The Mystery of the Golden Coffin
How did $65 million of allegedly stolen antiquities wind up in two of the world’s greatest museums?
Ariel Sabar
Ariel Sabar is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His latest book, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best true-crime book of the year and the runner-up for the Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award. His first book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for his Family’s Past, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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Illustration by Ana Miminoshvili They Stole Yogi Berra’s World Series Rings. Then They Did Something Really Crazy.
The childhood friends behind the most audacious string of sports-memorabilia heists in American history
Illustration by Federico Tramonte An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery
The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars—and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists. Now a prominent medievalist is taking a new approach to unlocking its secrets.
Yale University The ‘Secret’ Gospel and a Scandalous New Episode in the Life of Jesus
A Columbia historian said he’d discovered a sacred text with clues to Jesus’s sexuality. Was it real?
Photo-illustration by Pacifico Silano. Sources: General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada; Thomas Alwood; Three Lions / Getty. The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury
How a small-town auto mechanic peddling a green-energy breakthrough pulled off a massive scam
Maxime Mouysset The Tomb Raiders of the Upper East Side
Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit
Malike Sidibe for The Atlantic A Biblical Mystery at Oxford
A renowned scholar claimed that he discovered a first-century gospel fragment. Now he’s facing allegations of antiquities theft, cover-up, and fraud.
Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society and the University of Oxford Imaging Papyri Project Karen King Responds to ‘The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife’
The Harvard scholar says papyrus is probably a forgery.
Karen L. King / Harvard / AP / Lisette Poole / Ariel Sabar / Christian E. Loeben / The Atlantic The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife
A hotly contested, supposedly ancient manuscript suggests Christ was married. But believing its origin story—a real-life Da Vinci Code, involving a Harvard professor, a onetime Florida pornographer, and an escape from East Germany—requires a big leap of faith.
Marc Burckhardt The Anti-Redskin
In the fight over the team’s name, Ray Halbritter is an adversary unlike any the NFL has faced before.
John Cueno
