Karen King

Karen King central scholarly argument is that the word Gnosticism obscures more than it describes. The category was assembled from the writings of the heresiologists, the church fathers who catalogued opinions they were opposing, and it groups together texts and communities that share far less than the label implies while cutting them off from the wider Christian world they belonged to. Her book on the subject traces how the modern category was built, and shows that the questions historians have asked about origins, whether it came from Iran, from Judaism, from Greek philosophy, are questions the category itself generates rather than questions the evidence poses.

The methodological point behind it is larger. Orthodoxy and heresy are the outcome of a long contest, not the starting positions of the people who fought it, and writing the history of early Christianity in those terms means adopting the conclusions of one side as the framework of the account. A similar argument was made in the same period by Michael Allen Williams, and the two together changed how the Nag Hammadi material is discussed. Her work on the Gospel of Mary belongs to the same programme, reading a text with a woman as an authoritative teacher as evidence about the range of second century Christian argument rather than as a curiosity.

In 2012 she announced a small Coptic papyrus fragment in which Jesus is made to say the words my wife, and named it after that phrase. Her stated position from the first announcement was that the fragment could not show that Jesus was married, because a text of that date is evidence about the people who wrote it, and that what it might show was that some early Christians held such a view. Scientific testing of the ink and the material followed and was consistent with antiquity.

What decided the case was not the laboratory. Over the next four years journalists and scholars traced the ownership history of the fragment to a modern holder, and the documents offered in support of an earlier provenance did not hold up. King said publicly that the evidence pointed to forgery. The episode is worth recording for a reason that has nothing to do with any individual: a physical test can tell you the age of a material and cannot tell you when the writing was put on it, whereas a document trail showing where an object has been is very difficult to fabricate convincingly. Provenance decides manuscript cases, and the atlas treats an unprovenanced text with that in mind.

A further consequence followed for the discipline rather than for any individual. Journals and museums tightened their expectations about unprovenanced material afterwards, and papyrology in particular has spent the years since arguing about whether a text with no ownership history should be published at all, given that publication itself adds value to an object that may have been looted or manufactured. The fragment is now cited more often in that argument than in any discussion of early Christian marriage.