Professor Karen King reached this conclusion after reading an investigation into the papyrus's origins by The Atlantic reporter Ariel Sabar.

The professor said "it tips the balance towards forgery".

She first obtained the papyrus fragment in 2011.

Critics had argued for years that problems pointed towards a forgery.

These included errors in Coptic grammar and similarities with the Gospel of Thomas.

The writing on the papyrus suggested Jesus had been married.

Professor King had placed her faith in the opinions of expert papyrologists, along with a series of carbon-dating and other scientific tests.

The person who gave her the papyrus has been revealed as a Walter Fritz from Florida.

Fritz is said to have acquired the papyrus from a German businessman called Hans Laukamp in 1999.

It was revealed that Fritz was a business associate of Mr Laukamp, who died in 2002.

Fritz first met Mr Laukamp in Berlin in the 1990s at a talk given by author Erich von Daniken, known for his theories on aliens.

Fritz denies having forged or manipulated the papyrus.

But a lawyer who represented Mr Laukamp's estate denied the German had ever owned such material.

The lawyer stated it would have been impossible for Mr Laukamp to have acquired the papyrus in East Germany in 1963 as claimed.

A note with the sales contract stated "Papyri were acquired in 1963 by the seller in Potsdam (East Germany)".

Asked how Mr Laukamp's signature may have ended up on the sales contract, Mr Laukamp's wife Gabriele gave an explanation to The Atlantic.

"I can easily imagine Walter Fritz saying, ‘I need your signature for the company'?. - adding Mr Laukamp "would have signed that without reading everything."

Fritz apparently studied Egyptology and worked as a tour guide in Berlin's Egyptian Museum.

He was also revealed to have set up pornographic websites in 2003 that showed his wife having sex with other men.

The websites have since been taken down.

Sources

• The Atlantic
• Daily Mail
• Image: Biblearchaeology.org

Harvard University biblical scholar Karen King, who first revealed the papyrus, hopes questions over whether it is a modern fake will now fade.

It consists of just eight lines and 33 words of an interrupted conversation, which were probably part of a larger papyrus.

Jesus speaks of his mother, his wife and a female disciple, one of whom may be identified as "Mary".

A broken conversation between Jesus and his disciples seems to be on the papyrus.

"Jesus said to them, my wife . . . ," one line states.

Another line continues: " . . . she will be able to be my disciple", while the line before the "wife" quote has Jesus saying "Mary is worthy of it" and line 7 says, "As for me, I dwell with her in order to . . . ."

King has stressed that the fragment does not prove that Jesus was married.

"The main topic of the fragment is to affirm that women who are mothers and wives can be disciples of Jesus — a topic that was hotly debated in early Christianity as celibate virginity increasingly became highly valued," she said.

Jesuit priest and author Fr James Martin wrote on the America magazine website that his own faith does not require that Jesus be unmarried.

"But my reason tells me that he was," Fr Martin said.

It would be odd for much more ancient accounts of his life not to mention a wife if he had one, the priest said.

Leo Depuyt, an Egyptologist at Brown University, wrote that the Coptic language in the papyrus contains grammatical errors that render it "patently fake".

Other critics say testing could date the document as late as 800AD.

Jesus could have been speaking metaphorically and be referring to the Church as his bride, others say.

The owner of the papyrus told King that he bought it and five other papyri in 1999 from a collector who said he acquired them in East Germany in 1963.

Sources

• Religion News Service
• America
• Huffington Post
• Image: Five Temples

The most egregious case of New Testament fakery was announced to the world in 1973 when Morton Smith, a scholar from Columbia University, published a book on the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark. Smith said that he found the text while working in the library of the ancient monastery of Mar Saba on the West Bank in 1958. It forms part of a letter purportedly by the third-century father St. Clement of Alexandria. It has since disappeared, but certainly existed since several other people saw it and even took photographs. It is now clear that the manuscript was a forgery, probably perpetrated by Smith himself. Again, the arguments, detailed in books such as Stephen Carlson's The Gospel Hoax, don't need rehearsing here.

The Secret Gospel of Mark seemed to be designed to suggest that Jesus was gay. The key lines read, "And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God." This looks carefully calibrated to be suggestive but not too revealing. (Morton Smith's own sexuality is a matter of controversy. Almost no one of his generation was "out"; being so would have ended his career.) In any case, Smith hardly used Secret Mark in his subsequent book Jesus the Magician published five years later. This must be the only case of a scholar ignoring his own groundbreaking discovery, unless Smith felt the need to distance himself from the monster he'd created. Read more

Sources

• First Things
• Image: Examiner

"Substantial reasons would lead us to conclude that the papyrus is actually a clumsy counterfeit," the newspaper said in an editorial.

"In other words, in any case it is a fake," wrote L'Osservatore Romano editor-in-chief Gian Maria Vian.

The fragment referring to Jesus wife was written in Coptic, a language used by Egyptian Christians, and says in part, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife ..."

The paper is generally thought to reflect the views of Vatican officials, a report on CNN said.

Karen King, a Harvard Divinity School professor, earlier announced the findings of the 1.5- by 3-inch honey-colored fragment in Rome.

King, in a draft of her analysis of the fragment, said the text "does not, however, provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married."

"This fragment, this new piece of papyrus evidence, does not prove that (Jesus) was married, nor does it prove that he was not married," King told reporters last month. "We don't know if he was married or not."

The New York Times in a report said suspicions that the papyrus was forged grew last week after Francis Watson, a New Testament scholar at Durham University in England, posted a paper online arguing that the text was cobbled together from phrases in the Gospel of Thomas.

That text was discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 among a cache of ancient manuscripts thought to have been written by early Christians known as Gnostics. However, experts say that kind of cobbling does not prove it was forged, because such amalgamations show up in authentic ancient texts as well.

The Vatican newspaper also published an analysis by a Coptic scholar Alberto Camplani who raised some issues with the papyrus and King's reading of the text. Other ancient sources make no mention of Jesus' conjugal situation, he wrote.

Camplani said he was also suspicious because the papyrus had been found on the antiquarian market and not through a dig. "Such an object demands that numerous precautions be taken to establish its reliability and exclude the possibility of forgery," the New York Times report quoted Camplani.

Sources

• CNN
• The New York Times
• The New American
• Examiner.Com
• Image: Harvard Divinity School