In 2012, Karen King, a Harvard professor specializing in Gnosticism and early Christianity, announced to much hoopla that she had in her possession a fragmentary text of a forgotten gospel in which Jesus discusses Mary and refers to his wife. Four years later, the journalist Ariel Sabar revealed that the document—written on papyrus in the ancient Coptic language—was in fact a forgery. Matti Friedman reviews Sabar’s recent book, Veritas, which recounts the story:

Unavoidable throughout the story of the papyrus, and throughout Veritas, is the long, silly shadow of The Da Vinci Code, the bestseller by Dan Brown that posited a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene and a lurid Catholic conspiracy to cover it up. . . . In the frenzy that followed the novel’s publication in 2003, King had become one of the academics interviewed frequently on the subject, seeing the popularity of Brown’s work as an opportunity to talk about the multiplicity of voices in early Christianity and about the greater role that women [supposedly] played before they were sidelined by men.

King saw herself as a historian and spoke much about “data,” but she also wrote, “History is not about truth but about power relations,” and thought the historian’s priority should be to drop “the association between truth and chronology.” All of this made King the perfect mark for the forger peddling the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.

One of the book’s unlikely heroes is Christian Askeland, a New Testament Coptologist with a Cambridge PhD and a sharp eye for forgery. Askeland is an evangelical Christian, making him an outsider in the world of the mainstream academy. With the outsider’s sharpened senses and a familiarity with religious modes of thinking, Askeland understands that there are “fundamentalists” on both the left and the right. The world of religious studies at places like Harvard might have more diversity of sex and race than they used to, but “intellectually, Askeland felt, they were monoliths, often blind to their own liberal pieties.” This is an important part of the intellectual landscape of our times, and it turns out to be a key part of the sorry, fascinating, and relentlessly entertaining tale told in Veritas.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.