With a fascinating true story of scandal at the highest levels of academia, award-winning author and journalist Ariel Sabar will join us to discuss his latest book, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. A tale of fierce intellectual rivalries, Veritas is a piercing psychological portrait of a disillusioned college dropout whose life had reached a breaking point. It is also a tragedy about a brilliant scholar handed a piece of scripture that embodied her greatest hopes for Christianity, but that forced her to confront fundamental questions about the line between reason and faith.

In 2012, Karen King, a star professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery at a scholarly conference just steps from the Vatican: she had found an ancient fragment of papyrus in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene “my wife.” The tattered shred of text made international headlines. If early Christians believed Jesus was married, like other rabbis of his time, it would upend the 2,000-year history of the world’s predominant faith, threatening not just the celibate, all-male priesthood, but also sacred teachings on marriage, sex, and women’s leadership.

As debates over the manuscript’s authenticity raged, Sabar set out to investigate a baffling mystery: where did this tiny scrap of supposed second-century papyrus come from? His search for answers is a fascinating international detective story, described by The New York Times as “madcap,” “unforgettable,” and “barely believable.”

Ariel Sabar’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and many other publications. He is the author of My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

Ariel Sabar comes to Washington Hebrew through a partnership with the Jewish Book Council.