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

[Paul Rumelhart]

I thought this was already "known" from the Gospel of Philip, one of the New Testament apocrypha from the Nag Hammadi scrolls.  It was quoted in The DaVinci Code, too, I think.

" 59: The
wisdom which (humans) call barren is herself the Mother of the
Angels.¹ And
the companion of
the [Christ] is Mariam the Magdalene. The [Lord loved] Mariam more
than [all the (other)] Disciples, [and he] kissed her often on her
[mouth].² The
other [women] saw his love for Mariam,c they
say to him: Why do thou love [her] more than all of us? || The
Saviorº replied,³ he
says to them: Why do I not love you as (I do) her?"

From this web page:  http://www.metalog.org/files/philip.html

I'll have to look in my copy of the Nag Hammadi library when I get a chance and see how it's translated there.

The more interesting Apocryphal  book, in my opinion, is The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: http://www.gnosis.org/library/inftomb.htm, which covers some of Jesus' life when he was around 8 years old.  

Paul




________________________________
 From: Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com>
To: vision2020 at moscow.com 
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 4:55 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] Jesus Had a Wife, Newly Discovered Gospel Suggests or Now The Fin Begins
 


  
Jesus Had a Wife, Newly Discovered Gospel Suggests
Life's Little Mysteries Staff
Date: 18 September 2012 Time: 04:30 PM ET       
 
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? [Jesus Christ the Man: Does the Physical Evidence Hold Up?]
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," 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."
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.

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




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