Confirmation Bias

Third Friday of Advent

No, this post is not about the rite twelve year olds proceed through in becoming full members of the church. 

 

Confirmation bias is a psychology term that goes something like this. If we hold a belief or idea or hope about something, and we encounter something that we could take as evidence to support that belief or idea or hope, we are biased in favor of accepting that evidence as confirming what we had already thought. We are disinclined to examine that evidence closely or to be skeptical about it. 

 

Veritas is the Latin word for "truth." It is also the motto of Harvard University. It is also the title of a new book by Ariel Sabar. The subtitle is "A Harvard Professor, A Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus Wife." It's a great book. Although it is non-fiction, it reads like a really good detective novel. I recommend it highly,

Some of you may remember the controversy in 2014, when Dr. Karen King of Harvard Divinity School, who holds the oldest endowed chair in Harvard University, published news of her discovery of a previously unknown Gnostic papyrus manuscript fragment in Coptic (the language of Egypt from the first through early seventh centuries A.D.). The fragment was only a few lines, all of them broken off. This is not uncommon for papyri. 

One of the lines of the fragment says, "Jesus said, 'My wife'".... The line breaks off after "wife." King was an expert in Gnosticism, Coptic language, and feminist theory. She was not, however, a Coptic papyrologist. I won't go into papyrology, just to say that its extremely difficult work, that only a very few specialists have both the training and the brainpower to do. 

The book goes into how King acquired the papyrus from a mysterious man in Florida, whom she refused to identify. She was thrilled to get this papyrus because it demonstrated that at least some early Christians (she dated the document to early third century) believed that Jesus was married, presumably to Mary Magdalene, who is mentioned in an earlier line of the papyrus. I won't go into feminist theology, just to sat that God is not male or female, and that many feminists are bothered by the idea of an unmarried male savior. King entitled the fragment, "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife."

This fragment was exactly the kind of thing Karen King had been hoping to find all her academic life. She thought that her discovery might even change the whole course of the Christian religion. As a scholar, she did know she needed some verification by other scholars. She consulted Anne-Marie Luijendijk, a young Dutch scholar, who had studied under King. Like King, she was an expert in Coptic, but not a Coptic papyrologist. King also had the fragment examined by Roger Bagnall, who was the greatest Greek  papyrologist in the world and also had an excellent knowledge of Coptic. He authenticated the fragment. But he was not a Coptic papyrologist. 

Things moved rapidly. King was on the program to present a paper on the fragment at a quadrennial international conference of Coptic papyrologists in Rome. The paper would include Powerpoint slides of the papyrus. Meanwhile, King had sold the idea of a TV special on the papyrus to the Smithsonian station. They got the TV special out quickly. It lauded the discovery as a game-changer for Christianity.

Meanwhile, the Harvard Theological Review, a major scholarly journal was consulting with King, who wanted an article she had written on the papyrus fragment to be published. HTR, like most scholarly journals is a refereed journal. It requires double-blind peer review before publication. The article is read by three anonymous experts in that particular field. The readers do not know who the author of the article is. The author does not know who the readers are. The editors of the journal weigh the readers recommendations, then decide whether to publish. Because this article would be such a headliner, HTR wanted to get it out as quickly as possible. They ignored some of the standard review protocols and gthe opinions of two of the readers and published the article. 

The Rome Conference was a disaster for King. Her computer crashed and she couldn't show the slides. The slides got there before the end of the conference. Now they would be examined by real Coptic papyrologists. Scientists would also radioactive carbon-date the manuscript. Over a period of the next year and half or so the evidence of both the scientists and the papyrologists piled up to an overwhelming and certain consensus that the manuscript was a forgery. Karen King was exposed as having made numerous mistakes and lapses of judgment in her whole process. There were numerous things she did not check. She too easily dismissed evidence contrary to what she wanted to hear. HTR was almost as bad as King. 

Veritas goes into great detail on the story and the story behind the story. King would never tell who gave her the papyrus. Ariel Sabar does some truly brilliant investigative journalism and finds out. The back story gets more and more fascinating. The book is a real page-turner. 

The lesson of the book is that even a brilliant, hard-nosed, endowed chair Harvard professor, a really, really smart person, can be the victim of a good con-man. If people tell us what we want to hear, show us what we want to see, we tend to put on the blinders to what should be our own critical thinking. Confirmation bias can get us conned.

Next Thursday I will talk about a current case of what may be my own confirmation bias. You can decide whether I'm letting myself be conned. Yes, it will be Christmas Eve. Yes, my case will have some relation to Christmas.

Faithfully,

Christian