Eight Words That Made Headlines Before They Were Checked

In September 2012 the Harvard historian Karen L. King stood before the International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome and presented a papyrus scrap containing a broken Coptic sentence she translated as including the words Jesus said to them, my wife. King was careful in how she framed it: not proof that Jesus had been married, she said, but evidence that some early Christians had debated the question, in a period when celibacy and marriage were both live and contested ideals within the young movement. The caution did not survive contact with the press. Global headlines ran with the more sensational version of the story within days, ahead of any independent scientific testing of the papyrus itself.

That order of operations, publicity before verification, turned out to matter enormously. King had received the fragment from an anonymous private owner who supplied a thin and, as later reporting would show, largely fabricated backstory for how he had acquired it. The Congress presentation and the scholarly article King prepared to accompany it treated the fragment's authenticity as an open question worth investigating rather than a settled fact, which was the responsible position to take. It was also, within a few years, revealed to have been the correct instinct, for reasons the fragment's owner had gone to considerable lengths to obscure.