I can understand the frustration that may have lead King to commit such a blunder. As an Arab woman, I have found people who think that I am not apt enough in engaging in the discourse I am participating in. But I do not think that I would risk my ethics in accepting evidence or forgoing provenance for the sole motive of boosting my career. As we have discussed in class, provenance is important. It prevents more colonial exploitation of the Middle East, and it allows native scholars to learn and add to their own great history. This is where my sympathies end with King--- the idea that this text had "tipped over into likelihood" of being a forgery should have been where she exercised her duty as a scholar and disengaged with the text.

I never knew this was an anxiety. I, somehow, naively assumed that the people who colonized an area and justified the colonization due to the inferiority of the people would then not call into question the legitimacy and authenticity of the texts they stole. It reminds me of Edward Said’s *Orientalism— the idea that we need Western academics to explain the intricacies and nuances of Middle Eastern culture because Middle Easterners can’t do this work by themselves— the same general distrust that plagued the documents “discovered” by Western archaeologists is the same distrust criticized in Said’s work.

The power of semantics is crucial when understanding how colonial agents justified their exploitation and mishandling of knowledge they had no hand in creating.

Isn't this the same person that Keith was disagreeing with in his social memory theory article? Bultmann argued that it was possible to reach the historical Jesus through deconstructing the Bible (reaching the historical through the literary).

I appreciate the power of fiction that is explained here. There are some people, like the past, who talk down on the efficacy of a novel, not seeing its benefits or influence beyond a humanities class, but the argument that gospel thrillers do not fixate and exacerbate our fears and anxieties as much as it alleviates our worries is fascinating. It subverts the misconception I had when coming in to read this article.