This is pretty much a duplicate of my previous post (New Sappho Followup ~ Some Questions Answered in TLS, but since it really is a separate issue (despite being mentioned in my initial post on the Sappho things: A New Sapphic Poem ~ Wading into the Morass ) it seems to merit a post of its own. As longterm readers of rogueclassicism might recall, the last we heard of the Gospel of Jesus wife was that they were waiting the results of testing (Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Latest). Most recently, Mark Goodacre has reminded the blogworld of the same thing (Whatever happened to the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife?). With that in mind, I think we really should compliment the diligence of Dr Obbink in regards to similar matters as described in the TLS:
Some scholars did, at first, doubt its authenticity, including one of the editors of the last “New Sappho” to be discovered. But other indicators leave no room for doubt. Metre, language and dialect are all recognizably Sapphic and (more difficult for a forger to achieve) there are no contrary indications whatsoever of date or handwriting . The authorship of Sappho was clinched, however, when the papyrus’s text was found to overlap, in two narrow vertical bands of letters, with fragments of two previously published papyri containing fragments of Sappho. The antiquity of the physical fabric of the papyrus is beyond reproach: indeed, it was damaged in ancient times, torn up the centre of the one complete surviving column, and still bears the ancient papyrus repair strips on its back applied in antiquity. It is written in black carbon ink in an identifiable professional bookhand, but with idiosyncratic stylistic traits that would be difficult for a modern calligrapher consistently to emulate. It also passes tests of spectral analysis for density of ancient carbon-base ink. The authenticity of the ancient mummy cartonnage panel, from which the papyrus was extracted, having been recycled in antiquity to accompany a burial, has been established through its documented legal provenance. The owner of the papyrus wishes to remain anonymous, but has submitted the papyrus to autopsy and multi-spectral photography, as well as Carbon 14 testing of an uninscribed portion of the papyrus sheet itself by an American laboratory, that returned a date of around 201 AD, with a plus-minus range of a hundred years.
- via: New poems by Sappho (TLS)
So it appears that it really isn’t that difficult to arrange for this sort of testing. The obvious question: what’s taking so long to get it done with the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife?
rogueclassicism 