Dr. King first presented her blockbuster paper on what she called the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” at a conference of Coptic scholars in Rome in September 2012. The faded scrap, smaller than a business card, contained two phrases that upended traditional Christian beliefs in its eight lines of text on the front side: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ” and “she will be able to be my disciple.” Dr. King said it was dated to the fourth century.

In an adjacent room at the conference, a young American named Christian Askeland says he was presenting his paper on a Coptic version of the Book of Revelation. After buzzing with colleagues over the Jesus’ Wife papyrus, Dr. Askeland returned to Germany, where he is an assistant research professor at Protestant University Wuppertal, and began examining the images that Dr. King had posted on the Internet in the hope that other scholars would indeed weigh in.

Dr. Askeland is an evangelical Christian who is also affiliated with Indiana Wesleyan University, an evangelical college in Marion, Ind., and the Green Scholars Initiative. That organization was founded by the Christian owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of arts and crafts stores to study a collection of biblical artifacts amassed by the family for display in a Bible museum they plan to build in Washington.

However, Dr. Askeland said his doubts about the Jesus’ Wife fragment were not prompted by any concerns about the unorthodox content because “there are many gospels, many texts, that say all kinds of things about Jesus.” Instead, it was the appearance of the fragment — the handwriting, the ink, the letter forms: “Whoever wrote it had different ways of writing the same letter,” he said.

During 2013 and into 2014, as a steady rumble of skeptics kept posting concerns about grammatical anomalies in the Jesus’ Wife fragment on the Internet, Dr. King escorted the fragment, encased in glass, to the University of Arizona, Columbia University, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for testing on the papyrus and ink.