That’s a reference to a lecture (video here).

It isn’t logically sound. Not only does it ignore all the evidence of fictionalization and gross improbability in the Gospels [and Acts] (markers against a tale having an honest source), but it ignores the fact that a lot of fiction has the very properties he thinks indicate eyewitness sourcing. Thus, Bayesian reasoning takes his argument down quickly. (And that’s even assuming we grant all his premises, and one could challenge many of those as well.)

re the usual gospels:
Have you encountered Peter Williams (tyndale House) :New Evidences the Gospels were Based on Eyewitness Accounts?

Thanks
A

Provenance breaks in Egyptian history date to the Old Kingdom, since tombs were already being looted THEN. The artifacts of the tomb robbers are now themselves valuable archaeological evidence!

I don’t know if there are Old Kingdom-era forgeries, but there are Middle Kingdom era forgeries (which are also now valuable historical artifacts in their own right!)

Kind of extraordinary to think about, really.

Most dictionaries also have a few made-up words added to them in order to catch plagiarists who blindly copy their contents.

If only that were true. A scandalously huge number of papyri and manuscripts have no provenance, and that will probably always be the case. So that is no longer a reliable criterion for forgery. See my remarks above.

I don’t think anyone at Harvard was involved in the forgery. They were just the marks.

On possible motives, see above.

Grammatical errors as such are not uncommon (depending on the quality of the scribal product); it’s grammatical errors that just happen to exactly match typos in a modern text that is very improbable.

As to motive, it’s often unfathomable. Money, perhaps. But it could be like computer hackers who do it just for the thrill, or to create a headache for the Vatican and its celibacy policy (Morton’s Secret Gospel of Mark is deemed a forgery by most, who suspect it has ideological purposes along similar lines, to embarrass the Vatican’s anti-gay policy), or to prime the market for something else (keep your eye out for new books etc. that would benefit from the publicity this fragment has already created).

The motives can often be clever. It could also be a test run for a planned forgery of greater potential value (e.g., possibly a forger is being tested by his client by trying to pass off something relatively minor like this to prove he can do it, or to smoke out the methods of detection so they can be thwarted better when the real prize gets made, a forgery of more substantial significance).

Typically, though, it’s money in some way. For example, the James ossuary forgery was probably a money scheme, but the real dollars were probably in exhibit fees on museum tours, not the sale of the artifact per se, which owners can collect even if it’s declared a forgery, since once it’s famous, people will pay to see it anyway. And in that case the most-likely-forger’s legal team has done a good tobacco-company-style job of obscuring the certainty it’s a forgery anyway; pall of suspicion means nothing when plausible deniability secures the value of the object in the eyes of the faithful. I expect something similar could happen with this fragment, the “authenticating documents” (like that dead professors letter) being used to muddy the waters of certainty.

To a layman about forgery in manuscripts, but one much more familiar with forgery in art and paintings, the lack of provenance, the refusal to identify the names of the providers of the fragment, constitute the most powerful index of the highest likelihood of forgery.

Unfortunately, though, in papyrology that’s common. Because most papyri are in places with little in the way of effective law enforcement or even personal safety, a large quantity of papyri is (or has been) recovered illegally by looters and sold on the black market. There has been a huge debate going on for years whether universities and museums should buy such materials, but the consensus more or less is, if they didn’t, we’d lose vast quantities of historical materials (looters would just sell it to private collectors and it would disappear since there would be no other market for it, or they’d just destroy what they found if they couldn’t sell it). This makes the prior probability of forgery for unprovenanced ancient papyri much lower than it does for, say, art work. But for papyri of this specific kind, it’s still high enough to always be concerned.

(Note that there is a claimed trail of evidence for the fragment that dates it pre-1980. But that trail itself may be based on forged documents. And right now, that even seems likely.)

These features include the repetition of typos and other mistakes from an online edition of the Gospel of Thomas in Coptic, which are extraordinarily unlikely, unless the text was being reproduced using that online resource (which would date the forgery to after 1997, when that resource first appeared online).

More recently than that, even. Mike Grondin (in a comment to Goodacre’s blog post) says that the typo in question didn’t appear on his site until Nov. 11, 2002.