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<div class="timestamp">September 18, 2012</div>
<h1>A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ Wife</h1>
<h6 class="byline">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/laurie_goodstein/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by LAURIE GOODSTEIN"><span>LAURIE GOODSTEIN</span></a></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
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 ...’ ” </p>
<p>
The faded papyrus <a title="About the fragment" href="http://www.hds.harvard.edu/faculty-research/research-projects/the-gospel-of-jesuss-wife">fragment</a>
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.” </p>
<p>
The <a title="Karen L. King’s paper (PDF)." href="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">finding was made public</a> in Rome on Tuesday at the <a title="More about the meeting of Coptic scholars." href="http://www.copticcongress2012.uniroma1.it/">International Congress of Coptic Studies</a> by <a title="Faculty page." href="http://www.hds.harvard.edu/people/faculty/karen-l-king">Karen L. King</a>,
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
The discussion is particularly animated in the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/roman_catholic_church/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about the Roman Catholic Church." class="meta-org">Roman Catholic Church</a>,
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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.” </p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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.” </p>
<p>
“It would be impossible to forge,” said Dr. Luijendijk, who contributed to Dr. King’s paper. </p>
<p>
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? </p>
<p>
“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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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.”
</p>
<p>
Major doubts allayed, The Review plans to publish Dr. King’s article in its January issue. </p>
<p>
Dr. King said she would push the owner to come forward, in part to avoid stoking conspiracy theories. </p>
<p>
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.” </p>
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