Over the last eight years or so of
blogging about the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, I have occasionally thought about posting a piece of fun speculation. Every time I think about it, I think "Shall I post this?" and then I think, "Nah; it's stupid. Move on." To be fair, I often think that about a lot of things.
I probably would have forgotten all about it if it were not for one of the journalists covering the Jesus's Wife story seriously wondering if there might be something in it when I told her about it for a laugh. Even so, they wisely did not publish on something so speculative. Andrew Bernhard and I have talked about this occasionally, and after chatting about it this morning, I have decided there is nothing to lose at this point in airing my fun speculation.
So I preface this with the comment: this speculation is probably ridiculous!
But here's the thing. The Urban Dictionary allows people to go in and create words and definitions of the kind of everyday slang that would never find its way into proper dictionaries. Back in September 2012, I was wondering how easy it would be for a forger to find the Coptic phrase tahime ("my wife") on the internet given that it would not have been possible for the forger to find it in Coptic Thomas. So I googled the transliterated tahime and found very little except this, in Urban Dictionary:
Tahime
She is a girl that is very unique, cool ,calm, and a little bit loud. She has a temper. She is so pretty and very beautiful. She always has little self-confidence because she doesn't feel accepted or pretty. She thinks nobody likes her. That isnt [sic] true. She is loved by everyone! She is a sensitive girl and tries to make everyone happy. She doesn't bitch at people. SHE IS SOOO FUNNY!!! She is true and not fake. She will be your best friend till forever. She sometimes may act a little cocky and nerdy. She is so random at times but it will make you laugh. She loves friends.
"Hey that girl is so Tahime." "You mean she's unique?" "HELL YEAH BRO! "
I wouldn't have given it a second look but for a couple of things. "She is true and not fake" made me wonder, and then there is the author / date stamp:
by goo goo gaa gaa 456 December 07, 2011
Karen King's article gave the date of the owner's visit to Harvard, to hand over the fragment, as "December 2011", the same month that this entry was added to Urban Dictionary by "goo goo gaa gaa 456". Sabar dates the visit to December 14, 2011, within a week of the entry appearing.
There is no evidence that I can find anywhere that
Tahime has any such meaning. Absolutely nobody uses it that way. And in so far as
Tahime crops up, it is as a male name (e.g. the character "Tahime Sanders" in
Life of a King), and not a female slang term.
It is, of course, highly likely to be a coincidence. This is just some random entry by who-knows-who? about who-knows-who? in what is probably an in-joke that will never be known to others.
Yet one of the things that made me dismiss the possibility of a link every time I considered it was that I couldn't imagine the forger of the fragment being so playful, and imitating, in a rather irritating way, how he imagines young people speak. I was working on the assumption that his motivation was financial given all the talk about selling the manuscripts in King's article. But now, having read Sabar's Veritas, I can't help wondering again if Fritz might just have done this in another attempt at humour. There are so many playful elements that Sabar reveals, including Fritz's love of Monty Python, and his use of "abdicate" in his interlinear, that I am now wondering if it is really quite as ridiculous as I had first thought that this too could be a playful addition by the forger himself.
This blog post will self-destruct as soon as someone points out the flaw in the comments below!
* "The current owner contacted Karen L. King via email requesting that she look at the fragment to determine its content. The owner then delivered the papyrus by hand to Harvard Divinity School in December, 2011, and generously gave permission to publish" (Karen King, "Jesus said to them . . . " draft, September 17 2012, p. 3).
