Veritas: A conversation with author Ariel Sabar about a bizarre academic scandal at Harvard
Greetings,
We’re Glad to invite you to the Next Meeting in our “Virtues and Vices in the Academia” Series:
Veritas: A conversation with author Ariel Sabar about a bizarre academic scandal at Harvard, Monday 11th October 2021; 19.00 to 20.00 Israel time; 12.00 PM EDT (noon); 18.00 CET;
Professors Yitzhak Hen and David Levi-Faur will interview Ariel about his book and the larger ramifications for academic ethics. Zoom link here
In 2012, Dr. Karen King, a star religion professor at Harvard, announced a breathtaking discovery just steps from the Vatican: she’d found an ancient scrap of papyrus in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene “my wife.” The mysterious manuscript, which King provocatively titled “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” had the power to topple the Roman Catholic Church. It threatened not just the all-male priesthood, but centuries of sacred teachings on marriage, sex, and women’s leadership, much of it premised on the hallowed tradition of a celibate Jesus. Award-winning journalist Ariel Sabar covered King’s announcement in Rome but left with a question that no one seemed able to answer: Where in the world did this history-making papyrus come from? Sabar’s dogged sleuthing led from the halls of Harvard Divinity School to the former headquarters of the East German Stasi before landing on the trail of a Florida man with an unbelievable past. Could a motorcycle-riding pornographer with a fake Egyptology degree and a prophetess wife have set in motion one of the greatest hoaxes of the century? Sabar’s critically acclaimed new book, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, is a stirring expose of how elite professors used fraudulent evidence, failed peer review, and multiple undisclosed conflicts of interest to promote a sensational forgery as a long-lost piece of the Bible.
Ariel Sabar is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Harper’s, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He has reported from Africa, Europe, Scandinavia, and the Middle East. His debut book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in American letters. Veritas was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best true-crime book of the year and for the Investigative Reporters & Editors Book Award. Sabar graduated magna cum laude from Brown University and lives with his family in Washington, DC. For more details, visit his website at www.arielsabar.com.
Professor Yitzhak Hen is an historian of western Europe and the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on the social, cultural and intellectual history of the post-Roman Barbarian kingdoms of the early medieval West; Western Liturgy; early medieval Latin Paleography and Codicology.
Virtues and Vices in the Academia meeting series examines Various aspects of our personal and professional ethics in an era of Health, economic and technological crises and of new opportunities to improve our personal and professional ethics. The series provides an opportunity to think about our identity and about our personal and professional integrity. The series may also trigger Change and Renewal.
The motivation for the Series is, of course, Good, and decent citizenship in academia and society, and I hope it’ll help the participants and me to understand ourselves better and to give professional and personal ethics a more important place in our daily lives.
The target audience for this series is the younger generation (members of Maavarim), the present generation, and the founding generation.
The series is in constant design, flexible and evolving and I welcome suggestions for additional themes and guests. I would like to thank the participants and over ten colleagues who served as informal consultants in the preparation of the series.
Regular updates on the activity of the series can be obtained through registration to Maavarim network but also through the “electronic calendar of the series’” This calendar contains the zoom addresses for meetings and makes it easier to manage time and viewing. All sessions of Maavarim are available on our YouTube channel that you are welcome to join. The playlist of the series is also at your disposal.
With regards,
Prof’ David Levi-Faur,
On Behalf of maavarim’s Participants