An interesting view of the shadow side of academia and expert opinions. A fun, critical read that will deepen your commitment to questioning authority.

This was a RIDE. I'm kind of surprised that I didn't hear about this "gospel" when I was in high school but at the same time it makes sense knowing the school I was at. For whatever reason, I did find that the first quarter-ish of the book dragged. I think in part because of how it was laying out the basic "plot" of the story and wasn't giving a lot of the con. But once we got underway, the twists and turns and inadvertant complicity was astonishing. If you're a fan of true crime that's not murder/Christian academic discourse, I'd recommend picking this up.

On September 18, 2012, in Rome near the Vatican, Prof. Karen King of the Harvard University Divinity School proclaimed the finding of a scrap of parchment that she dubbed, just for "reference purposes," the Gospel of Jesus's Wife. Veritas explores what led up to this presentation and the fallout afterwards.

Ariel Sabar covered the Rome conference for Smithsonian Magazine in 2012. He later wrote an article on the results of physical examination of the parchment in The Atlantic in 2016. He has continued to dig into this story resulting in Veritas which walks the reader though the story in five acts. Act I is Discovery with the presentation and early reception of the parchment. Act II is Doubt where people outside Karen King's group raise questions on the dating of the manuscript and what she claims it means. Act III is Proofs, proof of forgery in regard to an accompanying parchment and then proof in regard to the Gospel of Jesus's Wife. Act IV is The Stranger, an investigation into Walter Fritz who provided Prof. King the parchment. Sabar investigates Fritz's background, history, and possible motives for the forgery. Act V is The Downturned Book of Revelations which is an inquiry into why Prof. King was so eager to proclaim the forgery as genuine.

In Veritas, Ariel Sabar provides a detailed investigation of the whole Gospel of Jesus's Wife controversy from the beginning until now. If you have an interest in early Biblical texts, forgery, and/or academic dishonesty, Veritas would be a good read for you.

I've always been fond of religion as a subject, and this non-fiction definitely did not disappoint. The title really tells all the background it needs to - a con man tried to pass off what he suggested was the first copies of the Gospel of Jesus's wife, to a renowned Harvard professor. And in reading the book, it sounds like the professor decided to overlook a lot of red flags and stake her fame on this amazing discovery (the Gospel, which she tried to maintain was not a fraud).

The author of this book went above and beyond. Even when a particular fact became glaringly not possible, the author would travel wherever needed to check every detail involved to make the verification (or lack of) even more concrete. A lot of the background in the trafficking of old religious texts and artifacts was quite interesting.

This book also makes me want to re-read Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. As suggested in Veritas, the author notes several similarities between the tale woven by the con man and the Harvard professor, and the 'facts' in the popular fiction book. The timing between the publication and controversy of The DaVinci Code and the reveal of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife was suspiciously close.

In a nutshell, nothing about this book can be summed up in a nutshell. If religion, religious texts, and the big business behind it all is a curious topic to you, this book is definitely worth reading. I'd give this 4 out of 5 stars, and still honestly feel like there was as lot I didn't thoroughly understand without more background in religion, religious texts, The DaVinci Code, and Harvard's famous divinity school.

I love a good con story! THis one is wild and the story is detailed, rich & I think most true crime fans would enjoy this book!

Oh, Veritas! I don't recall hearing this story before I read the book so I was all in on every page. I experienced things as they were presented to the audience. Imagine my surprise at the document presenting Mary Magdalene as Jesus' wife being declared legitimate. I think I told everyone I knew...then I had to go back later and tell them I finished the book and it ended differently than I thought. So, maybe don't go telling everyone as soon as you read it?

One wish: I wish that the story moved along a bit quicker. It's achingly slow. I feel like the book could have been 75% as long and had been even better with the extra cut out.

Overall, I really liked the book - even though I found myself skimming and scanning every once in awhile.

This book fits into the category of “bizarre true stories”. History, faith, and “truth” are tangled in a complicated knot, and Ariel Sabar works to untangle this complicated story with verifiable facts and by searching for motive. Just the way this nonfiction narrative is structured to give you information and keep you interested was enough to have me wanting to read more.

Note: Part of this story involves fetishised porn sites and so the language is quite lewd in some parts as the writer quotes and/or describes what is included on those sites.

This book is like a modern day detective story with the author being the detective going down rabbit holes and blind alleys. It is hard to believe that it is all true. It is also hard to believe that a distinguished Harvard professor could be fooled by a third rate pornagrapher flim-flam man, but yet it is true. What I really appreciated about the book is how in the end he explained the why of what happened and it is a story in itself. Just be prepared--this is a very long book and tends sometimes to go off in tangents, although Mr. Sabar always has a reason he goes off on the tangents. The whole story is hard to believe, but true!!

***I was granted an ARC of this via Netgalley from the publisher.***

The search for truth is an important one. However, waht happens if our search for truth becomes clouded by our own biases and what we want to be true because 'the end justifies the means'? In the book, Vertias: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus' Wife by Ariel Sabar, the author takes a look at one such situation. When a Harvard professor is approached by an anonymous individual claiming to have legitimate old papyrus that he leads her to believe has proof that an old Christian text referred to Jesus having a wife, its a discovery she is eager to announce. However, under scrutiny from her peers it turns out to be an elaborate forgery. Sabar takes us down the rabbit hole of his investigation into the forgery that feels like at times a mystery novel with all the twists and turns in the story. His profile of the con man is one of the most interesting sections of the book exposing the myriad of lies the man had weaved about himself while still portraying him as a human and not a monster. And he does a good job of questioning the motives of the Harvard professor in question, the questionable things she did up to and after revealing the papyrus to the world and throughout her career. It is these penetrating questions that show us how what one may want to be true can corrupt one's search for what is actually true. This is one of the best non-fiction books that I read all year. It will grab you and have you glued to its pages as the story becomes clearer through all the twists and turns that are uncovered throughout the investigation. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who likes history, archeology, or true crime.

Rating: 5/5 stars. Would highly recommend to a friend.

A common aphorism says “If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything.” It has gained enough traction that a version of it even appears in the smash hit Hamilton, when the title character asks, “If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?” But there is a corollary to the observation, one that isn’t as poetic and that I just made up myself, but is just as true: “If you stand for something, you’ll fall for something that confirms your preconceptions.” That is the message of the Ariel Sabar’s terrific new book Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.
In 2012, a distinguished professor at Harvard University announced the discovery of a scrap of papyrus she called “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”. On this papyrus, it seemed that it recounted Jesus calling Mary Magdalene “my wife”. Dr. Karen King claimed that this discovery could change thousands of years of church teaching on marriage and even women. The only problem? It was a fake.
Sabar’s just-released book Veritas recounts every single step of how a forged scrap of papyrus made worldwide news and, after years, was confirmed as a hoax. Among the central questions of the book: How did a Harvard professor fall for what some people considered an obvious forgery? How does one go about proving that a document is a forgery? And how do we know the history we think is true is actually true? (I wish there was a complete answer to this last question, but I always enjoy thinking about it nonetheless.)
Just to get it out of the way first, I disagreed with some fact statements made by Sabar while giving background to Dr. Karen King’s work with the Gnostic Gospels. While I could be interpreting him wrong, Sabar seems to accept King’s pronouncements that the Gnostic Gospels (The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, etc.) should be considered on an equal playing field as the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). But many biblical scholars give evidence to the contrary. N.T. Wright, for instance, contends that “the Gospels of the Bible were written in the first century (around AD 70–90). On the other hand, the Gnostic Gospels were written in the second century AD.” He writes: “The canonical gospels were being read and quoted as carrying authority in the early and middle second century, whereas we do not even hear of the non-canonical ones until the middle or end of that century” (Wright, N. T. (2006) Judas and the gospel of Jesus: Have we missed the truth about Christianity? Grand Rapids, MI; p. 77).
I, as a layman, do not know enough about the source work here to make a case for Wright’s view (a view that is very common among biblical scholars), but one more piece of evidence for the coherence of canonical Scripture is in another canonical book itself. Talking about Paul’s letters, Peter writes in 2 Peter 3:16: “He speaks about these things in all his letters. There are some matters that are hard to understand. The untaught and unstable will twist them to their own destruction, as they also do with the rest of the Scriptures.” This is additional evidence that the canonical books (like Paul’s letters) were already accepted as Scripture in the time they were written. I felt that Sabar should have offered this orthodox Christian view of the canon in addition to King’s view, but I liked the book so much that I digress. This complaint is confined to the beginning chapters of the book, and the rest of it is pretty fair to orthodox Christians.
The strength of Sabar’s book lies in its investigation of Dr. King, the papyrus, and the con man behind all of it. The detail in which he writes about the process of uncovering the “wife papyrus” as a forgery is just remarkable. He takes the reader through every turn of the narrative, constructing the scaffolding on top of which you can eventually see the story in its entirety. The most impressive section of the book consists of the first-person interactions Sabar has with the con man, whom I will not name here to preserve the mystery of the book. Sabar flies to Germany and back more than once to investigate the details behind the story of the papyrus and unearth the truth behind its forgery. The narrative is so meticulously researched and so appropriately layered that a hypothetical reader opening it up to the middle would have no idea what was going on. However, reading from beginning to end (as most people do), you understand every turn as he relays it and I, for one, was thrilled at every moment.
Sabar is appropriately critical of Dr. King, as it becomes increasingly obvious that her research into noncanonical gospels is loaded with confirmation bias, only accepting information that confirms her pre-formed opinions and disregarding contradictory evidence. This is admittedly common among all people, but it becomes an especially fitting description of Dr. King’s scholarship, as she seems to disregard truth (“veritas”, the Latin motto on the Harvard shield of arms) to form a narrative of her own. Sabar writes:
King argued that (The Gospel of) Mary was a contemporary of some of the twenty-seven books that would make the New Testament, and not — as most scholars believed — a late second-century reaction to them. It was a daringly original argument. No one had interpreted Mary this way, King wrote, “until now.”
I understand the importance of new interpretations of history, as a lot of them prove to also be correct interpretations. However, these new interpretations are usually based on new historical evidence. If everyone else, using the same evidence as you, agrees on a certain interpretation, you should tread carefully when putting forward a new interpretation.
The “wife papyrus” provided King with the evidence she thought she needed for others to accept her interpretation. She even seems to have had qualms about the legitimacy of the papyrus for more than a year before she decided to accept and study it, and Sabar provides evidence for the assertion that she may have decided to pursue it only to save her school of religion at Harvard.
It gets worse, and Sabar calls her on it:
In a major theoretical work published the same year as her Mary Magdalene book, King argued that historians’ first order of business should be to abandon “the association between truth and chronology.” The idea that people closer in time to an event make better witnesses — a bedrock of police work, news reporting and traditional history — was suspect. That certain gospels were composed nearer to Jesus’s day, she writes, doesn’t in itself make them a clearer window into the views of his earliest followers. “The new physics, from relativity to subatomic particle studies, is in the process of reconceptualizing the Western construction of time,” she explained. “This new form of time is discontinuous and unpatterned; it is not serious, real, or true.” Which was partly why the history she writes was less concerned with any objective past than with “enlarging one’s imaginative universe” and adding texture to the way people think about religion. If this more enlightened view of history prevailed, she wrote, “then 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.”
She called facts “little tyrants” and accused people who put too much stock in them of “fact fundamentalism.”
Her “goal” was to “relativize” scientific objectivity — “to shift the criteria for the adequacy of truth claims away from objectivity to ethics.” In other words, a thing was true not if it was real; it was true if — in King’s estimation — it was a moral good.
Throughout Veritas, Sabar compares the drama of the “wife papyrus” to the effects that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code had on serious scholarship, and if you are familiar with The Da Vinci Code it is obvious that the themes would overlap significantly. In my favorite section of the book, Sabar relays a much more responsible way to handle history and truth:
“For most people ‘True’ still means historically true,” the biblical scholar Stephen Patterson told colleagues in the aftermath of The Da Vinci Code. “That is why, when ideology goes in search of ultimate validation, it is not enough to reach for religion only. It needs history, too. And so the artist supplies it: bowdlerized, filched, fudged or just plain made-up — — in the murky nether world of historical fiction the distinction between the history and the fiction is easily lost. It matters not. The sympathetic reader knows how it really went down. Can’t prove it. Don’t need to. Wink. “All of this has taken historians of the Bible a little by surprise,” Patterson added. “While [the academic fashion for] postmodern doubt seems well advised in moderate doses, if The Da Vinci Code passes for ‘meticulously researched’ history today, perhaps we could set aside our theoretical misgivings for a moment and do what history we can.”
Veritas is both a thrilling mystery and an effective argument for responsibility in scholarship, in both cases reflecting an unyielding desire to reach the truth as a classic journalist would: attempting to leave biases aside, reporting what is discovered no matter the cost to your preconceptions. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Christianity, scholarship, research, journalism, or simply stories of hoaxes. I hope a lot of people pick it up and see intense journalism and truth-seeking at work.

I received a review copy of Veritas courtesy of Doubleday and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

"'Truth' was just a language game, won by the player who told -- and sold -- the best story." -Ariel Sabar

The book's title, Veritas, is Latin for truth. It also happens to be Harvard University's motto. Author Ariel Sabar aims for nothing less as he doggedly chronicles the story behind the story. In 2012, esteemed Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King allowed herself to be double-duped -- by both a con man and her own agenda. "Her ideological commitments were choreographing her practice of history. The story came first; the dates managed after." 
Sabar had already gone deep on the subject of the Jesus's Wife papyrus for Smithsonian magazine, following up with an article in The Atlantic about the sketchy artifact and the Florida pornographer who baited King with it. In this true crime story, Sabar lets no stone go unturned. It makes for a dry read, and asks for a patient reader. But as patient readers will come to learn, provenance matters. Dr. Karen King's history, her history with the papyrus, Harvard Divinity School's history, the strange, strange history of the forger: It all adds up to a brilliant journalistic achievement that occasionally reads like an IRL Da Vinci Code.

Not too much to say here, this was pretty dry and not that exciting. I thought it would be a cool story about how someone lied to a well known Harvard professor about Mary Magdalene being Jesus's wife. Instead, this book jumped around a lot going into the Gospel of Mary, how the Gospel was discovered, and then back and forth into Dr. Karen King and the medical issues she was dealing with which may have caused her to not be hyper vigilant. I liked the historical interludes into this Gospel, other Gospels, and also into the some pop-cultural areas with Sabar going into Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code." Other than that, the book was a slog after a while and it took me several days to just parse through this.

"Veritas" is about Dr. Karen King, Historian of Religion, who is currently the Hollis Professor of Divinity, and what led Dr. King to declare that the random finding of a papyrus that someone claimed to be the Gospel of Jesus's wife, and how it came out that it was forged. The author, Ariel Sabor, also includes his investigation into the background on this forgery. In 2012, Dr. King announced the finding of the papyrus outside the Vatican which of course then led to a lot of discussion and potential consequences among the catholic Church to wonder what did it say about their religion if it came out that Jesus had been married.

I can't say much about this cause when this all came out in 2012 I was all of 32 year's old and had started a new job. I think I recall hearing about this on the nightly news and wondering if Dan's Brown novel was really nonfiction and went about my day. I just didn't find it very believable, but what did I know. Apparently though, this was not real and "Veritas" breaks down the very things that led to this document being declared real when it was in fact a forgery.

There are some things about this book I liked. One, I liked that we get into how Mary Magdalene was incorrectly called a prostitute and was forever seen that way going forward after Pope Gregory the First in 591 combined Mary with another Biblical figure and forever ruined her name. I also liked that we got more details about Mary and how she was probably a wealthy woman and how she was an apostle of Jesus too.

Around the 15 percent mark though I have to say that I started to become bored, around the 50 percent mark my eyes were glazing over. I was just glad to be done with this one. The flow was not great and the book needed a tighter edit in my opinion.

The ending of the book of course shows that the manuscript or whatever you want to call it was a forgery. And of course it seems to be asking why did Dr. King go along with this, what benefited her when it seems like she had to know it was a forgery. I don't know what to say, this book was weird to me in a way. I think Sabar tried to break up the story by inserting historical facts and pointing out what was fact or fiction, but the whole thing just read like a mess to me after a while.

This is an interesting read both for history scholar and Christian scholars. The author doesn't just look at what happened, and how a forgery fooled one of the best minds at Harvard, but also the circumstances that helped to make everyone involved ripe for being fooled. It's an mind blowing how such intelleigent people could just ignore common sense, in the lure of seeing something they wanted to see in a fragment, an then when exposed as a forgery, blame others for their refusals to see sense. It makes you look at the higher levels of acadamia with a jaded eye, and see how notierity and money can affect decisions that shouldn't be made. It's also an unique behind the scenes look at the changes made within Harvard University itself. For Christians, it's also a look at how popular theories evolved in the past 20 years, and the lack of solid construct behind them. It's not a quick read- this is one to go slow and understand all the subtexts.It may make you rethink a lot of your own learned ideas!

Ariel Sabar is an investigative journalist who applied his formidable skills to digging into the “Gospel of Jesus Wife” fragment that Professor Karen King of Harvard Divinity School announced as authoritative proof that Jesus was married. This is a thoroughly documented endeavor that takes a deep dive into the details. This is not for everyone and it’s not casual reading but it is very interesting. This was a hoax of the highest order played out against a scholar who may not have been as innocent in this as she claimed. The author makes a clear case for King’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the questions of provenance in order to have a document that proved a point important to her. The author doesn’t make a weak accusation on that point again, it’s thoroughly researched and documented.

#Veritas #NetGalley

As a Catholic, I found this book incredibly interesting and well written, as I had heard about this whole con but didn’t know much beyond the headlines. All I can say is...wow! I couldn’t believe, at times, that this was a true story. So much scandal at so many levels!! I know the description of an academic/religious book might now seem exciting but I could NOT put this one down.

5 out of 5 stars.

Way too long and in depth for my interests. To a reader who wants the whole story including back story on everything related to the story, I must say everything is included and then some. I basically wanted to know whether the fragment of parchment was true or not. period. I was not looking for the history so I ended up skimming most and skipping a lot to find out the answer.

Thank you NetGalley for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest opinion.

Veritas initially appears to be a story of a hoax pulled on Harvard Professor Karen King, deceiving her into thinking she had been given access to Gnostic scripture in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene his wife. This book, however, is much more to that thanks to the diligent research and excellent writing by author Ariel Sabar. Before reading this book, I knew the Gnostic Gospels existed, but not much about them. As Sabar tells the story of how the papyrus was presented to King, he weaves in the history of the Gnostic Gospels, not just what they are, but how they have been regarded historically by the Catholic Church and others. This alone was fascinating, detailed enough to be informative without being bogged down in minutia.
In addition to the narrative of the hoax, Sabar was able to identify the person behind it and uncover the methods, the personal history and reasonable alternatives for the motives.
This book is incredibly well researched, and all the pieces come together well which is tribute to Sabar's journalistic skills and style. Perhaps the best aspect of the writing is the author's restraint. I think I know what he thinks of Professor King, and what he thinks the motives were of the man who started the hoax, but he doesn't share any conclusions that aren't backed up by facts or statements. When it comes to motives, he lets the reader make that last leap. I think this speaks well of his style and puts more credibility in all the facts that he does present and can back up. This is not a book of conjecture, it is a book of research, facts and a very gripping narrative.
Thank you to NetGalley and DoubleDay for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I didn’t know what to think about this book going on. I hadn’t heard the story when it was in the media so I didn’t know how it “ended”. I enjoyed this book because the information was new to me. I liked how King was presented as is, nothing added to suit a story. Sabar does a good job of telling the story but remaining objective, giving readers something to hold their interest while providing actual information. This book read like a mystery novel.

Very readable non-fiction. I would recommend this book to people who like fictional mysteries as a segue into read non-fiction.

I find it hard to sum up my thoughts about "Veritas."

Ariel Sabar's book is seemingly the story of an encounter between a con man and a Harvard professor over a papyrus later known as "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife." One might expect the book to be a bit of a detective story, seeking to answer the fundamental question of whether the papyrus is a forgery. And yes, Sabar addresses that (and goes to great lengths to answer that question), but he pushes himself to grapple with questions far beyond that, from investigating the entire life of the suspected forger, to the significance of women's role within the early church, to the intra-institutional history of Harvard itself, to the disciplinary conflict between history and theologians, to the final question of scholarship's relationship with the truth. Throughout the book, Sabar proves to be an exceptional researcher, a comprehensive investigator, a stunningly beautiful writer, and above all, an incredibly thoughtful writer.

In short: Very, very well done. If I can put forward a guess (and I'm not the type to do so), I would expect to see this on a lot of award lists this year.