While Sabar's investigative journalist work is clearly well researched and fascinating, I am not convinced of the psychological profile he has put together on Dr Karen King, and to a lesser extent on the forger Walt Fritz.

Re Dr King, Sabar provides us a thorough background on her childhood and early academic career, including being a consultant on The Da Vinci Code film, being careful enough to evade notice of East German gov't officials while studying there on a West German scholarship. Yet I am not entirely moved to see these life events as "proof" that she is so cunning, her whole life built up to advance this forgery. I am seeing many red flags that she as a scholar of such reknown should have seen, many mistakes made (having only 2 friends peer review the work, being late getting scientific testing done, getting friends / family to do the testing, being too eager to break the story without sufficent proof of its authenticity, etc). But it seems more to me that she is a scholar who unfortunately just fell for a forgery, when she really wished it to be true, during a time when her department at HDS was possibly going to lose status with the Yard wishing to open (secular) religious studies themselves. I don't think she had nefarious motivations per se. 

Sabar also makes a lot of jumps to conclusions that seem like reaches to me, but definitely make for intrigue at first glance. For example, there is a passage where an English translation of the forged text uses the word "abdicate" rather than the more accurate word "deny", and this is used as part of the proof that the forger had used a specific website to piecemeal together this forged Jesus's Wife papyrus fragment. Sabar then leaps to the conclusion that the forger must have used the word "abdicate" as word play to target Dr Karen "King". Not sure I buy this. 

Another example of what feels like just sensationalism: 
We move into a deep dive of Walt Fritz the forger and his fetishes, including his running of a hot wife video website. Sabar attempts to link Fritz's "switch" kink persona to the need to essentially suck up to idols, such as Prof Osing while Fritz was in grad school, or to Dr Karen King for the Jesus Wife fragment. Again, I am not buying these psychological profile and linkages betwen these events. Is everyone's fetishes really the answer to why they supposedly do what they do?

Sabar acknowledges this, yet doubles down and says the two things (the making of the forgery and being a hot wife pornographer) are relevant to each other and thus needs to be included in the book because both things involve "wives". This feels lacking to me. 

Another example where I was just getting more "Pepe Silvia conspiracy" vibes, this time however at least Sabar acknowledges the mere coincidence.. he says Fritz's first email to Dr King is 114 years to the day after scholars first announced their discovery of Gospel of Mary, and 114 is the number of sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. It feels like all this is just giving credence to Fritz and his supposed smarts to be able to link everything he does to some kind of well thought out plan, when I don't believe he had one. 

Overall a quite thrilling read that covers a lot of ground and was difficult to put down even with my above gripes with some of the conclusions.