NY Times Update on "Jesus Wife" fragment

[Wisconsin Beth]

Just in case anyone's interested.   

www.history.com/news/tests-reveal-gospel-of-jesuss-wife-not-fake from 4/15/2014

In September 2012, Harvard University divinity professor Karen L. King made a stunning announcement, revealing the existence of an Egyptian papyrus fragment that contains the first-known explicit reference to Jesus being married. The fragile relic, measuring only 1.6 inches by 3.2 inches, appears to have been cut from a larger document and contains eight incomplete lines of Coptic script scribbled by a nubby pen. The fourth line of the text contains the words “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife,” followed in the next line by “she is able to be my disciple.”

King’s revelation of “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” generated instant controversy. (The use of the word “gospel” is a shorthand reference by scholars and not a claim of canonical status.) Although initial assessments indicated the fragment was indeed ancient, fellow scholars and the Vatican newspaper were among the critics who declared the document to be a modern-day forgery. Now, according to an article published last week in the Harvard Theological Review, scientific testing of the ink and papyrus and an analysis of its handwriting and language has determined the controversial fragment to be authentic with no evidence of fabrication.

Microscopic imaging revealed no suspicious ink pooling on the document’s lower fibers that would have indicated a modern-day application. The scientific analysis dates the papyrus to the seventh or eighth century A.D., and the carbon composition of the ink was found to be consistent with that time period. Researchers believe, however, that the date of the fragment is unlikely to be the date when the gospel was first composed. That date could have been as early as the second century A.D.

King stresses, as she has done since revealing the existence of the papyrus in 2012, that the artifact does not provide any evidence at all that the historical Jesus in fact had a wife, just as no historical proof exists to support claims that he never married. The fragment is too small and was written too far removed from Jesus’s time to have evidentiary value. Rather, the relic demonstrates that early Christians debated the roles of marriage, sexuality and family in spiritual life, and some believed that Jesus was married. “The main topic of the fragment is to affirm that women who are mothers and wives can be disciples of Jesus—a topic that was hotly debated in early Christianity as celibate virginity increasingly became highly valued,” King said.

[Deleted]

The Divinici Code was not fictional.

[damnotagain]

He was a man ! What man doesn't like to surround himself with GOOD friends and good looking women?  

[Virgil Showlion]

Interesting, from an academic standpoint anyway. As the article states, there's no scriptural evidence to suggest Jesus Christ didn't have a wife. Many of the apostles did.

[Wisconsin Beth]

Here's another update.

www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/us/fresh-doubts-raised-about-papyrus-scrap-known-as-gospel-of-jesuss-wife.html?_r=0 

New evidence discovered by a skeptical young scholar has raised fresh doubts about the authenticity of the scrap of papyrus known as the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” a relic that has provoked fascination and fury since it was unveiled nearly two years ago by an eminent historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School.

The latest finding comes only weeks after the Harvard Theological Review published a long-awaited lineup of articles by experts reporting that scientific testing and close examination of the papyrus had found no apparent evidence of forgery. But detractors of the Jesus’ Wife fragment remained unconvinced, and the contents of those articles gave them new material to investigate.

Even the historian who first brought the papyrus to public attention, calling it a valuable clue that some early Christians believed Jesus was married, said this latest forgery accusation, by an American professor doing research in Germany, raises significant concerns and merits further examination, but is only one scenario and is not conclusive.

[Virgil Showlion]

From the article:

It happens that Dr. Askeland wrote his Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge on the Coptic versions of John’s Gospel, so he decided to compare this square fragment with another John text called the Codex Qau, an authentic relic which was discovered in 1923 in a jar buried in an Egyptian grave site. Amazingly, the text of the small John fragment replicated every other line from a leaf of the Qau codex, and for 17 lines the breaks in the text were identical. It “defied coincidence,” he said.

Dr. Askeland’s theory is that a modern-day forger copied from a photograph of the Qua codex off the Internet. If the John text is forged, he reasons, so is the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, which seems to be written by the same hand.

Not only that, but he found that both these John texts were written in the Lycopolitan dialect, which experts believe died out before the seventh or eighth century, when the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife was supposedly written, according to radiocarbon testing.

Hence the ball is back in the proponents' court.

Interesting, although sad that somebody might try to forge something of this nature.

[Wisconsin Beth]

Yes.