<br>
<div id="header">
<div class="header_logo_cont">
<a href="http://www.livescience.com/">
</a>
</div>
<div class="header_search">
<div class="search_containers">
<div class="search_cont_top">
</div>
<form action="/search.html" method="GET">
<div class="search_cont_bot">
<div class="header_searchbut">
</div>
<div class="header_searchbox">
<input name="q" value="Search" type="text">
</div>
</div>
</form>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="album_cont" id="nointelliTXT">
<span style="display:inline-block" class="top_nav_links">
<span><a class="section_home" href="http://www.livescience.com/"></a></span></span><div class="album_title">
<h1>Jesus Had a Wife, Newly Discovered Gospel Suggests</h1>
</div>
<div style="float:left;width:300px">
<div class="by_line">Life's Little Mysteries Staff</div>
<div class="album_time">Date: 18 September 2012 Time: 04:30 PM ET</div>
</div>
<span style="float:right;padding-right:10px">
<a href="http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/">
</a>
</span>
</div>
<div class="aa_share">
<div class="aa_text" style="width:100%">
<div class="aa_fbl" style="width:140px">
</div>
<div class="aa_fbl" style="width:100px">
</div>
<div class="aa_fbl" style="width:80px">
</div>
<div class="aa_fbl" style="width:115px">
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="float:left;width:0px;height:0px;overflow:hidden"><img src="http://www.livescience.com/23284-jesus-wife-gospel-suggests.html" id="popped_image"></div>
<span style="float:left;margin:0px 10px 10px 0px;color:#727f6e">
<table style="width:1px" border="0">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<a class="make_big" rel="#custom0">
<span id="mag_glass" class="centered_magnify"></span>
<span class="img_overlay_black overlay_iFF_black"></span>
</a>
</td>
</tr><tr>
<td style="margin-top:10px;border:1px solid lightgray;padding:10px"><br></td></tr></tbody></table></span><p>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."</p>
<p>
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.</p>
<p>
According to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/historian-says-piece-of-papyrus-refers-to-jesus-wife.html?_r=2&hp">New York Times</a>,
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.
</p><p>
</p><div class="center_adsense" id="nointelliTXT" style="margin:10px 0px;padding-bottom:0px;border:0">
<span id="ad_sense1" style="display:inline-block"></span>
</div>
<p>
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? [<a href="http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2319-jesus-christ-man-physical-evidence-hold.html">Jesus Christ the Man: Does the Physical Evidence Hold Up?</a>]</p>
<p>
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.</p>
<p>
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.</p>
<p>
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 <a href="http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/666-which-jobs-require-celibacy-.html">celibate</a> or married, and which path his followers should choose, King told the Times.</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 <a href="http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/1607-why-sex-evolved.html">have sex</a>."</p>
<p>
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.</p>
<p>
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.</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," Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute
for the Study of the Ancient World, at New York University, told the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/historian-says-piece-of-papyrus-refers-to-jesus-wife.html?_r=2&hp">New York Times</a>.</p>
<p>
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.</p>
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.<br><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br><br><img src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><br>
<br>