An anonymous dealer brought the papyrus fragment to Professor Karen King of Harvard Divinity School so she could help with translation and analysis back in 2011. According to a New York Times report, the dealer hoped to get Harvard to buy the fragment if they were to buy a larger portion of his collection of Coptic fragments. Early fragments of Coptic Christian literature are relatively common; Professor King presented her translation notes at a conference on Coptic texts that is held every four years in Rome.
As Elaine Pagels from Princeton University noted in an interview with CNN, “You can find boxes filled with Coptic fragments.” But what makes this one significant is for the first time, it explicitly has Jesus referring to “my wife.”
