Some Reflections on Ariel Sabar’s Veritas
Scholars, or at least those scholars in my small corner of academia, have been gleefully reading (some hate-reading) and reviewing Ariel Sabar’s new book Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. I’m a bit late to the party, but I seem to be among the few who did not get sent an advance copy (sheesh!) and was further delayed because there were no stores within 50 km of me that bothered to stock the book on the day of its release. To me (and my colleagues) this book is important—why isn’t it important to everyone? Sigh. Truth be told, academics seem to both delight in and dread when outsiders (Sabar is a journalist) look into our world; it’s very much how Canadians feel living in the shadow of the US: they noticed us! (But did they have to be so mean?).
As other reviewers have said, Veritas is an excellent book. If you read Sabar’s piece on GJW for The Atlantic, you know that Sabar is a gifted investigator and writer, though here Sabar has adjusted his style so that readers are treated to a page-turning thriller. But he is no less strong an investigator. At several points in the book I felt like he had followed the evidence as far as he could, but then he went deeper, and found more. Who would have thought the trail would lead him to wandering around Bad Wurzach looking for men who were altar …