In 2012, Karen King, a respected scholar at Harvard Divinity School, presented a papyrus fragment bearing text that implied Jesus was married. King staked her reputation on the authenticity of what she called “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” Test after test failed to prove the papyrus was a forgery, but the journalist Ariel Sabar still smelled something fishy. He put the fragment through a new test, one that examined its chain of ownership. Sabar joins us Tuesday to share the unbelievable tale he uncovered.

Ariel Sabar is a journalist and the author of My Father’s Paradise [Amazon|Indiebound], which won a 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. His article “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife” appears in the August/July issue of The Atlantic magazine. Read it on The Atlantic's web site.

FROM THE ARCHIVE: In 2004, Professor Karen King was one of Doug's guests in a conversation about Mary Magdalene. Listen here