Alin Suciu, Christian Askeland finds the "Smoking Gun", helpfully illustrated how the verso of the John fragment was clearly copied from Herbert Thompson, The Gospel of St. John According to the Earliest Coptic Manuscript (London: British School of Archaeology in Egypt, University College, 1924), line breaks and all.
What I would like to present here is the same kind of graphic illustrating how the recto of the John fragment copies from Thompson. Often in this kind of work, a graphic is worth a thousand blogged words because it enables one to see the point quickly and straightforwardly (click on the pic for a larger version):
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| Herbert Thompson's Gospel of St John, page 7 (left); Coptic John fragment recto (right), illustrating how the forger copied every second line of this text of John 5.26-30, line breaks and all |
Thompson's edition is based on the Cambridge Qau Codex and like Grondin's Interlinear Gospel of Thomas that appeared to have been used for the Jesus' Wife Fragment, it is available online. It is not clear from the ETANA website when the PDF was uploaded, but the properties of the PDF itself show that it was created in 2005 and modified in 2008, well within the time frame for the presentation of these fragments to Prof. Karen King.
The graphic above should speak for itself but essentially the point is this: the forger appears to have copied mechanically every other line from the Thompson edition. Every line break is the same. It is beyond reasonable doubt that this is a fake, and this conclusion means that the Jesus' Wife Fragment is a fake too.
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