“I regret that the normal method of historical verification has been sacrificed to the perhaps necessary requirements of a journalistic scoop.” (Hugh Trevor-Roper on the "Hitler Diaries" saga)
Following Mark Goodacre's excellent series on the Gospel of Jesus Wife, presented by Karen King to the world in 2012, I decided to compare how it failed to learn the lessons from another academic being duped by fakers. Mark's blog is at:
https://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2020/08/interview-with-ariel-sabar-on-nt-pod.html
What is The Gospel of Jesus Wife?
The Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a papyrus fragment with Coptic text that includes the words, "Jesus said to them, 'my wife...'". The text received widespread attention when first publicized in 2012 for the implication that some early Christians believed that Jesus was married. The title was given to it by Karen King - it is not named. It is about the size of a credit card, so it really is fragmentary.
The Hitler Diaries
One of the most notorious cases of an academic being taken in by a fake was the case was the Hitler diaries.
The New Yorker gives a concise summary of the emergence of the Hitler diaries:
On April 25, 1983, Stern magazine—the German answer to Life—held a press conference to make a sensational announcement: their star reporter had discovered a trove of Hitler’s personal diaries, lost since a plane crash in 1945. Now Stern would begin publishing what he’d found.
Involved in this was Gerd Heidemann, a journalist in the contemporary history section of Stern, and Konrad Kujau, a small-time crook and prolific forger.
As the New Yorker notes:
While Heidemann continued to buy volumes (there were supposedly twenty-seven of them), two historians began a nearly-two-year-long project of verifying the diaries. (Unfortunately, they failed to notice that the history book they were using to check the diaries’ facts—Max Domarus’s anthology, “Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945—The Chronicle of a Dictatorship”—was the same one Kujau had copied swaths of information from, word for word.)
And there were even more obvious clues, had everyone not been so excited about the find:
Mistaking the Gothic “F” for an “A,” Kujau had accidentally labeled each notebook’s black cover “FH” instead of “AH,” a detail that failed to put anyone on alert
The Sunday Times turned to one of the greatest historians of his generation: Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of The Last Days of Hitler, and Hitler’s Table Talk, now elevated to the title of Lord Dacre of Glanton.
As the Guardian noted:
Trevor-Roper didn’t merely pronounce the Hitler diaries genuine. He also declared them “the most important historical discovery of the decade.” He maintained that they were, in an odd comparison, “a scoop of Watergate proportions.”
But he began to get doubts:
Lord Dacre, better known as Hugh Trevor-Roper, the historian and director of Times Newspapers, who originally said that the diaries were authentic and then backtracked, commented last night: “I don’t want to blame anyone. It is my fault."
“I should have refused to give an opinion so soon. I have been convinced for some time that they are forgeries.”
The fallout was significant. As the Independent noted:
The historian Trevor-Roper was left badly damaged. For all his glorious academic achievements, it was the Hitler Diaries for which he was remembered. When he died in 2003, the headline on The Independent’s obituary called him “The Hitler Diaries historian”.
So why did it happen? Why were so many historians and journalists initially eager to pronounce the diaries as genuine?
Giovanni di Lorenzo suggested that it was part of the spirit of that age:
“Today, if a colleague came into the newsroom and said, ‘I just bought the Friedrich the Second’s crutches, from Goering’s collection,’ I would advise him to seek psychological help. But here, you read, they went on a tour of Heidemann’s collection, and came back enraptured... But what you feel, reading this text, is that there was a fascination with this time period, and with this ‘Adolf Hitler’ who played a role in all their childhoods. This is a fascination that is unimaginable in my generation.”
In other words, there was a psychological and cultural predisposition for the experts to pronounce the diaries authentic. No one initially dug deeper either into provenance (which is when the whole hoax was finally exposed) or even into the obvious copying from other sources within the diary itself.
There was such an expectation to believe them genuine that, as Hugh Trevor-Roper regretfully noted in hindsight: “I regret that the normal method of historical verification has been sacrificed to the perhaps necessary requirements of a journalistic scoop.”
The Gospel of Jesus Wife.
Reading and listening to Mark Goodacre's podcasts, and reading the linked material, it seems as if something very similar had happened there, this "fascination with this time period". Obviously, with such a document much better prepared that the diaries - using old papyrus to present the material as genuine, it took longer, but the resulting investigation which proved it a fake followed similar lines (1) an examination of the text itself, and locating it as copying from a modern print of a Coptic text and (2) a detailed investigation into provenance.
There seems to have been an untimely rush to get the story out, and "The Gospel of Jesus Wife" was certainly a title designed for journalists rather than academics, and a world which had eagerly devoured "The Da Vinci Code", as well as its predecessor "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail". Like "The Hitler Diaries", this resonated with the zeitgeist of our times in which Mary Magdalene is often seen to have a special and intimate relationship with Jesus.
[In passing, I would say it is a shame that the other women in the New Testament are so often marginalised as a result of this focus on Mary Magdalene. "The Women around Jesus" by Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel [late wife of theologian Jurgen Moltmann] stands apart in looking at all of those.]
It is not the only occasion in which academia has gone for the snappy title aimed less at colleagues, but more at the public - I remember "The Myth of God Incarnate" as another example. A perusal of the book elicited the simple fact that different contributors had different understandings of what myth meant, and sometimes the same contributor used it differently in the same article. And it came out at a time when secularism seemed especially on the rise (as Harvey Cox's "The Secular City" suggested); again in keeping with the zeitgeist.
And like the Hitler diaries, matters of provenance took a back seat, and even carbon dating came later in the day - after the press announcement. Like Hugh Trevor-Roper with the diaries, Karen King seems to have initially been too eager to accept the fragment as genuine.
After all, she said initially the fragment dated to the 4th century but could be a copy of an early gospel from the 2nd century. But in fact one of the carbon-dating tests indicated that the papyrus went back olny as far as somewhere between the year 659 and 869 , much later than her estimate. And she seemed to have overlooked the fact that - as The Atlantic magazine pointed out -forgers have access to genuinely ancient papyrus: blank pieces are easily purchasable on the antiquities market, as are papyri containing unremarkable texts from which the ink can be scraped off.
And for four years, she defended the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” against scholars who argued it was a forgery. But finally she conceded that the papyrus—which she introduced to the world in 2012—is a probable fake.
A Late ApologyKaren King is a highly respected specialist in early Christianity whose work focuses on the Gnostics. But I can't help thinking that, like poor Hugh Trevor-Roper, this hoax will loom large in any future obituary, especially as unlike Trevor-Roper, she stoutly defended the papyrus for four years, where he began to have doubts within a very short space of time.
History Magazine reported on her grudging acceptance of the hoax:
“I don’t see anything to retract,” King told the Boston Globe, noting that her research paper had always allowed for the possibility of forgery. “I have always thought of scholarship as a conversation. So you put out your best thoughts, and then people…bring in new ideas or evidence. You go on.” She did tell the newspaper that the experience had taught her one thing. “I would never agree to do an anonymous thing again. Lesson learned.”
However, in contrast, Trevor-Roper actually admitted his mistake over the diaries in a much less strident manner:
"I believe that I too was badly treated, both by Stern, which misled me with false evidence of fact (which I could not doubt unless I was to accuse them of bad faith) and, to some extent, by The Times, which did not allow me the conditions which I had at first been promised to check the material (i.e. a typed transcript of the German text on which I was to make a written report). However, I have refused to make any complaint or excuse on these grounds, for I recognise that I should have been firm and have refused to commit myself in the circumstances which actually obtained. So, when I first doubted the authenticity of the material, I decided to take the whole blame on myself-and I must admit that The Times and the Sunday Times were very happy to place it there."
The Failure of the Scientific Method
Karl Popper said of the scientific method, that you start with a hypothesis and you try to falsify it. The hypothesis was that the documents were genuine, but unfortunately there was not enough work done on trying to subject it to critical scrutiny.
Ariel Sabar notes that when she revealed her fragment, King refused to allow a (negative) response to be published alongside her article in Harvard Theological Review and that when she released her story to the press she did so on the condition that they only speak to pre-approved scholars
The same mistake can be seen in the methodology of the translation of the Gospel of Judas, which appears to have made significant errors, changing the meaning. April D. Deconick showed in detail how this changed the whole understanding of the text commented:
"National Geographic wanted an exclusive. So it required its scholars to sign nondisclosure statements, to not discuss the text with other experts before publication. The best scholarship is done when life-sized photos of each page of a new manuscript are published before a translation, allowing experts worldwide to share information as they independently work through the text."
That happened later with the Gospel of Jesus Wife, and at least the photos were available online and in high definition for scholars to work on. The working together of different scholars to track down major problems with its authenticity shows, I think, that an open scientific method in historical study works extremely well - but also that when it is curtailed, all kinds of mistakes are made.
To give an analogy, it is like proof reading - one person can easily misread a text, but more sets of eyes there are, the greater the chance of catching any misprint. Equally if something is authentic, a robust critical scrutiny is more likely to establish that than trying to restrict scrutiny to a narrower field of views, especially if chosen to defray criticism. There really is a wisdom of the crowd, if it is a clever and diverse crowd.
Like Michael Fish's notorious weather forecast, when academics make some mistakes, they are doomed to have those follow them, like an albatross hung around their neck. Both Hugh Trevor-Roper and Karen King seem to have rushed into authentication, without enough care, without making sure that the documents could not be forgeries.
As Ariel Sabar, author of Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, says: “In speaking to scholars, my sense is that her reputation has taken a hit"
See also:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-curious-case-of-jesuss-wife/382227
https://nypost.com/2020/08/15/how-a-mystery-note-proving-jesus-was-wed-led-to-harvard-profs-disgrace/
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/opinion/02iht-edeconick.1.8558749.html
Postscript:
While Hugh Trevor-Roper will be forever overshadowed by "The Hitler Diaries", in terms of a contemporary British conman he appears to have been remarkably more critical. The take of how he came to doubt and then pursue British impostor Robert Parkin Peters is outlined in "The Professor and the Parson: A Story of Desire, Deceit, and Defrocking" by Adam Sisman which I would highly recommend.
Summary at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/books/review/professor-parson-adam-sisman.html
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