondin had accidentally left out that same word.

Bernhard wrote up something on his findings and sent them to Mark Goodacre, a scholar at Duke who ran a blog on the New Testament. He was intrigued and posted it on his blog, and the next day The Guardian newspaper published on article about it. Other news outlets followed suit. Anyone following the story at this point probably thought it was a fake.

The next twist was that the scientific tests came back, though many months after they were expected. The Harvard Theological Review felt they could now publish King’s article because the results did not indicate a modern forgery (or to be more precise, they did not indicate an obvious forgery). Almost unnoticed in all of this was that the date the scientists indicated was in the eighth century rather than the fourth. King mostly ignored this, and her reaction to Bernhard was that it was unlikely that a forger would get so many things right but also so many things wrong.

Meanwhile, another development concerned a second fragment that the forger had sent to King, a Coptic fragment from the Gospel of John. Coptic translations of the Gospel of John were the specialty of an evangelical scholar named Christian Askeland, who had written a Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge University on all such translations, so he took a careful look at this. The first thing he noticed was that it was written in a very rare dialect of Coptic. There were only two other translations using this dialect, and he quickly figured out that the fragment must have been a forgery because of the weird similarities to one of the other translations. And then he noticed that the scientists had also taken a look at this fragment, and had put it in the eighth century, when no one was using that dialect of Coptic. So once again, a forgery was likely, even if it wasn’t of the primary fragment. Once the media learned about Askeland’s findings, they realized that that cast doubt on the other fragment. Yet, King talked as though both fragments might still be authentic. In the midst of all this, Francis Watson, who had first called people’s attention to the similarity of the main fragment and the Gospel of Thomas, wanted to do more than just have some obscure people who were out of the loop say it was a fake. As editor of a journal called New Testament Studies, he decided to have an issue devoted to those claiming it was a fake. Bernhard and Askeland both had articles published in it.

Meanwhile, what about the provenance of the fragment? King had not released the name of the owner, but who had owned it before him? She wasn’t terribly interested, but finally recalled that it was a German named H.U. Laukamp who had previously owned it. Moreover, there was some interesting evidence that the previous owner provided that indicated that a German professor had written to another German professor about these fragments and that that other professor had replied saying he thought it was the only known evidence for the claim that Jesus was married. Conveniently, all three of these people were dead. The author, Ariel Sabar, did some digging and found out a few things. First, that is when the name Walter Fritz came up, and he correctly deduced that he was the one who offered it to King in the first place. Second, almost certainly Laukamp had never owned such a fragment since according to friends, he never collected anything. Third, there were problems with these letters between the two dead professors, somewhat reminiscent of the problems with the letter Dan Rather produced about President Bush.

By the way, the faking of a provenance happens regularly. My wife a few years ago received an email from someone in Germany wondering if she were related to a certain collector who had once owned some prized cuneiform tablets. My wife replied that yes, she was his daughter, except that he hadn’t owned any prized cuneiform tablets. Instead, he had owned just one cruddy one, which was all he could afford. Someone out there had tried to construct a provenance for items presumably stolen, and they latched onto my father-in-law’s name because he was conveniently dead and because he actually had owned one such tablet.

After having discovered these and other irregularities about the history of the document, the author wrote an article in the Atlantic about it and about the forger, and that was pretty much that. In my next post, I will discuss how King got to Harvard and how she handled this whole business, which seems questionable and even manipulative.

Oops, well, it isn’t completely true that that was that. In a response to the Atlantic article, King wrote in The Harvard Crimson that people were focusing too much on the authenticity of the papyrus and not on the issues it raised. Incredible. However, an anonymous commenter snarkily damned her attitude with the following perfect comment:

Fake, but accurate

As Glenn Reynolds would say, Heh.

Yikes: Were Early Socialists Nazis After All?

Steve Sailer talks about the canceling of George Bernard Shaw, who was a leftist, but who also favored eugenics. See here. When I was a leftist, I had no idea that there had been a eugenics strand in leftist thought prior to World War II, but when I moved to the right, I began hearing about it. And now some leftists are themselves noticing it, though this is probably because everyone born before about 1990 is subject to being canceled, no matter how prominent they once were in leftist circles.

Once Again, Iran Shows Its True Colors

For all the unreasonable Iran-lovers out there among the Democrats, the Iranian regime has once again shown the world how vicious it is by executing a young wrestler accused of killing a security guard during a demonstration. See here. Whether he was guilty or not is anyone’s guess, since he claims he was tortured to extract a confession.

Exactly why Obama and friends were soooo anxious to have a deal with this regime will be a mystery for the ages. Ok, I know many of you will point out that these are the sort of people who liked Castro’s Cuba. And I say, yes, that’s true, but there were at least ideological affinities there, so that made some distant sort of sense. But there is no ideological affinity with Iran, plus there is a history of Iranian brutality toward liberals and leftists, so why have anything to do with them? In fact, why not demand that members of the regime be brought before an international criminal court for crimes against humanity?

Like I said, this will be a mystery for the ages.

Some Advice to Those Professors Who Face Demands from Students

See here: a professor who merely watched a pro-police demonstration is now getting heat from students who want him fired. Why doesn’t he shoot back and demand that those students be expelled?

On People Leaving New York City

See here about people leaving New York City. Take a look at this line:

For these cities ... your ethnic and racial identity [is] a source of someone else’s political power.

That struck me as particularly cynical, but I won’t disagree.