Three years ago, Harvard University professor Karen L. King showed the world a tiny fragment of ancient Egyptian papyrus whose eight partial lines of Coptic script included one sensational half-sentence: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’ ”

It was big news. The Boston Globe and The New York Times ran front-page reports; the story went global as TV crews and bloggers and wire services joined the fray.

But doubt swiftly set in.

As critical takedowns of the fragment — which King provocatively named “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” — ricocheted across the Internet, a growing chorus of academics cast the papyrus as a fake.

“When is this papyrological pantomime, this Keystone Coptic, this academic farce, this philological burlesque finally going to stop?” Egyptologist Leo Depuydt of Brown University wrote in an e-mail last year.

Earlier this month, a Coptic papyrologist from Australia visited Harvard to have another look at the papyrus.

Yet his will not be the last word on what may be, centimeter for centimeter, the most controversial scrap of ancient paper ever seen. The case remains one of the most high-profile and confounding academic mysteries in recent memory.

As the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, King holds the oldest endowed academic chair in the country. The daughter of a pharmacist from small-town Montana, she has built her career on sober and painstaking research, mainly concerning early Christian and heretical texts.

So when a stranger sent her an e-mail in 2010 claiming to have a papyrus that mentioned a married Jesus, she paid it little mind. But when he contacted her again, she took a closer look.

The owner, who asked King to keep his identity secret, brought the fragment to Harvard. King took it to New York, where she spent hours analyzing it with two eminent scholars — AnneMarie Luijendijk, a papyrologist from Princeton University, and Roger Bagnall, who directs the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.

The handwriting was crude, nothing like a typical ancient literary manuscript. Bagnall thought it might be the work of an unskilled scribe with a bad pen. But both he and Luijendijk agreed it appeared to be ancient.

With that advice in mind, King eventually argued that the Coptic fragment was probably genuine — a fourth-century copy of a Greek composition from the second century, she hypothesized.

King never thought the fragment was evidence that Jesus actually had a wife. But she believed it showed that some early Christians portrayed him as married as they debated celibacy and the role of women in the church, specifically wives and mothers.

And she was fascinated. So was everyone else. The Smithsonian Channel filmed a documentary in advance of her announcement about the papyrus in Rome.

But some scholars reacted with immediate skepticism, even scorn. Rapid-fire online exchanges erupted in the weeks following King’s announcement, as academic bloggers pored over images of the fragment. The handwriting looked strange, they said. The grammar seemed way off. And to many critics, the text bore an uncanny similarity to the Gospel of Thomas; the only surviving full copy of Thomas was hidden in Egypt and rediscovered in 1945. British scholar Francis Watson argued it was an inelegant pastiche of that gospel.

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