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

[Nicholas Gier]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reminder of this passage. Good to see that you research more
than just climate science.

My major professor in graduate school was James M. Robinson, who was chosen
by the UN to head up the translation of the Gnostic Gospels.

His achievement is often favorably compared to the small group of scholars
who kept the Dead Sea Scrolls to themselves and delayed publication for
years.  In contrast Robinson sent out the texts all over the world and
involved dozens of professors and graduate students.  The most famous
faculty member was Harvard's Elaine Pagels.

If I had had Greek in college, I most likely would have been assigned a
gnostic gospel for my dissertation, put in a crash course in Coptic, and I
would now be driving a taxi for a living.

Thanks for posting this.

Nick

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com>wrote:

> 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 Savior**º* <http://www.metalog.org/files/philip.html#Savior> *
> 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
>
>
>   <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)
> art.deco.studios at gmail.com
>
>
>
>
> =======================================================
> List services made available by First Step Internet,
> serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>               http://www.fsr.net
>           mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> =======================================================
>
>
> =======================================================
>  List services made available by First Step Internet,
>  serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>                http://www.fsr.net
>           mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> =======================================================
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120919/1f6e8ff5/attachment.html>