[posted to GThomas Yahoogroup May 1st, 2014]
"Two Fragments - Depuydt & Bagnall"

Charlotte Allen's recent reporting in the Weekly Standard contains
some revealing quotations from Leo Depuydt and Roger Bagnall.
In "The Wife of Jesus Tale", Depuydt is quoted as follows:
 
"I'm a grammarian - I've written a grammar of Middle Egyptian.
I did my doctorate in Coptic Manuscripts at Yale. This [JWF] is
unlike anything you see in a Coptic literary text. The people who
wrote Coptic literary texts wrote fully grammatically. Reading 
one of those texts is like reading the New York Times."
 
Hmm. I think I see now why Depuydt did such a poor job of
stating the forgery case in HTR, and why he kept repeating over
and over again how certain he was that it was a forgery. He has
evidently not read much from the Nag Hammadi texts. Although
later Coptic texts (from Shenoute, e.g.) may read like the New
York times, the NH texts sure don't. There, errors abound.
 
Now on to two revealing quotes from email that Charlotte Allen
received from Roger Bagnall. In "The Wife of Jesus Tale":
 
"The closest analogues [to the handwriting of JWF] that I have
been able to discover have been dated to the late fourth or early
fifth century ... It is indeed interesting to find this type of 
hand turning up in something from 2-3 centuries later; it raises
questions that at present I can't see a way of answering."
 
He's alluding to the dating of the papyrus as 7th-8th century.
Not to mention (as Depuydt does a little later in the Allen
article) that the existence of a gnostic-type text at that time 
is problematic. But back to Bagnall. He seems to be beginning 
to waver. That's bad news for King. Even worse news, though,
from Allen's second article ("The Deepening Mystery..."),
where Bagnall is again quoted, this time on the two fragments:
 
"As to the handwriting, it is not possible to date with confidence
a very rudimentary hand of the kind in use in both of these
fragments (which are if not in the same hand at least extremely
close)." [parenthisized portion emphasized]
 
Which raises the question of whether Bagnall ever saw the John
fragment, or compared the two. In any case, I think it's safe to 
say that if he crumbles, the battle is over.
 
Mike Grondin