Fact-Checking the Torah -- no surprises here.

In 2016 I wrote about a religious controversy manufactured by the press to fill out their bucket list on covering religion. 

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2016/06/fact-checking-torah-wrapping-up-digs.html

I said there that the mass media publications did not cover radiocarbon data. Here is the first test. The dates, as the paper notes, are anomalous, so there was probably a contaminant. 

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/gojw/files/hodginssupplementalreport2013v4.pdf

At any rate, you can't write about "Jesus" 200 years before he supposedly lived. It doesn't even fit the dates of Yehuda ibn Perachiah's student who was called Yeshu ha-Notsri and lived in the time of King Alexander Jannai, the Hasmonean.

The next year a new test showed that the papyrus (separately from the ink) dated between 600 and 900 CE, that is, during the so-called dark ages. 

https://gospelofjesusswife.hds.harvard.edu/radiocarbon-dating

To save the concept invented by the mass media, which at least supports that Jesus was a real person, articles then suggested that the fragment was part of a copy of something of the right age. 

https://harvardmagazine.com/2014/04/jesus-wife-fragment-appears-real

The problem is, nobody has ever been able to establish a chain of custody because, as I said in the original post, nobody really knows who the people are whose names are associated with the "find". (See the More Questions section.)

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gospel-jesus-wife_n_5206932

Some of you who haven't read my blog are saying in disgust that the Talmud refers to the  Christian Jesus. I can send you my total study of that urban legend but I do cover it on the blog.  The Reader's Digest version is it was invented by a Jew hater who never read Talmud and the concept has been a tool of Jew haters ever since.

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2016/12/fact-checking-torah-pranaitis.html

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2016/12/fact-checking-torah-er-twins.html

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2016/12/fact-checking-torah-sources.html

I'm writing about this today because 11 people read that top blog entry in the last 24 hours and I thought I ought to tell the rest of the story about the papyrus. I found a long blog post by somebody else that goes through all the urban legends about Jesus, including the Da Vinci Code, but that writer did not give direct links to the science. I sent them to him (?) after I found them. Before I published this. 

I appreciate the interest and it gave me the impulse to do the rest of the research. Enjoy!