Posted on 05/02/2014 9:16:57 AM PDT by Kartographer
Then last week the story began to crumble faster than an ancient papyrus exposed in the windy Sudan. Mr. Askeland found, among the online links that Harvard used as part of its publicity push, images of another fragment, of the Gospel of John, that turned out to share many similaritiesincluding the handwriting, ink and writing instrument usedwith the "wife" fragment. The Gospel of John text, he discovered, had been directly copied from a 1924 publication.
"Two factors immediately indicated that this was a forgery," Mr. Askeland tells me. "First, the fragment shared the same line breaks as the 1924 publication. Second, the fragment contained a peculiar dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before the sixth century." Ms. King had done two radiometric tests, he noted, and "concluded that the papyrus plants used for this fragment had been harvested in the seventh to ninth centuries." In other words, the fragment that came from the same material as the "Jesus' wife" fragment was written in a dialect that didn't exist when the papyrus it appears on was made.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Great point.
Thanks; it gets overlooked a lot because it isn’t PC...
The truth is a hard thing. Everybody wants justice good and hard when their ox is gored, but everybody wants mercy and plenty of it when their ox did the goring.
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