There were times when I Iooked at my reporting
and wondered whether this sprawling story with
all these wild characters could possibly be true.
I found really more than I ever imagined I would.
In July of 2010, Karen King, who is this very prominent
professor of religious history at Harvard,
receives an email from a private collector
of manuscripts she's never heard of before,
and this man tells her
that he has some interesting papyri,
among them is one in which there appears to be
this partial phrase: Jesus said to them, my wife.
This is clearly a bombshell of a papyrus.
At stake for the Catholic Church in all of this
is centuries of tradition.
To be a priest, celibacy is required,
because celibacy in their view is how you turn away
from the world and towards God.
The Vatican wasted no time in calling it an inept forgery.
But what ended up happening in the days afterwards
was that independent scholars started taking
a closer look at this manuscript,
and were starting to find
things that made them suspicious.
There was this one sort of area, or line of investigation
that no one had ever really looked at deeply,
and that was the question of provenance.
And provenance is sort of a fancy way of saying:
Where does an object come from?
What are its origins?
Who were the chain of owners that had this object?
Who took it out of the ground initially?
Who owned it before it came to Karen King?
And as far as I could tell, Karen King herself had made
no independent investigation of that.
She took the owner's word, more or less,
and that's kind of where she leaves it.
Three years after the story first breaks,
I decide to start digging and not really sure what I'm
going to find, because I figured after three years
the ground had probably been so heavily raked over that
if there was anything explosive to learn about the owner,
who he was, we would have already heard about it.
I found that that was absolutely not the case.
I started doing what journalists do all the time:
digging through public records,
I started cultivating sources,
following one lead to another,
often encountering dead ends,
but ultimately discovering this really wild tale
about the owner, not only identifying the owner,
but meeting with him and finding that he was
this very complex, fascinating figure whose life
intersected with the worlds of Egyptology,
with the worlds of porn,
who had kind of popped up almost Zelig-like
in a million different places.
When I first called him during
my first trip to Florida in November,
he denied everything!
He denied being the owner.
He denied ever studying at the Free University.
He denied really having anything more than
a passing relationship with the previous owner,
knew really nothing about anything.
So it took my going to Germany and compiling basically
a kind of dossier on him,
and then calling him back months later and saying:
hey, this is what I found, now can we talk?
Then all of the sudden, he becomes very very open,
and we have something like a total of 22 hours
of conversations about the papyrus,
and about his own history.
Now, you're learning that the owner is not this
hapless collector who doesn't read Coptic,
and just stumbled upon this document,
doesn't really know what it is,
but he actually was a former student of Coptic
who's very very well-read in Christian history,
who's very very well-read in ancient history,
and then he acknowledged to me that he had lied
to Karen King about certain details.
It's one thing to lie to a reporter.
It's another thing to lie to a Harvard professor
who you are asking to introduce
your papyrus to the world.
Whether the Gospel of Jesus's Wife itself is authentic
or not I think will remain an open question.
We need more scientific testing.
Perhaps we need an eyewitness to a forgery,
or we need a confession from somebody.
But what I found in the course of my reporting
was that the provenance story, the story of where
the owner said he acquired the papyrus,
who he acquired it from,
I believe, based on my reporting,
that those are false.
And that that story does not hold water.
I just think it shows that
with a little bit of scholarly training,
with an ability to read people,
with an ability to identify the right kind of mark,
and to understand precisely what it is they want,
you can get away with almost anything.