THE DARK SIDE OF PAPYROLOGY
In my previous article, I outlined the wealth of information offered by ancient papyri. I concluded by saying that papyrology had a dirty secret: it is easy to produce an unrecognizable fake.
Some forgers do their work to make money; others have ideological goals. The buyers may be tourists but also scholars hoping to make a name for themselves with a spectacular discovery. A notorious example is the “Gospel of the Wife of Jesus”, which was immediately recognized as fake. Between 2018 and 2019, dozens of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls (fortunately not the main ones) were recognized as forgeries.
The large number of fakes is simple to explain. It is easy to manufacture something that is so deceptively real that it cannot be recognized in the lab. This is the dirty secret that every classicist and Biblical scholar learns about in their first year at university. It is something that is often laughed away, but that still constitutes a major
