[Vision2020] Jesus Had a Wife, Newly Discovered Gospel Suggests or Now The Fin Begins

[Art Deco]

  <http://www.livescience.com/>
          <http://www.livescience.com/>
Jesus Had a Wife, Newly Discovered Gospel Suggests
 Life's Little Mysteries Staff
Date: 18 September 2012 Time: 04:30 PM ET
  <http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/>


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<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/historian-says-piece-of-papyrus-refers-to-jesus-wife.html?_r=2&hp>,
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? [Jesus
Christ the Man: Does the Physical Evidence Hold
Up?<http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2319-jesus-christ-man-physical-evidence-hold.html>
]

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<http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/666-which-jobs-require-celibacy-.html>
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," she 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<http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/1607-why-sex-evolved.html>
."

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<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/historian-says-piece-of-papyrus-refers-to-jesus-wife.html?_r=2&hp>
.

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.

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
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