Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife

From National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Ariel Sabar, the gripping true story of a sensational religious forgery and the scandal that shook Harvard.

In 2012, a discovery announced by Harvard religious studies professor Dr. Karen King threatened to shake the very foundations of the Christian faith: an unearthed papyrus in which Jesus referred to Mary Magdalene as "my wife." The find seemed to indicate that millennia of church doctrine on marriage, celibacy, and women's leadership had been unfounded. A revolution of the faith seemed at hand. But when award-winning journalist Ariel Sabar set out to confirm the authenticity of the document in question, he found himself in the midst of a fascinating international detective story. From Berlin's factory districts to the former headquarters of the East German Stasi, Sabar winds up in rural Florida on the trail of an Internet pornographer with a prophetess wife, a fascination with the Pharaohs, and a tortured relationship with the Catholic Church. Veritas is a true crime story of the strangest kind, about an ambitious, respected scholar poised to change the face of Christianity and the disillusioned college dropout whose scheme forced a reckoning with fundamental questions about the nature of truth and the line between reason and faith.