If you’re not interested in the textual history of the Christian Bible, then the details of this story about the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” papyrus will probably not thrill you. Let me give you the thumbnail version.
- A Harvard professor came up with an apparently ancient papyrus that has Jesus talking about his wife.
- Some authorities immediately offered the opinion that this papyrus was fake.
- Others argued based on different factors that it was genuine.
- Eventually, a clever fellow from Cambridge pretty well proved that since the papyrus was in the same handwriting as a known forgery that it had to be a forgery.
- Then Ariel Sabar, a journalist from The Atlantic declared that it was a forgery because the source of the item was a shady character.
Hershel Shanks offers this comment:
What disturbs me about Sabar’s piece is not his conclusion—I do believe the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is a forgery—but that he reached his “probable” conclusion without even considering scholarship on the subject. For him it is apparently irrelevant; the only relevant question is Walter Fritz’s character. That scholarship had already declared the text a forgery on substantive grounds seems irrelevant.
Shanks did not explain it this way, but he’s reacting to the journalist’s careless use of the ad hominem fallacy. Walter Fritz provided the papyrus. Walter Fritz was a well known shady character. Therefore, the papyrus is a fake.
My father used to buy pricy antiques–items that could have been fakes–from a guy who had been in prison. Did my dad carefully check that the antiques were genuine? Yes. Did he give this seller keys to the house? No. But my father did not immediately assume that this man who had been incarcerated must be a crook.
Ariel Sabar should have known better than to employ the ad hominem. Now I’ll never trust anything he says in the future. Oh, but that would be my own version of the ad hominem.