Debunking the 'Gospel of Jesus's Wife'

In 2012, Karen L. King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, traveled to Rome to deliver a conference presentation on a compelling historical artifact that had recently come into her possession. It was a piece of papyrus, about the size of a business card, inscribed with several lines of Egyptian Coptic and culminating in the phrase, "Jesus said to them, My wife." King shared preliminary news of the find with a handful of media outlets, including Smithsonian magazine, which dispatched a reporter to investigate. That journalist, Ariel Sabar, would spend the next few years uncovering a story far stranger and more provocative than the artifact itself.