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September 18, 2012
A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ Wife By LAURIE
GOODSTEIN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/laurie_goodstein/index.html>

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity
School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in
Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece
of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife ...’ ”

The faded papyrus
fragment<http://www.hds.harvard.edu/faculty-research/research-projects/the-gospel-of-jesuss-wife>is
smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black
ink
legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a
wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly
says, “she will be able to be my disciple.”

The finding was made
public<http://www.hds.harvard.edu/sites/hds.harvard.edu/files/attachments/faculty-research/research-projects/the-gospel-of-jesuss-wife/29813/King_JesusSaidToThem_draft_0917.pdf>in
Rome on Tuesday at the International
Congress of Coptic Studies
<http://www.copticcongress2012.uniroma1.it/> by Karen
L. King <http://www.hds.harvard.edu/people/faculty/karen-l-king>, a
historian who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and
is the first woman to hold the nation’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis
professor of divinity.

The provenance of the papyrus fragment is a mystery, and its owner has
asked to remain anonymous. Until Tuesday, Dr. King had shown the fragment
to only a small circle of experts in papyrology and Coptic linguistics, who
concluded that it is most likely not a forgery. But she and her
collaborators say they are eager for more scholars to weigh in and perhaps
upend their conclusions.

Even with many questions unsettled, the discovery could reignite the debate
over whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and
whether he had a female disciple. These debates date to the early centuries
of Christianity, scholars say. But they are relevant today, when global
Christianity is roiling over the place of women in ministry and the
boundaries of marriage.

The discussion is particularly animated in the Roman Catholic
Church<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/roman_catholic_church/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
where despite calls for change, the Vatican has reiterated the teaching
that the priesthood cannot be opened to women and married men because of
the model set by Jesus.

Dr. King gave an interview and showed the papyrus fragment, encased in
glass, to reporters from The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Harvard
Magazine in her garret office in the tower at Harvard Divinity School last
Thursday.

She repeatedly cautioned that this fragment should not be taken as proof
that Jesus, the historical person, was actually married. The text was
probably written centuries after Jesus lived, and all other early,
historically reliable Christian literature is silent on the question, she
said.

But the discovery is exciting, Dr. King said, because it is the first known
statement from antiquity that refers to Jesus speaking of a wife. It
provides further evidence that there was an active discussion among early
Christians about whether Jesus was celibate or married, and which path his
followers should choose.

“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.”

Dr. King first learned about what she calls “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”
when she received an e-mail in 2010 from a private collector who asked her
to translate it. Dr. King, 58, specializes in Coptic literature, and has
written books on the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary of Magdala,
Gnosticism and women in antiquity.

The owner, who has a collection of Greek, Coptic and Arabic papyri, is not
willing to be identified by name, nationality or location, because, Dr.
King said, “He doesn’t want to be hounded by people who want to buy this.”

When, where or how the fragment was discovered is unknown. The collector
acquired it in a batch of papyri in 1997 from the previous owner, a German.
It came with a handwritten note in German that names a professor of
Egyptology in Berlin, now deceased, and cited him calling the fragment “the
sole example” of a text in which Jesus claims a wife.

The owner took the fragment to the Divinity School in December 2011 and
left it with Dr. King. In March, she carried the fragment in her red
handbag to New York to show it to two papyrologists: Roger Bagnall,
director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at New York
University, and AnneMarie Luijendijk, an associate professor of religion at
Princeton University.

They examined the scrap under sharp magnification. It was very small — only
4 by 8 centimeters. The lettering was splotchy and uneven, the hand of an
amateur, but not unusual for the time period, when many Christians were
poor and persecuted.

It was written in Coptic, an Egyptian language that uses Greek characters —
and more precisely, in Sahidic Coptic, a dialect from southern Egypt, Dr.
Luijendijk said in an interview.

What convinced them it was probably genuine was the fading of the ink on
the papyrus fibers, and traces of ink adhered to the bent fibers at the
torn edges. The back side is so faint that only five words are visible, one
only partly: “my moth[er],” “three,” “forth which.”

“It would be impossible to forge,” said Dr. Luijendijk, who contributed to
Dr. King’s paper.

Dr. Bagnall reasoned that a forger would have had to be expert in Coptic
grammar, handwriting and ideas. Most forgeries he has seen were nothing
more than gibberish. And if it were a forgery intended to cause a sensation
or make someone rich, why would it have lain in obscurity for so many
years?

“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,” Dr. Bagnall said.

The piece is torn into a rough rectangle, so that the document is missing
its adjoining text on the left, right, top and bottom — most likely the
work of a dealer who divided up a larger piece to maximize his profit, Dr.
Bagnall said.

Much of the context, therefore, is missing. But Dr. King was struck by
phrases in the fragment like “My mother gave to me life,” and “Mary is
worthy of it,” which resemble snippets from the Gospels of Thomas and Mary.
Experts believe those were written in the late second century and
translated into Coptic. She surmises that this fragment is also copied from
a second-century Greek text.

The meaning of the words, “my wife,” is beyond question, Dr. King said.
“These words can mean nothing else.” The text beyond “my wife” is cut off.

Dr. King did not have the ink dated using carbon testing. She said it would
require scraping off too much, destroying the relic. She still plans to
have the ink tested by spectroscopy, which could roughly determine its age
by its chemical composition.

Dr. King submitted her paper to The Harvard Theological Review, which asked
three scholars to review it. Two questioned its authenticity, but they had
seen only low-resolution photographs of the fragment and were unaware that
expert papyrologists had seen the actual item and judged it to be genuine,
Dr. King said. One of the two questioned the grammar, translation and
interpretation.

Ariel Shisha-Halevy, an eminent Coptic linguist at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, was consulted, and said in an e-mail in September, “I believe —
on the basis of language and grammar — the text is authentic.”

Major doubts allayed, The Review plans to publish Dr. King’s article in its
January issue.

Dr. King said she would push the owner to come forward, in part to avoid
stoking conspiracy theories.

The notion that Jesus had a wife was the central conceit of the best seller
and movie “The Da Vinci Code.” But Dr. King said she wants nothing to do
with the code or its author: “At least, don’t say this proves Dan Brown was
right.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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