Porn Producer Scammed Harvard Professor Over the Wife of Jesus

Crazy story that's written by Candida Moss in The Daily Beast.

Here's some extracts from the article:

In September 2012, late in the evening of the penultimate day of the 10th International Congress on Coptic Studies, academic luminary and Harvard professor Karen King announced the discovery of a previously unknown early Christian text that she called the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife (GJW). King’s discovery made headlines around the world because one line of the fragment read “Jesus said to them, ‘my wife…’” and then broke off. Was Jesus referring to his wife?...

The only journalist in the room for King’s talk in 2012 was Ariel Sabar, then a freelancer for Smithsonian Magazine. Though the story was initially delegated to him by an editor, for Sabar his interviews with King and trip to Rome were the beginning of a seven-year journey that culminates with the publication of his fascinating new book, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife...

In the end though, it was Sabar himself who would drive the final nail into the coffin. The provenance information that King had received was forged. Years of meticulous research and persistent interview requests eventually brought Sabar to the door of Walter Fritz, a 50-year-old Floridian who had emigrated to the U.S. from Germany. Fritz, a failed wannabe Egyptologist, originally hailed from Bavaria, where he had been raised by a single mother in a small town. Three weeks before King’s announcement in 2012, Sabar discovered, Fritz had registered the domain gospelofjesuswife.com
online using his personal information. Digging deeper, things started to take an unexpected turn.

This was not the only domain name owned by Walter Fritz.

Spoiler: Porn site & content of site mentioned

For roughly a decade, beginning in 2003, he and his wife had hosted and run a “hotwife”-themed pornography site that advertised his wife as “America’s #1 Slut Wife.” (A hotwife, a carefully crafted Google search will tell you, is a woman who engages in sexual acts with men other than her husband and often in front of him).

Fritz, it turned out, was the owner of the papyrus and almost certainly the forger of the writing on it. He had taken some basic Coptic, had had access to real ancient papyrus, and had a sex-positive anti-Catholic bias. In what sounds like the punchline of an internet game, “Florida Man Runs Pornography Business and Forges Christian Gospel.”