The tiny papyrus, no bigger than a business card, has sparked controversy among scholars since it was unveiled by Harvard historian Dr Karen King in 2012.

Dr King then called it a valuable clue that some early Christians believed Jesus was married.

"The Gospel of Jesus' wife" consists of just eight lines and they show an interrupted conversation.

Among its phrases were "Jesus said to them, ‘My wife. . .' " and "she will be able to be my disciple".

But articles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times detail findings by a Coptic expert at Indiana Wesleyan University that cast doubts on the papyrus.

Dr Christian Askeland posits that it matches another document, the "Gospel of John" fragment, which is clearly a forgery.

The two documents have many similarities—including the handwriting, ink and writing instrument used.

The "John" piece was written in a dialect of Coptic known to have died out before the papyrus it was written on could have been made, tests show.

It also appears to have been copied from another Coptic document discovered in 1923, even repeating its line breaks.

Dr Askeland concluded that both the "John" and the "wife" papyri were written by the same hand.

Many scholars now consider the debate over, declaring the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" is a clever fake.

Dr King, who unveiled the wife papyrus in 2012, admitted these latest criticisms should be taken seriously.

"This is one option that should receive serious consideration, but I don't think it's a done deal," she told the New York Times.

Last month, the Harvard Theological Review published the results of scientific tests on the wife papyrus.

These revealed that radiocarbon tests produced a date of 659 to 859 CE.

The ink used was also consistent with other ancient documents, tests showed.

The Review published experts who wrote that they could find no apparent evidence of forgery.

Sources

• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• Image: MNN

"Substantial reasons would lead us to conclude that the papyrus is actually a clumsy counterfeit," the newspaper said in an editorial.

"In other words, in any case it is a fake," wrote L'Osservatore Romano editor-in-chief Gian Maria Vian.

The fragment referring to Jesus wife was written in Coptic, a language used by Egyptian Christians, and says in part, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife ..."

The paper is generally thought to reflect the views of Vatican officials, a report on CNN said.

Karen King, a Harvard Divinity School professor, earlier announced the findings of the 1.5- by 3-inch honey-colored fragment in Rome.

King, in a draft of her analysis of the fragment, said the text "does not, however, provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married."

"This fragment, this new piece of papyrus evidence, does not prove that (Jesus) was married, nor does it prove that he was not married," King told reporters last month. "We don't know if he was married or not."

The New York Times in a report said suspicions that the papyrus was forged grew last week after Francis Watson, a New Testament scholar at Durham University in England, posted a paper online arguing that the text was cobbled together from phrases in the Gospel of Thomas.

That text was discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 among a cache of ancient manuscripts thought to have been written by early Christians known as Gnostics. However, experts say that kind of cobbling does not prove it was forged, because such amalgamations show up in authentic ancient texts as well.

The Vatican newspaper also published an analysis by a Coptic scholar Alberto Camplani who raised some issues with the papyrus and King's reading of the text. Other ancient sources make no mention of Jesus' conjugal situation, he wrote.

Camplani said he was also suspicious because the papyrus had been found on the antiquarian market and not through a dig. "Such an object demands that numerous precautions be taken to establish its reliability and exclude the possibility of forgery," the New York Times report quoted Camplani.

Sources

• CNN
• The New York Times
• The New American
• Examiner.Com
• Image: Harvard Divinity School