From award-winning author Ariel Sabar comes the gripping, true story of a sensational religious forgery and the scandal that engulfed Harvard University.

In 2012, Dr Karen King, a star professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery. She had found an ancient fragment of papyrus — ‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’, as she titled it — in which Jesus called Mary Magdalene ‘my wife’. Her announcement made international headlines. If early Christians believed that Jesus was married, it would upend the 2,000-year history of the world’s predominant faith, threatening not just the celibate, all-male priesthood but sacred teachings on marriage, sex, and women’s leadership.

As debates over the manuscript’s authenticity raged, award-winning journalist Ariel Sabar set out to investigate a baffling mystery: where did this tiny scrap of papyrus come from? His indefatigable search for answers became an international true-crime story, in which, remarkably, he managed to solve the crime.