One of my favorite courses in grad school was “Bibliography and Methods,” in which we learned about the scholarship of studying manuscripts, variant texts, printing evidence, textual editing, and other kinds of hard-core old-school literary research. One of the things you can do with this knowledge is detect forgeries.
Scholars have found that the much-hyped manuscript fragment that refers to Jesus having a wife consists basically of phrases from the already-known gnostic text known as the Gospel of Thomas. Not only that, it replicates a mistake in the transcription that is found only in a version posted on the internet!
See Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: Forgery Confirmed? » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog.
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