Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this book from Doubleday Books, via #Netgalley, free of charge, for review purposes on this blog. No compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it, all opinions are my own
From National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Ariel Sabar, the gripping true story of a sensational religious forgery and the scandal that shook Harvard.
Synopsis:
In 2012, Dr. Karen King, a star professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery at a scholarly conference just steps from the Vatican: She had found an ancient fragment of papyrus in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene "my wife." The tattered manuscript made international headlines. If early Christians believed Jesus was married, it would upend the 2,000-year history of the world's predominant faith, threatening not just the celibate, all-male priesthood but sacred teachings on marriage, sex and women's leadership. Biblical scholars were in an uproar, but King had impeccable credentials as a world-renowned authority on female figures in the lost Christian texts from Egypt known as the Gnostic gospels. "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife"--as she provocatively titled her discovery--was both a crowning career achievement and powerful proof for her arguments that Christianity from its start embraced alternative, and far more inclusive, voices.
As debates over the manuscript's authenticity raged, award-winning journalist Ariel Sabar set out to investigate a baffling mystery: where did this tiny scrap of papyrus come from? His search for answers is an international detective story--leading from the factory districts of Berlin to the former headquarters of the East German Stasi before winding up in rural Florida, where he discovered an internet pornographer with a prophetess wife, a fascination with the Pharaohs and a tortured relationship with the Catholic Church.
VERITAS is a tale of fierce intellectual rivalries at the highest levels of academia, a piercing psychological portrait of a disillusioned college dropout whose life had reached a breaking point, and a tragedy about a brilliant scholar handed a piece of scripture that embodied her greatest hopes for Christianity--but forced a reckoning with fundamental questions about the nature of truth and the line between reason and faith.
Review:
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!
About the Author:
ARIEL SABAR is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared inThe Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, The WashingtonPost, and many other publications. He is the author of My Father'sParadise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, which wonthe National Book Critics Circle Award.
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