[posted to GThomas Yahoogroup April 28, 2014, as corrected same day]

Although I make it a personal policy, it's always at least a little embarrassing to
have to admit to a mistake. Even more so in this case, however, since I've posted
comments on Facebook and Mark Goodacre's and Anthony LeDonne's blogs
along the same lines as I previously posted here - namely, that the every-other-line
pattern of the Jn fragment vis-a-vis Qau isn't sufficient in itself to prove forgery.
Now I find - via Christian Askeland's blog entry of today - that in fact the fragment
doesn't religiously follow the every-other-line pattern. That little factoid wasn't in
Alin Suciu's original comparison of the verso of the Jn fragment to Qau, nor have
I seen it since. Not that it was never noted anywhere, but if it was, I missed it.
Indeed, I missed it even when I was putting together my own comparison of the
contents of the fragment to a hypothetical manuscript from which it supposedly
came. For me, it isn't the pattern itself, but the disruption of the pattern that's
persuasive. That and the fact that the disruption occurs at a suspicious place -
exactly between pages 8 and 9 of Thompson's presentation of Qau. Having
copied the last line of page 8, the forger (a term I'm now confident to use)
made the mistake of copying the first line of page 9, instead of the second.
An ancient copyist of Qau could not have made such a mistake.
 
To which may be added another feature of the fragment to which Askeland
draws attention: on line 7 of the recto of the fragment, there's a mostly-effaced
area which should (if it be a copy of Qau) hold the letters 'RKRINE'. But there's
not enough space for those letters. What it looks like, then, is that the forger
initially left out a letter or two, then later, realizing his mistake, decided to efface
his original writing (that can be done with papyrus) instead of trying to rewrite it.
 
In sum, I'm now persuaded that the evidence favors forgery.
 
...
 
Mike Grondin