The Gospel of Jesus Wife discovered...

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I would say that this is much ado about nothing. Even if someone came up with proof that Jesus had a wife (and I don’t expect that to happen), it would not alter the fact that he is our Lord and Savior.
 
Why should we trust a IV Century unknown piece of “document” rather than extensive I-III Century authentic material?
 
To people who say what difference does it make: It makes a pretty big difference because it raises serious questions. If Jesus was married, and Jesus was God, then that means God can fall in love with a human woman, and love her above all the others. Not love in the way Jesus loved everybody, but love in the way you love your spouse. It would be an extremely unequal marriage; omniscient, omnipotent God, and a normal human woman. Not only that, but that also opens the possibility of God reproducing with a human woman, and what kinds of offspring that would produce. The idea that Jesus got married seems quite incompatible with the doctrine that Jesus is God.

But it’s a silly idea anyway, brought up by people just trying to stir up trouble. If Jesus was married, I’m sure there would actually be some evidence for this besides some obscure papyrus that nobody ever heard of until now. For one thing, I’m sure they would honor His wife very much. For another thing; Jesus was their number one spiritual leader. If my number one spiritual leader, who was God incarnate, was married, and I was already taking notes of His life, I know I would be asking how to have a perfect marriage and such. But no such thing is written anywhere.
 
farpinho said:
Why should we trust a IV Century unknown piece of “document” rather than extensive I-III Century authentic material?
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But that would mean she couldn’t write a book and help NatGeo with it’s special issue and TV show.
 
Didn’t we already know that some Gnostics believed Jesus to have been married? Why would a fourth-century fragment which MIGHT NOT even have quoted Jesus as actually referring to a literal wife–it could have been the first word or two of an allegory–be such an astounding discovery even for revisionists?
 
kbwall said:
To people who say what difference does it make: It makes a pretty big difference because it raises serious questions. If Jesus was married, and Jesus was God, then that means God can fall in love with a human woman, and love her above all the others. Not love in the way Jesus loved everybody, but love in the way you love your spouse. It would be an extremely unequal marriage; omniscient, omnipotent God, and a normal human woman. Not only that, but that also opens the possibility of God reproducing with a human woman, and what kinds of offspring that would produce. The idea that Jesus got married seems quite incompatible with the doctrine that Jesus is God.
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This is a really excellent point. Considering who Jesus Christ is–the very son of God, God incarnate–he really couldn’t marry. To marry would be inconsistent with who he is. The creator of the universe taking a human bride? If Jesus Christ had taken a bride I believe that would throw everything we know about him into question. This uncorroborated tiny fragment is not enough to make us question.

I am reading a book by Jeffrey Burton Russell that debunks myths and lies about Christianity. I heard Dr. Russell say in an interview that Christianity has been so open and stable that it isn’t news. Therefore the media is always on the lookout for the fantastic even if it has little or no basis.
 
Having read some Gnostic ‘gospels’ I can say that, to even my igniorant ear, ‘Jesus’ doesn’t even SOUND like Jesus.

The fact that so many are saying, ‘So what if He was married’ indicates to me that they don’t yet get it.
 
GaryTaylor said:
Karen L. King, a historian at Harvard Divinity School, presented her finding, four words that appear on the fragment translate to, “Jesus said to them, my wife.” The words, written in Coptic on a papyrus fragment about one and a half inches by three inches.

hds.harvard.edu/news-events/articles/2012/09/16/hds-scholar-announces-existence-of-new-early-christian-gospel-from-egypt

Well I suppose findings will continue to occur for a long time to come.
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Couldn’t it be referring to one of the apostles’ wife instead?? :hmmm:
Isn’t it suspicious that just that part was preserved and the rest is gone? :hmmm:
What if it was one of the apostles introducing his wife, and then Jesus said “I think [your wife] could be one of my apostles”? 🤷
 
TheoloJer said:
According to huffingtonpost, there is a new document that was discovered suggesting that Jesus was married.

Gospel of Jesus wife discovered

I’m not sure where Christians stand on Jesus being married or single, but judging by the article, it sounds to alarmistic too me. Even if Christ was married, that still doesn’t hinder his teachings nor resurrection.

Thoughts?
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The article is deeply flawed on a couple of obvious counts (I’m sure there are more, but these are the two that jump out at me):
  1. If you read closely, you will see that Prof. King does not claim that this text is serious historical evidence for Jesus being married. All she claims is that it shows that some Christians believed he was, and thus perhaps evens the playing field a little by counterbalancing those voices that said he wasn’t. The earliest sources are, of course, silent either way, which is a vote against the idea that he was married, though not a decisive one (plenty of things about Jesus aren’t recorded, and most men his age would have been married, so one could argue that Jesus left his wife behind, she played no role in his ministry, and so she’s not mentioned–what I think is not at all justified based on the evidence is the romantic fantasy that he was married to Mary Magdalene).
  2. The DaVinci Code wasn’t just criticized by Vatican officials. It was criticized by anyone who knew anything at all about the history of early Christianity. The ex-Christian agnostic scholar Bart Erhman wrote a whole book attacking it. Even Elaine Pagels, the scholar whose work is closest to supporting Dan Brown’s outlook, pointed out the huge historical flaws in the book and dismissed most of its claims. (Her counter-argument is that what really bothers orthodox Christians is what is true in the book, which I think is a false argument and shows her desire to side with Brown as much as possible. But the point is that even she recognizes that there are lots of historical errors in the book and that Brown reads the ancient Gnostic texts quite badly.)
 
I’m quoting a book by Catherine M.Murphy,PhD, she makes some really good points regarding this:
Was Mary Magdalene Mrs. Jesus?
Given the intimate relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene at the moment of the resurrection, particularly in John’s gospel (John 20:1–18), many people have wondered if there was more to the pairing than the gospels let on. The idea that Jesus and Mary were married has been especially popular in literature and in the entertainment industry with books and films such as Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ (1955), Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), and the TV documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus (2007). Using the following historical ground rules, you can evaluate how likely the Mrs. Jesus scenario is:
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- Eyewitness testimony must be in multiple, early sources: No early sources say Jesus and Mary were married, and one even suggests that Jesus promoted celibacy (Matthew 19:10–12). Paul seems to know that Jesus wasn’t married, though, because when he argues that he could travel with a wife like “the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas [Peter],” Jesus is conspicuously missing from the list of husbands (1 Corinthians 9:5; though admittedly, this is an argument from silence). And even though the later Gnostic gospels say that Jesus and Mary kissed, they never say that it’s a sexual kiss or that Jesus and Mary were married. These later gospels I refer to include the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Philip.
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- Embarrassing things are more likely to be true: Jesus traveled with women and it made the gospel authors a little nervous, but they explain it for the reader (even if they delay mentioning it). If Jesus and Mary had been married, the fact that she traveled with him wouldn’t have been unusual at all, and it wouldn’t have required all those textual acrobatics. It may have been a little strange for a Jewish man not to marry, but we know of Jewish groups that practiced celibacy during Jesus’s time (like the Essenes). Unusual and awkward things that get reported anyway make traditions more credible, not less.
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In the end, the canonical gospels respect Mary Magdalene for her witness to the Christian faith. The modern novels and films can only imagine her to be significant if she’s married and has children, as if her sexual relationship with Jesus rather than her testimony were her chief claim to fame.
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boston.com/2012/09/19/harvard-claim-jesus-wife-papyrus-scrutinized/JNwbTDjsmTA6JyAuR4XGUJ/story.html
Stephen Emmel, a professor of Coptology at the University of Muenster who was on the international advisory panel that reviewed the 2006 discovery of the Gospel of Judas, said the text accurately quotes Jesus as saying ‘‘my wife.’’ But he questioned whether the document was authentic.
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‘‘There’s something about this fragment in its appearance and also in the grammar of the Coptic that strikes me as being not completely convincing somehow,’’ he said in an interview on the sidelines of the conference.
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Another participant at the congress, Alin Suciu, a papyrologist at the University of Hamburg, was more blunt.
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‘‘I would say it’s a forgery. The script doesn’t look authentic’’ when compared to other samples of Coptic papyrus script dated to the 4th century, he said.
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‘‘There are thousands of scraps of papyrus where you find crazy things,’’ said Funk, co-director of a project editing the Nag Hammadi Coptic library at Laval University in Quebec. ‘‘It can be anything.’’
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He, too, doubted the authenticity, saying the form of the fragment was ‘‘suspicious.’’
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Ancient papyrus fragments have been frequently cut up by unscrupulous dealers seeking to make more money.
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The fragment’s date wasn’t even validated yet… 🤷
 
Contarini said:
The article is deeply flawed on a couple of obvious counts (I’m sure there are more, but these are the two that jump out at me):
  1. If you read closely, you will see that Prof. King does not claim that this text is serious historical evidence for Jesus being married. All she claims is that it shows that some Christians believed he was, and thus perhaps evens the playing field a little by counterbalancing those voices that said he wasn’t. The earliest sources are, of course, silent either way, which is a vote against the idea that he was married, though not a decisive one (plenty of things about Jesus aren’t recorded, and most men his age would have been married, so one could argue that Jesus left his wife behind, she played no role in his ministry, and so she’s not mentioned–what I think is not at all justified based on the evidence is the romantic fantasy that he was married to Mary Magdalene).
  2. The DaVinci Code wasn’t just criticized by Vatican officials. It was criticized by anyone who knew anything at all about the history of early Christianity. The ex-Christian agnostic scholar Bart Erhman wrote a whole book attacking it. Even Elaine Pagels, the scholar whose work is closest to supporting Dan Brown’s outlook, pointed out the huge historical flaws in the book and dismissed most of its claims. (Her counter-argument is that what really bothers orthodox Christians is what is true in the book, which I think is a false argument and shows her desire to side with Brown as much as possible. But the point is that even she recognizes that there are lots of historical errors in the book and that Brown reads the ancient Gnostic texts quite badly.)
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Contarini,
Excellent post.

I really don’t understand why this fragment is causing such a stir.

I think all pastors/priests need to encourage their congregations to study the history of Christianity and the Biblical Canon----and that study should include the heretical sects. I think this would relieve some of the shock factor, when such fragments are discovered.
 
farpinho said:
Isn’t it suspicious that just that part was preserved and the rest is gone? :hmmm: 🤷
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I think this is an excellent point. Kind of reminds me of the other “gospel” (I don’t remember which one) where it says “Jesus kissed her on the ____.” Pretty odd really that only that line would survive. I understand the possibility, but I find it incredibly odd.

Makes me wonder if two thousand years from now someone is going to find a page from Dan Brown’s book and assume it was a historical writing. Just because someone wrote it down doesn’t make it historically accurate.
 
GaryTaylor said:
Karen L. King, a historian at Harvard Divinity School, presented her finding, four words that appear on the fragment translate to, “Jesus said to them, my wife.” The words, written in Coptic on a papyrus fragment about one and a half inches by three inches.

hds.harvard.edu/news-events/articles/2012/09/16/hds-scholar-announces-existence-of-new-early-christian-gospel-from-egypt

Well I suppose findings will continue to occur for a long time to come.
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GaryTaylor,

We know gnostic writings have survived. The discovery of Nag Hammadi texts back in the 1940’s, also written in Coptic, indicated Jesus was married—as well as far more scandalous things. These heretical gnostic texts are nothing new.
 
If He is Who He says, He was not married.

Those who say it doesn’t matter miss the point.
 
Sailor_Kenshin said:
If He is Who He says, He was not married.

Those who say it doesn’t matter miss the point.
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I don’t think the “point” was missed…the writers of the gospels wrote that Jesus claimed such and such…they reflected what the early Christian community came to believe about Jesus of Nazareth…the writers of the Gnostic gospels also wrote what their particular community came to believe Jesus of Nazareth was.

While I realize those who accept the canonical gospels record the very words of Jesus, others of us believe that the gospels reflect what the various Christian communities came to believe about Jesus…not necessarily what Jesus believed about himself.
 
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