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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/18/the-gospel-of-jesus-wife_n_1891325.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

"The Gospel Of Jesus' Wife," New Early Christian Text, Indicates Jesus May Have Been Married

Posted: 09/18/2012 1:55 pm Updated: 09/18/2012 2:35 pm

Jaweed Kaleem
Jaweed.Kaleem@huffingtonpost.com

A discovery by a Harvard researcher may shed light on a controversial aspect of the life of Jesus Christ.

Harvard Divinity School professor Karen L. King says she has found an ancient papyrus fragment from the second century that, when translated, appears to indicate that Jesus was married.

The text from the New Testament is being dubbed "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife." The part of it that's drawing attention says, "Jesus said to them, 'my wife'" in the Coptic language. The text, which is printed on papyrus the size of a business card, has not been chemically tested to verify its dating, but King and other scholars have said they are confident it is a genuine artifact.

"Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim," King said at a conference in Rome on Tuesday. "This new gospel doesn’t prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus’s death before they began appealing to Jesus’ marital status to support their positions."

King, who focuses on Coptic literature, Gnosticism and women in the Bible, has published on the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary of Magdala, Gnosticism and women in antiquity. She presented her research Tuesday evening in Rome, where scholars are gathered for the International Congress of Coptic Studies.

The idea that Jesus was unmarried and chaste is largely accepted by Christian denominations and forms the backbone of the practice of celibacy among Roman Catholic priests.

"Beyond internal Catholic Church politics, a married Jesus invites a reconsideration of orthodox teachings about gender and sex," said journalist and author Michael D'Antonio, who writes about the Catholic Church, in a blog on The Huffington Post. "If Jesus had a wife, then there is nothing extra Christian about male privilege, nothing spiritually dangerous about the sexuality of women, and no reason for anyone to deny himself or herself a sexual identity."

The quote about Jesus' wife is part of a description of a conversation between Jesus and his disciples. In the conversation, Jesus talks about his mother twice and speaks once about his wife. One of them is identified as "Mary." His disciples discuss whether Mary is worthy of being part of their community, to which Jesus replies, “she will able to be my disciple.”

The fragment has eight incomplete lines of writing on one side and is badly damaged on the other side, with only three faded words and a few letters of ink that are visible, even with the use of infrared photography and computer-aided enhancement.

The private owner of the papyrus first approached King in 2010. King said she didn't believe the document was authentic, but the owner persisted. She then asked the owner to bring the papyrus to Harvard, where she became convinced it was a genuine early Christian text fragment. Along with Princeton University professor Anne Marie Luijendijk and Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, King claims to have confirmed the document is real. The document's owner has not been named and King said he does not want to be identified.

It's unclear when the text was initially discovered. The owner who showed it to King found it in 1997 in a collection of papyri that he acquired from the previous owner, who was German. The papyri included a handwritten German description that had the name of a now-deceased professor of Egyptology in Berlin who called the fragment a "sole example" of a document that claims Jesus was married.

The scholars believe the text is from Egyptian Christians before the year 200, as it is written in the language used at that time. Since writing appears on both sides of the fragment, scholars believe it came from a codex, a kind of book, and not a scroll. The scholars also believe the document is a translation of an earlier one that was likely written in Greek.

King notes in her research that the idea of Jesus' celibacy hasn't always existed, and that early Christians debated whether they should marry or practice celibacy. It was not until around the year 200 that Christian followers began to say Jesus was unmarried, according to a record King cites from Clement of Alexandria. In his writing, Clement -- an early theologian -- said that marriage was a fornication put in place by the devil, and that people should emulate Jesus by not marrying.

One or two decades later, Tertullian of Carthage in North Africa declared that Jesus was "entirely unmarried" and told Christians to remain single. But Tertullian did not come out against sex altogether and allowed couples to get married one time, denouncing divorce and remarriage as overindulgent. A century later, the First Epistle of Paul to Timothy said in the New Testament that people who forbid marriage are going by the "doctrines of demons," but did not include anything about Jesus being married in order to make the point.

The point of view that ultimately became dominant was that celibacy is preferred as a high sexual virtue among Christians, but that marriage is needed for the sake of reproduction.

"The discovery of this new gospel," King said, "offers an occasion to rethink what we thought we knew by asking what role claims about Jesus's marital status played historically in early Christian controversies over marriage, celibacy, and family. Christian tradition preserved only those voices that claimed Jesus never married. The Gospel of Jesus's Wife now shows that some Christians thought otherwise."

The life of historical Jesus is often a matter of controversy, and this is not the first time it's been proposed that Jesus was married. Most recently, Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code" depicted Jesus as being married to Mary Magdalene. The book was published as fiction, but nonetheless attracted loud criticism from Vatican officials.

TCP

On July 9, 2010, during summer break, an e-mail from a stranger arrived in Karen King’s Harvard in-box. Because of her prominence, she gets a steady trickle of what she calls “kooky” e-mails: a woman claiming to be Mary Magdalene, a man with a code he says unlocks the mysteries of the Bible.

This e-mail looked more serious, but King remained skeptical. The writer identified himself as a manuscript collector. He said he had come into the possession of a Gnostic gospel that appeared to contain an “argument” between Jesus and a disciple about Magdalene. Would she take a look at some photographs?

King replied that she needed more information: What was its date and provenance? The man responded the same day, saying he’d purchased it in 1997 from a German-American collector who acquired it in the 1960s in Communist East Germany. He sent along an electronic file of photographs and an unsigned translation with the bombshell phrase, “Jesus said this to them: My wife…” (King would refine the translation as “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife … ’”)

“My reaction is, This is highly likely to be a forgery,” King recalled of her first impressions. “That’s kind of what we have these days: Jesus’ tomb, James’s Ossuary.” She was referring to two recent “discoveries,” announced with great fanfare, that were later exposed as hoaxes or, at best, wishful thinking. “OK, Jesus married? I thought, Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Even after reviewing the e-mailed photographs, “I was highly suspicious, you know, that the Harvard imprimatur was being asked to be put on something that then would be worth a lot of money,” she said. “I didn’t know who this individual was and I was busy working on other stuff, so I let it slide for quite a while.”

In late June 2011, nearly a year after his first e-mail, the collector gave her a nudge. “My problem right now is this,” he wrote in an e-mail King shared with me, after stripping out any identifying details. (The collector has requested, and King granted him, anonymity.) “A European manuscript dealer has offered a considerable amount for this fragment. It’s almost too good to be true.” The collector didn’t want the fragment to disappear in a private archive or collection “if it really is what we think it is,” he wrote. “Before letting this happen, I would like to either donate it to a reputable manuscript collection or wait at least until it is published, before I sell it.” Had she made any progress?

Four months later, after making a closer study of the photographs, she at last replied. The text was intriguing, but she could not proceed on photographs alone. She told the collector she would need an expert papyrologist to authenticate the fragment by hand, along with more details about its legal status and history.

William Stoneman, the director of Harvard’s Houghton Library, which houses manuscripts dating as far back as 3000 B.C., helped King with a set of forms that would permit Harvard to formally receive the fragment.

King brushed aside the collector’s offer to send it through the mail—“You don’t do that! You hardly want to send a letter in the mail!” So last December, he delivered it by hand.

“We signed the paperwork, had coffee and he left,” she recalls.

The collector knew nothing about the fragment’s discovery. It was part of a batch of Greek and Coptic papyri that he said he had purchased in the late 1990s from one H. U. Laukamp, of Berlin.



http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-a ... z26qlDi22d


pictures and more info here:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2 ... ied-jesus/

Adding a little more perspective:





https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/h ... emityn.www