In 2012, Karen King, a Harvard professor specializing in Gnosticism and early Christianity, announced to much hoopla that she had in her possession a fragmentary text of a forgotten gospel in which Jesus discusses Mary and refers to his wife. Four years later, the journalist Ariel Sabar revealed that the document—written on papyrus in the ancient Coptic language—was in fact a forgery. Matti Friedman reviews Sabar’s recent book, Veritas, which recounts the story:

Unavoidable throughout the story of the papyrus, and throughout Veritas, is the long, silly shadow of The Da Vinci Code, the bestseller by Dan Brown that posited a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene and a lurid Catholic conspiracy to cover it up. . . . In the frenzy that followed the novel’s publication in 2003, King had become one of the academics interviewed frequently on the subject, seeing the popularity of Brown’s work as an opportunity to talk about the multiplicity of voices in early Christianity and about the greater role that women [supposedly] played before they were sidelined by men.

King saw herself as a historian and spoke much about “data,” but she also wrote, “History is not about truth but about power relations,” and thought the historian’s priority should be to drop “the association between truth and chronology.” All of this made King the perfect mark for the forger peddling the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.

One of the book’s unlikely heroes is Christian Askeland, a New Testament Coptologist with a Cambridge PhD and a sharp eye for forgery. Askeland is an evangelical Christian, making him an outsider in the world of the mainstream academy. With the outsider’s sharpened senses and a familiarity with religious modes of thinking, Askeland understands that there are “fundamentalists” on both the left and the right. The world of religious studies at places like Harvard might have more diversity of sex and race than they used to, but “intellectually, Askeland felt, they were monoliths, often blind to their own liberal pieties.” This is an important part of the intellectual landscape of our times, and it turns out to be a key part of the sorry, fascinating, and relentlessly entertaining tale told in Veritas.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.