ficino wrote:This blogger concludes that the fragment is a forgery because another fragment, also in Coptic, is from the same pen and seems to be cribbed from a known MS.:
http://alinsuciu.com/
I agree that this little tid-bit seems to support the idea of forgery, but only if his opininon (although it appears it is a considered opinion by a qualified expert) is correct that the text was written in the same hand, and with the exact same ink and even the same writing instrument.
However, while the "hand" of this fragment of the Gospel of John does look remarkably similar to the Jesus' Wife fragment, the ink of the Jesus' Wife fragment has been tested and the papyrus carbon dated, which is something NOT done with the Gospel of John fragment he compares it to, at least as far as I know.
The fact that the ends of
each line of this new fragment of the Gospel of John duplicates exactly the ends of
every other line of a previously known manuscript of the gospel of John, a phenomenon unlikely to have occurred by pure chance, does suggest that the former copied from the latter. Instead of the two columns per page of the latter known example there would have to have been, in the new fragment, a single wider column on each page where each line exactly represented precisely the amount of the text from two lines of the narrower columns.
I wonder, though, whether this might not represent a copying exercise by a student scribe. The dialect of Coptic used would have been long out of use by the carbon date of the Jesus' Wife fragment, which would support the idea of it being a copying exercise ("Now Boy, copy this text exactly as it appears in this manuscript before you, but preserve the stichometry by a ratio of two to one, since we get paid by the line copied, not by line written").
The author of the blog also assumes that the fragment of the Gospel of John which was purchased with the Jesus' Wife fragment will also date similarly if tested. However, without testing of the Gospel of John fragment, I don't like making such generalizations. If the Gospel of John fragment was also tested along with the Jesus' Wife fragment, then I am babbling. I have not followed this thing especially closely, not having anything invested in it emotionally or intellectually.
But for the moment let me assume they are both of 8th century provenance and came from the same scribe. That still does not rule out two copying exercises carried out by the same (student?) scribe, all ending up in a dump or as binding materials for a codex. We just had the extraordinary luck of the exemplar of the Gospel of John fragment having already been discovered and catalogued. We did not have this same luck with the Jesus' Wife exemplar.
DCH