Heresy: A Reporter Investigates Evidence That Jesus Had a Wife

Walter Fritz had been an East German museum director, a real estate agent, an auto-parts business executive, an Egyptology student, and an amateur pornographer.

But his most recent achievement might well be his most lasting and ignominious – his involvement in an audacious antiquity transaction, wherein a piece of papyrus made its way into the hands of Harvard scholar Karen King, who then declared before the Vatican that it showed Jesus may have been married.

How a Shootout on a Guatemalan Highway Opened Window to Corruption

In 2013, ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella got a tip on an assassination attempt against Enrique Degenhart Asturias, a 44-year-old Guatemala native who had been working as a consultant to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. Rotella, a veteran Latin America correspondent, knew such violence was common in that part of the world, but this event felt distinctive.

For one thing, Degenhart was shot nine times, but he lived to tell the story. Second, Degenhart had recently been fired from a post in the country’s notoriously corrupt immigration service after trying to reform it. Third, the Guatemalan government had removed Degenhart’s security detail ten months before gunmen tried to take his life.