5. The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife
Site rank: 5, IMDb rank: 4
Director: Andy Webb
This Smithsonian-produced documentary tells the story of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, a scrap of papyrus that caused an uproar on its public release in 2012. Now believed to be a forgery, the scrap includes Jesus Christ referring to a wife, which would upend a great deal of the gospel and the popular image of Jesus relied upon by religious denominations, including the depiction of women as innate sinners. Forgers rely on the very reaction scholars had to the papyrus: In a race to outdo each other, they tried to authenticate it and ignored red flags.
