Did a North Port resident hoax Harvard with 'Jesus’s Wife' papyrus?

NORTH PORT – A 2,000-year-old controversy over whether Jesus had a bride, a journalist with the persistence of Victor Hugo’s Inspector Javert, and a black eye for one of the world’s most revered academic institutions have left a North Port resident at the center of this storm vowing legal action – once he’s absolved of forgery by the Egyptian government.

“I’ve been advised by my attorney not to say much right now,” says Walter Fritz, 55, in a brief phone interview. “I haven’t read the book and I will not read it. But we’re not going to let this stand.”

The book – “Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” by Ariel Sabar – went to press last month and has been greeted by roaring silence from both Harvard Divinity School and its preeminent scholar of early Christianity. Neither Karen King, the first woman awarded the university’s prestigious, 299-year-old Hollis Professorship of Divinity, nor Harvard, have reacted to Sabar’s latest reporting. Neither responded to the Herald-Tribune’s queries for clarification.

If Dan Brown’s wildly popular 2003 bestseller “The Da Vinci Code” triggered worldwide interest in Mary Magdalene’s speculated conjugal role in the life of Jesus Christ, “Veritas” is its antithesis – with an even more salacious twist. Sabar’s deconstruction of Brown’s fictitious alternative history/mystery/thriller leads to the doorstep of one of the Internet’s pioneering pornographers in Walter Fritz.

Unveiling a now-defunct website in 2003 touting the skills of “America’s #1 Slut Wife,” Fritz posted performance videos of former spouse Jenny Seemore (stage name) as she engaged multiple partners in a body of work Sabar describes as “prodigious.” Jenny would later reinvent herself, according to “Veritas,” as a quasi-mystical online persona whose automatic-writing exercises channeled messages from angels.

“So, she has this transformation into a prophetess at a time when her husband is trying to get Karen King interested in a papyrus about sex and Jesus, and the whole thing is like ... well,” says Sabar, “there were times in the story I could scarcely believe what I was seeing.”

At the core of the weirdness is a business card-sized scrap of papyrus that threatened to rock the foundations of Christianity in 2012. That’s when King, at a seminar in Rome, created an international furor by announcing the discovery of what she called “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” She extrapolated the title from sentence fragments written in ancient Coptic, which included the words “Jesus said to them, my wife,” “She is able to be my disciple,” “As for me, I dwell with her in order to.” The alleged context: a discussion among the disciples about the worthiness of a woman named Mariam, or Mary.

On assignment for Smithsonian magazine, Sabar attended King’s presentation, which was held across the street from the Vatican. Of all the outstanding questions, the most important was the provenance of the text: Where did it come from? Ultimately, that investigation pointed to North Port and Walter Fritz, whom Sabar calls “one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met.”

Born in West Germany, Fritz moved to Florida years ago and went into a Venice auto parts business with fellow German transplant Hans-Ulrich Laukamp. According to Fritz, Laukamp purchased “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” bundled with five other related Coptic papyri, in Potsdam, East Germany, in 1963. Fritz, in turn, told Sabar he purchased the entire package of Coptic texts for $1,500 in 1999.

Fritz, who first approached King about the papyri in a series of initially anonymous emails in 2010, also included a photocopied note attributed to one Peter Munro, an Egyptologist at Free University in Berlin. Munro stated that an academic colleague, Gerhard Fecht, allegedly identified one of the papyri as part of the New Testament’s Gospel of John. Fecht died in 2006. Munro died in 2009. Laukamp died in 2002.

Despite grave reservations over its authenticity, Harvard’s King agreed to take a look at Fritz’s material in 2011. Weeks before making headlines in Rome the following year, in anticipation of the publicity windfall, Fritz registered the domain gospelofjesuswife.com.

In the aftermath of King’s 2012 announcement, Sabar launched a full-court press on Fritz’s background, which required trips to Europe and conversations with former acquaintances and colleagues in Germany. Fritz himself expresses astonishment over Sabar’s tenacity.

“He even approached someone I haven’t even seen since the fifth grade,” Fritz tells the Herald-Tribune. “I said, How did you do that?' And he said, ‘It’s because I’m such a great journalist.’”

Sabar, who disputes that quote, would discover Fritz had worn a number of hats before coming to the United States – tour guide at Berlin’s Egyptian Museum, director of the Stasi Museum, also in Berlin, and student at Free University. After settling in North Port, as Sabar would write in a 2016 examination of the “Jesus’s Wife” text for The Atlantic magazine, Fritz “on paper looked like an unremarkable local” who wrote letters to the editor at the North Port Sun, belonged to the North Port Early Bird Kiwanis Club, and haggled with city commissioners in public meetings.

But with the 2008 recession dragging into 2010, Sabar discovered Fritz had put his house on the market and, finding no buyers at $349,000, relisted at $229,000. On July 8, 2010, Fritz wrote a newspaper letter urging the city to share the financial pain of its residents through staff layoffs and pay cuts of 35%. The next day, he sent his first email to Karen King. Ever since, Fritz has maintained that, if the “Jesus’s Wife” papyrus is a forgery, he had nothing to do with it.

While scouring Fritz’s applications for jobs with the Sarasota County Schools, however, Sabar says he “hit paydirt.” With an application in 2013, Fritz had submitted a 1993 master's degree diploma in Egyptology from Free University.

“Fritz never graduated – he washed out of the program and he’d be the first to admit it,” says Sabar. “He can no longer claim he’s not a forger or, at least, that he doesn’t work side by side with forgers because now, in the record, there’s a diploma he never earned. The professors’ names at the bottom of the diploma were in the college of modern European studies, which has nothing to do with Egyptology.”

Furthermore, Sabar writes in “Veritas,” he double-checked with the quality-control company that vouched for the veracity of Fritz’s diploma. Fritz had included a letter, from Educated Choices LLC of Palm Beach Gardens, with his job applications to the Sarasota school system.

“When I talked to (Educated Choices),” Sabar says, “they were like, ‘Wow, we didn’t check, it just looked authentic and we rubber-stamped it.’”

Apparently, Harvard fell into the same trap. Coptic scholars began pushing back against grammatical errors and suspicious lettering in the text even before King went public with her revelations in Rome; within days of her announcement, the Vatican declared it “an inept forgery.”

Nevertheless, despite continuing criticism within academic circles, King pressed forward. And in 2014, the Harvard Theological Review published her advocacy for the text as genuine.

Sabar’s subsequent spadework would identify previously undisclosed personal conflicts of interests among two scientists – at Columbia University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – King commissioned to lab-test the papyrus. He also located, named, and interviewed two anonymous peer reviewers had issued scalding critiques of King's research in warning Harvard against publication.

Sabar’s 2016 expose in The Atlantic, which blew even more holes in the papyrus’ validity, prompted King to reverse course. “It tips the balance towards forgery,” she conceded in a followup story. “Your article has helped me see that provenance can be investigated.

“I had no idea about this guy (Fritz), obviously,” King went on. “He lied to me.”

Fritz declines to directly address the resume he submitted to the school district, other than to say “This is something that will be part of my lawsuit, too.” But he claims vindication, for Harvard as well as himself, is right around the corner.

In the summer of 2019, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities contacted the U.S. State Department with questions about recovering fragments of its national heritage, if in fact that’s what the “Jesus’s Wife” papyrus represents. The Department of Homeland Security visited Harvard, where the material was being safeguarded and, with Fritz’s permission, took possession of the controversy.

“I have never asked anything for this, and I will gladly give it back to them,” Fritz says. “I’m going to wait and see how this pans out, and when the piece is returned to Egypt, we’ll have proof that this is not a forgery and we’ll see how it holds up in court.”

Fritz accuses Sabar of being hired – by someone he refuses to name – to do a “hit piece” on the papyrus because of the threat it poses to Christianity’s seminal doctrines on clerical celibacy and the role of women in the church. Sabar dismisses the accusation and says Egypt’s interest in Fritz’s material is strictly pro forma.

“Egypt has not requested it back yet, and it’s still under investigation, but it really doesn’t matter,” Sabar says. “Even if the papyrus came from Egypt, the top scholars are unanimous – the fragment and the ‘Gospel of John’ are fakes.”

The consensus appears to be the texts were largely cut-and-pasted atop papyrus samples whose median carbon-dating age is 741 A.D., not the fourth century, when the canonical Gospels were adopted by the church. King had accommodated the discrepancy by theorizing the papyrus was a copy of an earlier original text.

In “Veritas,” Fritz told Sabar he had been molested by a Catholic priest while growing up in Germany, and Sabar confirmed Fritz’s complaints were on file with the church. Sabar cites payback as a possible motivating factor in the potential creation of a new gospel.

The takeaway from this eight-year odyssey, says Sabar, is larger than Walter Fritz and ancient writing.

“It’s about all the shortcuts and corner-cutting that went on at one of the world’s richest and most powerful universities to get this tiny piece of papyrus into the public eye,” he says. “You can’t tell whether something is authentic or not unless you do a very thorough investigation of provenance.

“If you haven’t bent over backwards to thoroughly investigate that, if all your information comes from a single source, then you’re in trouble.”

Stephen Emmel, the Yale-trained expert on Gnostic manuscripts at Germany’s University of Munster who called the “Jesus’s Wife” papyrus a “clumsy and labored” forgery for the Harvard Theological Review, advanced his own theory for King’s otherwise gifted career of compelling insights into biblical history.

“My impression was she was doing everything she could to rescue this thing as authentic,” Emmel tells Sabar in the book. “She was so interested in having it as a hook for the very interesting work she does on the status of women in Christianity that she was not keen to let it go ... She could have written the bulk of her article without this text.”

Karen King’s webpage at Harvard has a brief reference to her current status: “On leave.”