on Harvard Theological Review's failure to retract

[mlinssen]

My barbaric, black and white, and unnuanced assessment is based on having read Sabar’s book. It includes extensive interviews with King, and is based on some fabulous research and investigation. But you’ve looked at his twitter.

Why should I invest any more time in this?

The fragment is a fake, and King was not a fraud. Done and done. Maybe we should just move on.

The way you want to end this small discussion with Irish is not so slightly reminiscent of the way that King wants to leave the entire affair

You are clearly offended by King being labelled a fraud, but instead of debunking the statement, you want to shrug off the incident here - and that, to say the least, is out of the ordinary

I really don't like using Wikipedia as a source but it usually is within the ballpark. And it says this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_ ... ic_testing

Scientific testing

Though two out of the three peer reviewers consulted by the Harvard Theological Review in mid-2012 believed that the papyrus was a probable fake, King declined to carry out scientific testing of the fragment before going public, in September 2012, at the academic conference in Rome. The omission of laboratory testing was a departure from customary practice for blockbuster manuscript finds, most recently the Gospel of Judas, which had undergone a battery of tests before National Geographic announced it in 2006.

King commissioned the first laboratory tests of the Jesus' Wife papyrus only after her 2012 announcement, amid sharp doubts about the authenticity from leading experts in Coptic language, early Christian manuscripts, and paleography. A radiocarbon dating analysis of the papyrus by Harvard University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found a mean date of AD 741.[33] This early medieval date upended King's and Bagnall's claims that the papyrus likely dated to the fourth century AD.Though King sought to claim that the eighth-century radiocarbon date was still evidence of probable authenticity, the date was historically problematic: By the eighth century AD, Egypt was in the early Islamic era and Coptic Christianity was orthodox, making it unclear why anyone in that period would be copying a previously unknown "heretical" text about a married Jesus. A Raman spectroscopy analysis at Columbia University found that the ink was carbon-based and in some respects consistent with inks on papyri in the Columbia library dating from 400 BC to AD 700–800. But more advanced, subsequent testing of the ink by the Columbia team would find similarities to modern inks and differences from genuinely ancient ones.

In a presentation at the Society of Biblical Literature's annual conference in San Antonio, Texas, in November 2016, the Columbia scientific team would declare its findings about the Gospel of Jesus' Wife "consistent with manuscript as forgery."[34] Taken together, the various scientific findings are consistent with the scholarly community's prevailing theory that a modern forger took a blank scrap of old papyrus and wrote the Gospel of Jesus' Wife text on top of it, using a simple, carbon-based ink as easy to make today as it was in antiquity. In his 2020 book Veritas, Ariel Sabar reported that two of the lead scientists King had commissioned to make the case for authenticity had no prior experience with archaeological objects and that both of the scientists had undisclosed conflicts of interest: one was a family friend of King's from childhood, the other the brother-in-law of the only other senior scholar to initially believe the papyrus was authentic. Those interpersonal relationships weren't disclosed to the public or to the editors of the Harvard Theological Review, which published the scientific reports in April 2014.[35]

The footnote 35 is from Sabar 2020

I am unfamiliar with the part in yellow highlight, and very much doubt it. No footnotes to it either

This section was modified November 16, 2020 and this last piece in bold got added, among others. If it's correct, then so is Irish

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special ... /989033186

[Peter Kirby]

instead of debunking the statement

A good dictionary will go a long way here. A fraud is someone who uses lies, things they know aren't true, in the attempt to deceive others. This is quite the claim. It would have to be put into context to have a bit more meaning: what were the lies told? Did King know it was a forgery?

Most of the things mentioned in conjunction with this claim are true, but they don't support the conclusion:

"The very title, 'Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,' which King contrived, is beyond silly." (okay, it's subjective, but I tend to agree)

"She has no background in papyrology!" (stunning! what masterful detective work! maybe that's why she offered no papyrological opinion and other experts were consulted for those kinds of assessments)

"She had no business doing any of this." (this is false and would never be in question except for the outcome that it's a fake - if she had literally "no business" doing anything, then the conferences and journals wouldn't have entertained her at all... but it's literally her profession to do things like this, with the help of relevant specialists that were needed to judge the question of authenticity)

"the fact that King got the fragment directly from Fritz, that she knew nothing about him and nothing about the provenance of the papyrus fragment" (if this is true, it's consistent with King not being a fraud because she did not know about Fritz and his forgery)

"she failed to do basic due diligence before making her sensationalist claims in Rome in 2012, and in her in 2014 HTR article" (everyone can play Captain Could Have Done It Better after the fact, but there were "basic" inquiries made of experts before the conference in Rome and somewhat extensive inquiries before the 2014 article, putting the lie to the idea that "fraud" - an intent to deceive - was involved here)

Though two out of the three peer reviewers consulted by the Harvard Theological Review in mid-2012 believed that the papyrus was a probable fake

I am unfamiliar with the part in yellow highlight, and very much doubt it. No footnotes to it either

It is correct.

The HTR chose to wait for additional testing and to publish a variety of perspectives in the same issue, including arguments for forgery.

Harvard Divinity School spokesman Jonathan Beasley:

“Dr. King’s `marriage fragment' paper, which Harvard Theological Review is planning to publish in its January, 2013, edition – if testing of the ink and other aspects of the fragment are completed in time – will include her responses to the vigorous and appropriate academic debate engendered by discovery of the fragment, as well as her report on the ink analysis, and further examination of the fragment.”

In his 2020 book Veritas, Ariel Sabar reported that two of the lead scientists King had commissioned to make the case for authenticity had no prior experience with archaeological objects and that both of the scientists had undisclosed conflicts of interest: one was a family friend of King's from childhood, the other the brother-in-law of the only other senior scholar to initially believe the papyrus was authentic. Those interpersonal relationships weren't disclosed to the public or to the editors of the Harvard Theological Review, which published the scientific reports in April 2014.[35][/i]

This section was modified November 16, 2020 and this last piece in bold got added, among others. If it's correct, then so is Irish

It also seems correct, but it's another case of not proving intent. To show intent, it would have to be combined with evidence that there was a well-known precedent that made not disclosing the "interpersonal relationships" an unusual and underhanded omission. Without evidence of that, this is puffery about details without larger significance.

A lot of negative significance is being placed on the decision to go public and to publish. In this case, perhaps it happened more quickly than in other cases, such as the Gospel of Judas. It also happened with more controversy and criticism, facilitated by the initial decision to go public sooner. The positive significance of going public, however, is obvious. By getting the fragment in front of everyone, King played a pivotal role in having it proved to be whatever it turned out to be - in this case, a forgery. There was no real harm from the fact that King was mistaken and blinded by personal bias on the matter. King did not plant any false evidence or lead anyone astray about the facts of the case. So, yeah, maybe just let Dr. King live it down.

A statement like this, from Sabar:

"Blogs like Goodacre’s had democratized and quickened these exchanges; they brought researchers of every rank together to vet discoveries fast, before the harm—to scholars, to universities, to the integrity of the historical record—became permanent."

is illustrative of the weird, unacademic attitude on display. "Permanent" harm? As if the whole point of the academic enterprise isn't to subject everything to scrutiny. There was no kind of mystical "permanent" damage. Only a fool will feel injured to have read an argument that led to a conclusion that isn't true, as if he can't think about it for himself and conclude otherwise.

If incorrect conclusions are a violation of the integrity of the historical record, then she is already a whore with thousands of different partners, each with their own opinions being deposited in that record every year, competing with each other to conceive something new or different.

As a reminder of what the word "fraud" means, the person who submitted the article under the name "Batson D. Sealing" was a fraud:

https://theancienthistorian.wordpress.c ... and-fraud/

As I mentioned a couple of days ago my first thoughts on this new text brought back memories of the so – called “Batson D. Sealing affair.” I misspelled the name previously. This was something that began in the late 80’s but hit the presses in 1991 after an article was published in Discussions in Egyptology 19 (1991). This was an elaborate fraud. The nom de plume Batson D. Sealing, obviously meant to be funny, was the supposed author of small piece in a New Orleans History Journal discussing a hand copy (no photographs of texts in this period) of a demotic Roman period Sayings of Jesus. The Journal really existed, but was not published in the year this fraudulent article appeared. Very clever. An amazing amount of effort went into creating this article, and then sending it for commentary to a journal in Oxford. All designed to embarrass someone. Robin Lane Fox commented on this in the Financial Times, 18 and 25 May 1991. It made a huge splash in British newspapers.

Because the article submitted to Discussions in Egyptology was fraudulent, it was not only retracted; they quickly printed an edition without it.

[Peter Kirby]

Mr. Sabar certainly doesn't let the truth get in the way of a good rhetorical flourish:

Hot takes scattered across different online forums in multiple countries over two years were no match for the dreadnought of a single, peer-reviewed journal bearing the name Harvard. There was a good chance that within a few decades the blogs would go dark and the only surviving totem in the scholarly literature would be Harvard’s tendentious take in the Harvard Theological Review.

Completely absurd.

[mlinssen]

I haven't read Sabar 2020, but comments like the one regarding Goodacre's blog are indeed weird

I have called Nicholas Perrin a foolish idiot, which was not very academic - but the point there was to point out that his booklet, the utter lack of objective (and most likely negative) response from within the proper academic circles, as well as his feeble and stammering response to the eventual response was greatly unacademic - albeit not unusual, of course.
But the word "fraud" is indeed inherently linked to intent - it is either that or naive incompetence

It was a clever (and risky) move by King to pull the 2012 sensational trick - that is what I see that it was, even intended to be. But had she played innocent after the 2014 official backlash, then Sabar wouldn't have had a pedestal from which to proclaim and promote this book.
Fraud is, on second sight, not the right word to use for King. She played according to the rules of the game, with the very likely intent of bending but not breaking them. We have a saying in the Netherlands that translates to "being more pious than the Pope", and perhaps it is something similar what we're expecting from King

I seem to now understand where you're coming from too, Peter. Undoubtedly there are lessons learned on all sides, and anything that any formal withdrawal or rectification will do is fuel the promotional fire to Sabar's book. Maybe the book is already closed, and "closure" would only reopen it, with the biggest benefactor being Sabar

[Paul the Uncertain]

Mr. Sabar certainly doesn't let the truth get in the way of a good rhetorical flourish:

Hot takes scattered across different online forums in multiple countries over two years were no match for the dreadnought of a single, peer-reviewed journal bearing the name Harvard. There was a good chance that within a few decades the blogs would go dark and the only surviving totem in the scholarly literature would be Harvard’s tendentious take in the Harvard Theological Review.

Completely absurd.

Not completely absurd. Again, I think Sabar is (possibly naively) applying the standards of the high end of his own profession to what he takes to be the hgh end of another profession, a unified "academia" of his own imagining. (Um, the title of his book is the motto of Harvard ... do you not suppose that the choice reflects his expectation of better performance from such an institution?).

Within journalism, Sabar's profession, the experiment has been done. Consider the Einstein-Gutkind ("God") letter. An auction house in 2008 effectively made up remarks attributed to Einstein about the "childishness" of some aspects of the Jewish religion, presenting these fictive remarks as a translation of the original German composition sent to Gutkind.

These became the standard of online discourse about the letter because the Guardian newspaper pimped the quasi-translation ... at one point attributing it to a person with the same name as a prominent academic translator of German philosophical works. (The auction house, when asked privately and directly, was forthcoming that the English in its sale catalog had been produced in-house.)

If your taste runs to the absurd, then consider that many outlets in the German press ran the Guardian version, translated from its English back into the German language! (OK, the 2008 pictures were not great, and Die Welt at least transcribed the most severely misrepresented sections rather than use the quasi-translation for those parts).

Up through the 2018 Christies auction of the letter, the Guardian version was all over the web ... because the truth of the matter was "no match for the dreadnought of a single," virtual rag "bearing the name" The Guardian. Christies broke with the pack and used a real transciption and translation (based on better images than were publicly available in 2008, plus in-person examination of Boston University's copy of the letter and related materials in its facsimile of the Einstein archives) - and Christies had that version independently vetted besides.

Since then, I'm pleased to say that the truth about the letter is now much more easily available online than ever before. But there, too, the shift follows on the heels of Christies being able to enlist the interest of big-name media in setting the record straight. For example, the New Yorker piece after the sale:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-co ... god-letter

It is entirely reasonable based on lived experience for Sabar to adopt a "big megaphone" approach to predicting what would happen if things had played out even a little differently. Harvard has one honkin' big megaphone. Sabar's position may be wrong, naive or even ill-informed in some respects, but it's not even slightly absurd.

[Irish1975]

A good dictionary will go a long way here.

Then why not consult a dictionary?

fraud n. 2a: a person who is not what he or she pretends to be; [Merriam-Webster]

A fraud is someone who uses lies, things they know aren't true, in the attempt to deceive others. This is quite the claim. It would have to be put into context to have a bit more meaning: what were the lies told? Did King know it was a forgery?

So we disagree about the meaning of the word, and at any rate you have not understood what I am saying. A person who is a fraud is not necessarily a liar, and I don’t pretend to know, or care about, her intent. Bullshit and postmodernist ideology (the shallow kind) are not the same thing as lies and falsehoods.

King pretends to be a historian of Christian antiquity. So much of what she is on the record saying and doing from 2012 till now about the “GJW” is activism and sensationalism, not historical scholarship. She went a long way confusing the public about the idea of historical fact in the study of religion, which is something I thought we all cared about.

But I’m done arguing about a book that Peter apparently has not read and wants to dismiss out of hand.

[Peter Kirby]

I've read the book, and my opinions have changed.

It also seems correct, but it's another case of not proving intent. To show intent, it would have to be combined with evidence that there was a well-known precedent that made not disclosing the "interpersonal relationships" an unusual and underhanded omission. Without evidence of that, this is puffery about details without larger significance.

There may be significance here after all. From Sabar's book:

ON A SUNDAY EVENING in May 2019, I found Jon Levenson, the co-editor of the Harvard Theological Review, outside his house in a Boston suburb. When I told him that the scientists he’d published had close personal ties to King and Bagnall, he said, “Whoa! This is the first I’ve ever heard of it.” The journal’s publisher, Cambridge University Press, requires authors “to declare any potential conflicts of interest...(real or apparent) that could be considered or viewed as exerting an undue influence on his or her duties at any stage during the publication process.” Levenson told me that neither the scientists nor the scholars had alerted the Review’s editors to any such relationships. If Levenson had known, he said, he would have sought other scientists—ones with prior archaeometric experience and without competing allegiances. “The fact that they are close friends, that certainly is very suspicious and not best practices [or] acceptable practices.”

That the journal didn’t peer-review the lab studies meant that no outside scientists could assess them before publication. Journalists, meanwhile, were told not to ask. Harvard Divinity School gave exclusives to The New York Times and The Boston Globe in April 2014 on the condition that the reporters contact no scientists or scholars besides the ones commissioned by King.

The editors were already not following best practices, not least because "the journal didn't peer review the lab studies," and there was no subsequent review of King's article, even after an earlier draft had 2 negative reviews from Emmel and Layton. It's possible that Levenson isn't telling the whole truth here, as that could implicate himself.

https://brentnongbri.com/2020/08/10/ari ... reactions/

What is surprising is the subsequent actions of the editors of HTR. Rather than accepting the advice of the two expert Coptologists and rejecting the article, the editors allowed King to assemble a team to conduct technical tests on the papyrus (analysis of materials, ink, and AMS radiocarbon testing) to try to “scientifically” prove its authenticity. Sabar’s investigations, however, reveal that the materials and ink teams were in fact headed by personal friends of King and Bagnall, conflicts of interest that were not revealed to the journal. But before letting HTR off the hook, Sabar points out that “the journal didn’t peer review the lab studies” (p. 297), and as far as I can tell, King’s revised article also seems not to have been given a second review. This seems to be a complete abdication of duty on the part of the editors of a major scholarly journal. Incidentally, these editors (Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson, both professors at Harvard Divinity School) seem to have ceased to be the editors of HTR at roughly the time the review copies of Veritas were mailed out.

The negative review from Emmel indicates that King made statements that they weren't qualified to make:

Emmel, without knowing King had written the article, had delicately questioned its author’s competence in Coptic. “This short fragment seems to contain four violations of basic Coptic grammar, only one of which was commented upon by the author,” Emmel wrote. “I think that the author’s knowledge of Coptic (and of Coptic manuscripts) is not deep enough for his her suspicions to have been aroused as they might have been, and perhaps should have been.” He also wondered how the author could call the ugly handwriting “the work of a proficient scribe.”

I asked Emmel whether King’s revisions had adequately addressed the questions his review had raised. He shook his head. “My impression was she was doing everything she could to rescue this thing as authentic,” he said. “She was so interested in having it as a hook for the very interesting work she does on the status of women in Christianity that she was not keen to let it go. My feeling is, You don’t need the hook: it’s an interesting subject without the papyrus. She could have written the bulk of her article without this text.” As for AnneMarie Luijendijk and Roger Bagnall, he said, “I think they all wanted to believe it. I think they found it exciting.”

The scariest part of this is the treatment of the only dissenting article in the HTR issue:

But King wanted Depuydt out. “The complication,” Levenson emailed Depuydt, “is that Karen now tells us that commitments made to the media and to the scientists involved require such strict confidentiality that your response cannot feasibly appear in the same issue but should instead wait until everything (online photos, full lab reports, etc.) has become public. The exact nature, origin and rationale of such commitments I don’t know.”

The advantages of delaying Depuydt’s piece were plain: King and Bagnall’s handpicked scientists would have the floor—and the headlines—to themselves when the journal published her article. If Depuydt’s critique appeared in the same issue, journalists would be apt to quote from it to balance their stories. If the journal postponed it to the next issue, three months later, few reporters would notice and fewer still would write about it. Levenson told Depuydt that joint publication was “preferable (though not to Karen, obviously), since it would give both the pro and the con on the issue and not allow the pro to monopolize the space of HTR, giving the false impression that we are endorsing it.” Levenson seemed to warn, however, that the matter was not entirely in his and his co-editor’s hands. Both were tenured professors at Harvard Divinity School—Levenson, a Jewish studies scholar, and Kevin Madigan, a historian of medieval Christianity. But their emails suggested that someone above their heads was calling the shots. Moreover, King was insisting on her conditions, even though she had yet to show the editors the scientific test results she expected the journal to publish. Levenson was unsure whether the journal could “shake free” from King’s “constraints,” he wrote. He and his co-editor very much wanted to send Depuydt copies of King’s article and scientific reports, so Depuydt would have time to respond, “but cannot, alas, now promise that we shall succeed.”

Depuydt was livid. The Review, he wrote to Levenson, had agreed “on more than one occasion” to publish his rebuttal in the same issue as King’s paper. If the journal reneged at the eleventh hour, at King’s urging, Depuydt said he would go public with what “will with certainty be interpreted by quite a few as an effort at suppression.” The idea that unexplained “commitments to the media and to the scientists” barred contemporaneous scholarly critique was unfathomable, Depuydt wrote. “We are, after all, in the truth business.”

“Kevin and I are in total agreement with your conditions and principles,” Levenson replied. But whether they would prevail did not appear to depend on them. “We are trying to have others farther up the chain of command than we to help with this.”

This act of suppression shows someone more concerned with control over the narrative than with the truth.

In a book with a lot of surprises, this passage shocked me more than anything.

[Peter Kirby]

Bullshit and postmodernist ideology (the shallow kind) are not the same thing as lies and falsehoods.

King pretends to be a historian of Christian antiquity. So much of what she is on the record saying and doing from 2012 till now about the “GJW” is activism and sensationalism, not historical scholarship. She went a long way confusing the public about the idea of historical fact in the study of religion, which is something I thought we all cared about.

I don't think I'm inclined to say that a bad historian with an agenda is, therefore, not a historian... but I guess that's beside the point. And you do make a good point.

In 2003 King specifically wanted new discoveries with Mary to be published, wildly suggesting that there's "stuff all around":

New papyrus discoveries were the only real hope for a more perfect Mary. “Maybe they’re sitting in somebody’s drawer somewhere,” King said in a videotaped 2003 talk in California’s wine country. “And they may not even know what they have.” In another talk available on DVD, the emcee urged the audience to send King any papyri they might have lying around. King then dangled naming rights. “Once they’re published,” King said, papyrus owners “can put their name on it, you know. ‘The Mary Smith Papyrus,’ okay? So if you know anybody like this, encourage them to do that. There is stuff all around.” To a con man in search of a scholar’s deepest desires, statements like these must have read like a personal invitation.

In 2006, King admits the shaky foundations of her research:

Even King seemed to know how suspect this line of reasoning was. Speaking to a friendly crowd at Harvard Divinity School in 2006, she allowed that “conversations” between texts might well be of her own imagining. “I put some of these texts in conversation with each other—they may have never been in conversation with each other, you know?” she said, with a short laugh. “Nobody in antiquity may have known to put them in conversation. So in some places, we’re playing with them. We’re creating conversations with these texts, for us to think with.” She described her method as “intellectual history in a new key.”

In 2012, King had the ability to investigate the fragment's owner but chose not to do so:

King’s public defense was that she’d promised the owner anonymity. But when Walter Fritz sent me a copy of a permissions form he said he brought to Harvard with his papyri in December 2011, I noticed something surprising: he left everything up to King. “Prof. King,” Fritz wrote, “is not obligated to identify the owner by name in connection with the publication of the papyrus fragments, but may do so.” When he made an informal request for anonymity five months later, he downplayed its significance. “Just say something like ‘private collection’ or ‘possession of a Florida private collector,’ ” he suggested in a May 2012 email. “The few that matter in this field do know who I am anyway.” The sly, self-contradictory argument was that hiding his identity was a courtesy of no import, because his collection was already known to all the important players in the manuscript world.

In 2013, with the HTR article postponed, King suddenly reversed position on whether the Gospel of Philip told a story about Jesus's physical relationship with Mary in an article in NTS: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/hand ... sAllowed=y

Indeed, for years, King, like her colleagues, was adamant that the gospel, like other early Christian writings, showed only a spiritual kinship. “There’s nothing particularly in these texts that would advocate a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary,” King told an audience in 2003. “If anything, the opposite: that their relationship was one of a disciple to a teacher. Okay? Always in that kind of way.” Now she realized how wrong she’d been, how wrong all scholars had been. A text depicting a married Jesus, it turned out, had been hiding in plain sight for decades.

What the editor of New Testament Studies (NTS) didn’t know was that King’s article wasn’t completely original. In fact, it was in large measure a cut-and-paste of the draft Harvard Theological Review (HTR) paper King published on a Harvard website the day of the Rome announcement—the paper, that is, that HTR had provisionally accepted but wasn’t publishing until the science came back. When I set the articles side by side, I noticed that King had taken nearly nine pages from the HTR article that dealt with the Gospel of Philip. Then, with minimal reworking, she dropped them into her new piece for NTS. The submission appeared to conflict with both journals’ posted editorial policies, which bar consideration of articles that have been submitted elsewhere. John Barclay, a British theologian who was NTS’s editor, told me he was unaware of the article’s origins or its substantial overlap with King’s publicly posted Gospel of Jesus’s Wife draft until I mentioned them in a November 2016 email. King never told him, despite a Cambridge University Press ethics policy requiring authors to “acknowledge and cite” parts of submitted articles that “overlap” with articles submitted or published elsewhere and “to provide the editor with a copy of any submitted manuscript that might contain overlapping or closely related content.” A 2019 update of the policy calls the practice “self-plagiarism.” King did not respond to my questions about the submissions.

When I took a finer-grained look at the two articles, I noticed telling word changes in some of the duplicate sentences. In the HTR draft she published online in 2012, King voiced a note of caution. The Greek and Coptic words for “companion” in Philip “could,” as one possibility, imply marriage and sex. Five months later, for NTS, she said those same words “often do” imply those things. In less than half a year, an ancient word’s sexual connotation had gone from a possibility to a frequent occurrence. But that wasn’t all. In her draft for HTR, she wrote, “It is therefore plausible to read this passage as a reference by Jesus to Mary Magdalene as ‘his lover.’ ” Five months later, for NTS, she wrote, “It is therefore plausible to read this passage as a reference by Jesus to Mary Magdalene as ‘his spouse.’ ” The reason for the switch from “lover” to “spouse” is unclear, because the footnotes, which exclusively cite the translation “lover,” are identical in both articles.

In 2016, King complains that the truth of forgery is getting in the way of telling a story that King wanted to tie to the text:

A FEW MONTHS AFTER MY Atlantic article and her change of mind about the papyrus’s authenticity, King complained to The Harvard Crimson that a “hot story of scandal” was detracting from the very real themes addressed by the papyrus’s text. “Focus on whether it’s a forgery or not is taking attention off the things that really matter,” she said, “which are the issues about authority, women’s roles, sexuality, and everything attached to them.”

In 2017, King is still interested in a story that said Jesus was married, after admitting that the fragment was probably fake:

Whether or not the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife was authentic, it had what King’s mentor, Bob Funk, called “operational effectiveness.” It felt true to many people’s experiences today. It was an entrée—a business card, in both size and function—to authentic but longer and more complicated texts, like the Gospel of Mary and the Diary of Perpetua, with which King earnestly wanted believers to engage. It was a parable with the power to improve lives. “What difference does it make if the story says Jesus was married or not?” King told Harvard Magazine in July 2017, more than a year after saying the Wife papyrus was a probable fake. “Well, it makes a big difference. It touches everything from people’s most intimate sense about their lives and their own sexuality to large institutional structures. It affects who gets to be in charge, who gets to preach and teach, who can be pure and holy. Should people be married or not? Can you be divorced or not? Is sexuality sinful, by definition? All of this depends on what kind of story you tell.”

King's writings are peppered with statements of disappointment with fact-based approaches:

“History,” she wrote elsewhere, “is not about truth” : King, What Is Gnosticism?, 235.
“My purpose is preeminently ethical” : Ibid., 245–46.
“The effect is rather to shift the criteria for the adequacy of truth claims away from objectivity to ethics.” : Ibid.
Facts are “little tyrants” : King, “Christianity Without a Canon.”
“fact fundamentalism” : King, “Back to the Future,” 86.
“One need never say no to a story, a song, a poem that gives life, heartens, teaches, or consoles, and need never fail to call it true” : King, “Factions, Variety, Diversity, Multiplicity,” 235.
“When the Jesus Seminar voted on the Gospel of Mary, they voted everything black. I was a little annoyed.”

While nobody's perfect, King was perhaps the perfect target for the forger to pick. Not only because of her research agenda but also because of her ability to disregard objectivity in favor of imagining a past more suitable to her on ethical grounds. And lastly, as someone purporting to be writing about history, she would still pay lip service to caring whether the fragment turned out to be authentic, writing about it in a way that would elevate its value as allegedly a part of ancient history... until it turns out to be fake, at which point the fact of forgery is distracting from "things that really matter."

The bar is so low in this field... I have probably grown a little numb to the amount of axe grinding. Surely we should be able to place that bar somewhere above what happened here and say that historians, if they want the public's trust at all, will need to do better.

[Paul the Uncertain]

Early on in the thread, the conversation seemed to me to be based on a presumption of good faith all around, as exhibited by imperfect humans, apologies for the redundancy in that last phrase. The additional considerations that have lately come up in the thread allege premeditated and calculated departures from announced editorial policy, authors' obligations and ordinary trade practice.

Those, then, are matters that are the publisher's (Cambridge University Press in this case) responsibility to address. Theirs ultimately is the conflict of interest policy, so theirs is the prerogative whether to complain if undisclosed personal friendships (whatever that turns out to mean in this case) violated that policy. Theirs ultimately are the peer review protocols, so theirs is the prerogative whether to complain if the scientific investigation or other material was published without any review.

And so it goes throughout the allegations on offer.

If the publisher finds that it has lost confidence in the performance of its editors, then the available remedies include retraction. Obviously. But the rationale for doing that would be a finding of extraordinary wrong-doing, not a journalist's disappointment that an academic publication wasn't what it never claimed to be, a journal of record for its field.

[Irish1975]

I've read the book, and my opinions have changed.