Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife by Ariel Sabar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Education Can’t Cure Stupid

This story is in essence simple and chock full of compelling academic gossip, educated dupes, money, and sex: A Harvard professor of history makes a mistake in accepting a fragment of ancient papyrus as authentic and representing it as a ‘gospel.’ When evidence is revealed that the papyrus is probably a fake, the professor temporises rather than accepts her error. Her faculty and then the university are induced to participate in her mistake by publicising the papyrus in a somewhat deceitful way.

A journalist, the author of the book, documents the mistake, the original self-deception, the subsequent dodgy endorsements, and traces the origin of the forged papyrus back to a professional liar and pornographer in Florida. It’s all the academic equivalent of the Theranos scandal - and just as arcane and sordid in its details and… well, just as tedious.

In other words, the book is essentially about lying and the diverse forms of lying - fraud, duplicity, self-delusion, misdirection, intrigue - indulged in by educated society. If the lying hadn’t emanated from a prestigious institution like Harvard, no one would have cared. But we all seem to think that there should be fewer lies produced at Harvard rather than more and better liars. So the book produced a scandal which has a certain class of folk tittering.

Rather than participate in the tittering, I’d like to propose Black’s Rules of Practical Epistemology:

Rule #1: Everybody lies, but only when their lips move.

Rule #2: The magnitude of the lie is not proportional to the deviation from truth or reality but to the potential loss or gain for the liar.

Rule #3: Lies will be uncontested by the hearers of lies according to the same criterion as that in Rule#2; that is to say, people will believe any lie which they believe it is in their interest to do so.

Rule #4; No factual evidence can ever override one’s perceived self-interest.

Knowledge of these rules should save philosophers and sociologists a great deal of avoidable anguish. Most of the rest of us already employ them in our daily routine.

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