This is fascinating as 8-10 papyrologists viewed this and beleived it to be genuine. I am posting experts from the Smithsonian Magazine article which address both text describing Jesus' statement and the authentication and determination.
"The fragment’s 33 words, scattered across 14 incomplete lines, leave a good deal to interpretation. But in King’s analysis, and as she argues in a forthcoming article in the Harvard Theological Review, the “wife” Jesus refers to is probably Mary Magdalene, and Jesus appears to be defending her against someone, perhaps one of the male disciples. “
She will be able to be my disciple,” Jesus replies. Then, two lines later, he says: “I dwell with her.” What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not just any wife, but possibly Mary Magdalene, the most-mentioned woman in the New Testament besides Jesus’ mother."
Every few weeks, a group of eight to ten papyrologists in the New York area gather at Bagnall’s Upper West Side apartment to share and vet new discoveries. Bagnall serves tea, coffee and cookies, and projects images of papyri under discussion onto a screen in his living room.
After looking at the images of the papyrus, “we were unanimous in believing, yes, this was OK,” Bagnall told me when we spoke by phone.
It wasn’t until King brought the actual fragment to Bagnall’s office last March, however, that he and Luijendijk reached a firm conclusion. The color and the texture of the papyrus, along with the parallel deterioration of the ink and the reeds, had none of the “tells” of a forgery. “Anyone who has spent any time in Egypt has seen a lot of fake papyrus, made of banana leaves and all sorts of stuff,” Bagnall told me.
Also convincing was the scribe’s middling penmanship. “It’s clear the pen wasn’t perhaps of ideal quality and the writer didn’t have complete control of it. The flow of ink was highly irregular. This wasn’t a high-class professional working with good tools. That is one of the things that tells you it’s real, because a modern scribe wouldn’t do that. You’d have to be really kind of perversely skilled to produce something like this as a fake. The Sahidic dialect of Coptic and the style of the handwriting, with letters whose tails do not stray above or below the line, reminded Luijendijk of texts from Nag Hammadi and elsewhere and helped her and Bagnall date the fragment to the second half of the fourth century A.D. and place its probable origins in Upper Egypt.
The fragment is some four centimeters tall and eight centimeters wide. Its rough edges suggest that it had been cut out of a larger manuscript; some dealers, keener on profit than preservation, will dice up texts for maximum return. The presence of writing on both sides convinced the scholars that it was part of a codex—or book—rather than a scroll"
The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine
