Wednesday, October 7, 2020

The Gospel Truth

 

 


The motto of Harvard University, to be found  boldly divided into trinitarian folios and mounted on an heraldic shield,  is VERITAS, Latin for “truth”.  You are sure to have seen it at the bottom of the title page of a learned book, or, if not there, on a keyring, beer mug, or sweatshirt.  It is also the title of a terrific new book* by Ariel Sabar that my erudite son-in-law Zvi just sent me as a gift.  Zvi is a broad-gauged historian, a Sinologist, an expert among other things on Islam in China.  In his spare time he is also what you might call a Bible buff, a student of the literature and archaeology of antique Judaism in the time of Jesus.  Some of his more colorful fellow Bible buffs play roles in the book Veritas, to which I shall return after a brief but necessary digression into scholarly autobiography and an embarrassing confession I have not before made public.

 

            The subject of my doctoral dissertation was the iconography—the pictorial illustrations—of medieval manuscripts of a popular medieval poem, The Romance of the Rose.  Most of its many surviving manuscripts date from the fourteenth century, the period of the height of its popularity.  There are many illustrations of aristocratic women, some allegorical and some not.  A common feature of attire of aristocratic French women was the tippet—a decorative band of cloth, often a long one, that hung from the sleeve.  I had never before seen such a thing.  The human mind, puzzled by what is unknown and unfamiliar, strives mightily to crowbar the phenomena into categories of the known and the familiar.  Looking really hard, I did not see strips of cloth but rods of wood attached by a ringed clasp to the arm near the elbow: medieval elbow crutches!  But how to account for such a large population of crippled women?  Probably bone degeneration caused by dietary insufficiency.

 


 


            This “discovery” was entirely peripheral to my interest in the poem, and I had no ideological commitment to its validity.  But for about three weeks I truly believed it, and continued to “see” wooden rods, until somebody told me about tippets.  Fortunately, I had not mentioned my breakthrough in medical history to anyone.  It was an interior drama of the mind.  Having established my own residence in a glass house, I can now start hurling stones.  Veritas is about what can happen when a scholar does have an ideological commitment to a wacky idea and does want to tell people all about it.

 

            The wacky idea was that Jesus had a wife, probably Mary Magdalene, and that there was written evidence of this not merely in the Da Vinci Code but in a very ancient bible-like text, a newly discovered fragment of a Gnostic gospel henceforth to be known as the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (GJW in academy-speak).  The scholar with ideological commitments was Professor Karen King, formerly a professor of divinity at Harvard.  If you do want to read a four-hundred-page book about feminist biblical scholarship, hot wives, child molestation, con artists, and the curious sociology of south Florida—as I sincerely hope you do—stop reading this essay immediately, as it could spoil a great experience awaiting you in Veritas.  But for the unfortunate few who lack the time or inclination I shall persist.  Prepare yourself for a breathless ride.

 

            There are three human actors in this drama, and one on paper.  The two human antagonists are an erudite and famous and feisty feminist scholar at Harvard and a seedy German con man and pornographer.  The hero is Ariel Sabar, the author, who styles himself a journalist, but obviously is actually the world’s Numero Uno Private Eye.  The paper player (GJW) is a fragmentary text on a piece of papyrus of about five square inches.  You can read the whole thing in less than thirty seconds—provided, of course, that you can read garbled Coptic fluently, as a surprising number of people in this book seem to be able to do.  The fourth line of GJW is supposed to say: Jesus said unto them my wifeI think it’s in Lolita that the narrator, Humbert Humbert, recalls having read a French mystery novel in which the clues were printed in italics. The scribe of GJW was similarly accommodating.  Karen King, the Harvard Professor, biblical scholar, ewig Weibliche  of the radical Jesus Seminar, and author of an imaginative book about Mary Magdalene, was intrigued to hear this, for she was already of the belief that women were far more important in organizing primitive Christianity than you would know from reading the canonical gospels.  Those gospels had first been spun and then given privileged status by a bunch of patriarchal geezers whose sex phobias encouraged misogyny, the suppression of women, and the establishment of an exclusively male and celibate clerical caste.  Speaking of gospels, in this tale Professor King  was in the classical lingo of the confidence game the mark.  The con man was a brilliant but reptilian German lowlife named (no kidding) Fritz.  Raised in the south of (West) Germany, Mr. Fritz had a difficult and perhaps traumatic childhood.  Later he started on a graduate degree in Egyptology in Berlin but dropped out before achieving it.  He reappears sometime after German reunification as the director of a new museum dedicated to the Stasi, the old East German Secret Police.  His directorship was brief, as he was lousy at his job though possibly adept at stealing treasures he was ostensibly guarding.  The next act finds him in south Florida, where he may be an officer in a German tool-making company, and may be the proprietor of a Potemkin gallery dealing in Egyptian art and antiquities, but certainly is the entrepreneur of a robust pornography outfit called HotWives.  HotWives is more or less what its name suggests, and the hottest wife, the superstar of most of the videos, is Mrs. Fritz—porn name, Jenny Seemore.  And, oh, yes: using linguistic expertise gleaned in graduate school, and a piece of ancient papyrus gleaned from God knows where, Mr. Fritz forged the fragment GJW and drew it to the attention of a famous Harvard professor who, he had excellent reason to believe, might be willing to authenticate it.  Eventually she did, against her own first instinct and the view of numerous peers whose shared perception of the fraud differed mainly in their esthetic judgement of the degree of the amateurishness of its fakery.  The coming-out party was  a biblical conference in Rome.  That was the place to stick it to the Pope and all that Virgin Birth, clerical celibacy, male priesthood stuff!  She then published it to academic drumrolls in the prestigious Harvard Theological Review. 

 


            It turned out to be a debacle, of course, leaving not only Professor King but various other Harvard worthies (its PR departments, the editors of the Theological Review) with most of a large, drippy omelet smeared across their faces.  But in the end traditional Christians dodged the bullet of having to think about a sexually active Jesus Christ.  I suppose I am not a traditional Christian, because that idea in the abstract bothers me not at all.  My medieval Franciscans spent endless folios in meditating upon Jesus’s Passion and its agonies.  Giving a little time to some imagined ecstasy might seem only fair were there any better evidence than that concocted by an erudite pornographer.  There isn’t.

 

            Sabar tells this story in amazingly documented detail, leaving a reader marveling at his forensic skills.  The first two thirds of the book can be read as a kind of exotic academic comedy, but in its last movement it becomes quite somber.  The author does not hesitate to detail the long path of evasion, obfuscation, professional impropriety, and actual prevarication Karen King traveled in order to overcome her own disbelief in a pseudo-antique fraud highly convenient to supporters of certain political and cultural arguments of today.  Nor does Sabar stop there.  He goes “heavy” of a sudden.  He wonders aloud how well a postmodern historiography for which facts are the malleable ornaments rather than the solid foundation of the intellectual enterprise actually can serve the endlessly  restated mission of our educational institutions, particularly the oldest and most famous of them, one proclaiming in wrought iron its allegiance to Veritas.  It turns out that “seeing is believing”  is  fake news.  Very often it works the other way around.  We see what we already believe, want to believe, or need to believe.  That’s how  one sees prosthetic devices instead of haute couture.

 

*Ariel Sabar, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife (Doubleday: New York, 2020), pp. 401