More on the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife from Le Donne and Moss

More stuff on the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife from Candida Moss and Anthony Le Donne.

Moss has a good sum up:

In the absence of clear evidence, the debate is still where it was over a year ago. On the one hand, tests designed to prove that the text is a forgery failed to establish its inauthenticity. On the other hand, the grammatical errors and similarities to the Gospel of Thomas are still a problem. A modern forger with the right materials could still have made this text. In some ways GJW is actually more interesting if it is a modern forgery. As an authentic text it offers late evidence of a debate about the role of women in the church. That’s something that scholars already knew about. As tantalizing as the potential reference to Jesus’s wife is, the phrase ‘my wife’ doesn’t tell us anything about Jesus himself. But if this is a modern forgery, then it raises lots of interesting questions about how forgeries are made, by whom, and for what purposes. Someone would have gone to great lengths to place this shocking manuscript in the hands of one of the foremost scholars of Early Christianity alive today. Did they do it for the money, in the hopes of bringing down established Christianity, or just for fun? Now that’s a conspiracy worth looking into. Dibs on the film rights, you guys.