Jesus had a wife, newly discovered gospel suggests - A Harvard
historian has identified a faded, fourth-century scrap of papyrus she
calls "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife." One line of the torn fragment of
text purportedly reads: "Jesus said to them, 'My wife …'" The following
line states, "she will be able to be my disciple."
The
finding was announced to the public today (Sept. 18) by Karen King, a
historian of early Christianity, author of several books about new
Gospel discoveries and the Hollis professor of divinity at Harvard
Divinity School. King first examined the privately owned fragment in
2011, and has since been studying it with the help of a small group of scholars.
According to the New York
Times, King and her collaborators have concluded that the business
card-size fragment is not a forgery, and she is presenting the discovery
today at a meeting of International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome.
The
fragment, written in Coptic, the language of a group of early
Christians in Egypt, has an unknown provenance, and its owner has opted
to remain anonymous. Questions about the fragment abound, but scholars
say it will nonetheless reignite several old debates: Was Jesus married?
If so, was Mary Magdalene his wife? And did he have a female disciple?
Scholars
say these controversies date to the early centuries of Christianity,
but they remain relevant today. In the Roman Catholic Church, for
example, women and married men are barred from priesthood because of the
model thought to have been set by Jesus.
King
has cautioned that the new discovery should not be taken as proof that
Jesus was actually married. The text appears to have been written
centuries after he lived, and all other early Christian literature is
silent on the question of his marital status.
But
the scrap of papyrus — the first known statement from antiquity that
refers to Jesus speaking of a wife — provides evidence that there was an
active discussion among early Christians about whether Jesus was
celibate or married, and which path his followers should choose, King
told the Times.
"This fragment suggests that
some early Christians had a tradition that Jesus was married," King
said. "There was, we already know, a controversy in the second century
over whether Jesus was married, caught up with a debate about whether
Christians should marry and have sex."
The
significance of this fragment was known by scholars previously, and then
forgotten. When its current owner acquired it in a batch of papyri in
1997 from its previous owner, a German, it came with a handwritten note.
The note cited a now-deceased professor of Egyptology in Berlin as
having called the fragment "the sole example" of a text in which Jesus
claims a wife.
According to the Times,
papyrologists and Coptic linguists who have studied the artifact thus
far say they are convinced by its genuineness by the fading of the ink
on the papyrus fibers and the traces of ink adhered to the bent fibers
at the edges. The Coptic grammar, handwriting and ideas represented in
the text would also have been nearly impossible to forge.
"It's
hard to construct a scenario that is at all plausible in which somebody
fakes something like this. The world is not really crawling with
crooked papyrologists," Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the
Study of the Ancient World, at New York University, told the New York
Times.
Certain lines of the text
resemble snippets from the Gospels of Thomas and Mary, both believed to
have been written in the late second century and later translated into
Coptic. King surmises that this fragment is also copied from a
second-century Greek text.
Further study will be
needed to work out the details, but the meaning of the words "my wife"
is beyond question, King said. The text beyond "Jesus said to them, 'My
wife …'" is cut off. ( LiveScience.com )
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