Several months ago, the media was breathing heavily over an alleged "Gospel of Jesus Wife". Within a few days, evangelical scholars were eviscerating the fragment and the credibility of the text.
This from Justin Taylor:
Jesus’ Wife Is Now Dead: The Role of Evangelical Scholars
An interesting point from Peter Williams, warden of Tyndale House in Cambridge, England, reflecting on the increasing expertise and scholarship of evangelicals related to the technical analysis of ancient texts, with the Jesus Wife fragment-forgery as a test case:
. . . To her credit, from the beginning Dr. King released high resolution photos and the technical information she had. This enabled quick scrutiny. Had the person responsible for the fake been better at his or her job the story could have had yet more negative impact. As it was, it’s noteworthy that British and British-educated scholars like Watson, Bernhard, and Goodacre mentioned above, along with evangelicals Simon Gathercole and Christian Askeland, played a significant role in exposing the problems with the manuscript and claims about it on blogs and in the media. Andrew Brown of The Guardian was commendably quick to notice and publish the doubts being raised.
It is worth reflecting on the progress here. Evangelicals now make up a significant proportion of those with the technical expertise to tackle a subject like this, and some of them had an intellectual firepower on the subject considerably exceeding that of the Harvard professor. I was contacted by Christians in touch with the media and was able to refer them to Simon Gathercole, a leading evangelical expert on apocryphal gospels. The rapid and informed response by Christians probably went a considerable way to deflating the story.
It is now well known by many who are not believers that there is a vigorous conspiracy-theory industry propagandising against the Christian faith. If Christians are seen as standing on history while others follow spin, even what seems like adverse publicity will ultimately end up glorifying God’s name.
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