What's astounding is all the red flags that were there from the beginning: the unusual shape and appearance of the fragment itself; the bad grammar; the mix of dialects; the fact that "my wife" was incomplete and didn't necessarily refer to an actual woman, let alone the Mary mentioned elsewhere, let alone Mary Magdalene; the lack of transparency over the origins of the fragment; and Prof. King's own reluctance to let others look at photographs, let alone the original. But it was catnip to Harvard Divinity School, looking for relevancy, and the feminists, scholars, and theologians unhappy with the Church's understanding of Jesus, and the press who always want something guaranteed to generate views.
King may have ultimately been fooled, a victim of confirmation bias and her own desperate desire for evidence of her pet theories. But Sabar also suggests something even worse -- that King knew almost from the beginning it was fraudulent, and she was willing to ignore inconvenient facts in favor of what she felt was the truth. As her mentor explained, the value of a (hi)story lies "not in whether it is true but in whether it feels true." King herself, by training a historian not a theologian, would argue that historical time was a "Western construction" and "not serious, real, or true"; therefore what does it matter if the papyrus is dated to the 8th century and the ink to the 21st? The fragment is true because it is good, not because it is accurate.
The irony is that even if one buys her relativistic approach to history, the very words of the fragment itself don't come close to saying what she wanted them to say. But it didn't matter to her; only her idiosyncratic beliefs about early Christianity did. That such an educated, gifted scholar would think this way is all the more disturbing given recent societal trends. She is far from the only American of recent years to reject demonstrable facts in favor of ideological "truth."
