This Just In: Jesus Had a Wife!!!

Well, not quite. Laurie Goodstein’s carefully-written article in the New York Times, “Papyrus Referring to Jesus’ Wife is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say,” certainly has no sensationalism of that sort.

The news here is that the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” papyrus fragment has been analyzed scientifically and found to resemble other papyri from the fourth to eight centuries.

The surest conclusion we can probably draw from all this is that it must be getting close to Easter: time for the usual run of stories either debunking something Christians allegedly believe or shoring up something at odds with their beliefs.

Goodstein is careful to consider all sides, including the views of a professor of Egyptology at Brown University who thinks it’s a fake “ripe for a Monty Python sketch.” But his view is a minority view among scholars, it seems. The evidence says that this ancient fragment which has the line, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’” is for real.

Goodstein gets it right: “The test results do not prove that Jesus had a wife, … only that the fragment is more likely a snippet from an ancient manuscript than a fake.” Karen King, the Harvard Divinity School historian who caused the uproar in 2012 by unveiling the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” is also careful not to draw any unwarranted conclusions.

Of course authentic ancient manuscripts witness to all kinds of things in the wildly diverse early Church, from groups who opposed marriage and demanded celibacy of all Christians, to groups who didn’t baptize but instead washed feet, to groups who used water instead of wine for the Lord’s Supper, to this group that apparently wanted to re-write history, several centuries later, to give Jesus – contrary to every other bit of written evidence –a wife.

Now let’s see whether the general public follows the New York Times’ lead and gets that nuancing right. Or whether the story gets out that JESUS HAD A WIFE!!

And then I suppose the story will be that Priests Should Be Able To Be Married!! Meaning we could surely draw this conclusion: a church without celibate priests and religious would hold a lot less interest for the rest of the world.

awr

Anthony Ruff, OSB

Fr. Anthony Ruff, OSB, is a monk of St. John's Abbey. He teaches liturgy, liturgical music, and Gregorian chant at St. John's University School of Theology-Seminary. He is widely published and frequently presents across the country on liturgy and music. He is the author of Sacred Music and Liturgical Reform: Treasures and Transformations, and of Responsorial Psalms for Weekday Mass: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter. He does priestly ministry at the neighboring community of Benedictine sisters in St. Joseph.

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Comments

17 responses to “This Just In: Jesus Had a Wife!!!”

  1. Fran Rossi Szpylczyn

    Yes, Jesus had a wife, and when they got married the presider sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah to them. Oh wait, confusing my internet memes. *sigh*

    Sorry to be so snarky, but that video is everywhere, as is this link, and then the pope’s comments… As a result, many of my non-practicing Catholic friends, along with those who think that the Church is a joke, find any or all three things news that they think I will be overjoyed about. But no, I am a #liturgicaloldcrank !!

    Reply
    1. Karl Liam Saur

      @Fran Rossi Szpylczyn – comment #1:
      Sondheim arranged “Getting Married Today” from newly discovered Apocrypha.

      Starting at the 2:17 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuQea2eVL2Y

      Reply
  2. Scott Smith

    BTW, “ancient” in this context appears now to be the Islamic era, and the tests also appear to indicate the fragment was of poor scribal quality (i.e. not a copy for public use, which we might expect if it were a “gospel”).

    Therefore we can discount this text as evidence of anything in the first century AD, or even in early gnostic thought.

    Finally the Harvard view against it being a modern fake are far from universal – A good modern fake using ancient ink and papyrus is still possible.

    Reply
    1. Jeffrey Pinyan

      @Scott Smith – comment #2:
      BTW, “ancient” in this context appears now to be the Islamic era…

      Yes, we have plenty of ancient documents about Jesus from that era, one of which purports that he was born in the middle of a desert, spoke as an infant when presented in the Temple, and that he was not ever crucified but instead raised up to heaven without dying. If they (whoever “they” are) believed it then, we might as well believe it now…

      Reply
  3. Alan Hommerding

    As happens so often, James Martin SJ offers the clearest viewpoints on this phenomenon:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-james-martin-sj/did-jesus-have-a-wife-no_b_5125355.html

    Reply
  4. Pat Barkey

    The story will be covered on the History, Nat. Geo, or Discovery Channels next month probably. That will make the matter utterly true and definitive, because they are a unbiased scholarly organization.. If the Catholic Church denies it, is obviously wrong and hiding some Ancient Truth that it covered up for centuries because of wanted earthly power and control over others.

    Reply
    1. Jeffrey Pinyan

      @Pat Barkey – comment #6:
      Next month? Why wait so long? This month has Passover and Easter. They’ll probably hastily scrape together whatever resources they can muster and have something on the air for Holy Week.

      Reply
  5. Don Donaldson

    The pressing question becomes, “What did she think of the new translation of the Roman Missal?” 🙂

    Reply
  6. crystal watson

    It seems like everyone is so anxious to deny the fragment could be authentic that the possibility of what it would mean if Jesus had been married is never even considered. James Martin offers a defense of Jesus being celibate and most evidence seems to support that belief but it’s not a “fact”. The church having so much invested in the mystique of celibacy should at least make us take defenses of it with a grain of salt.

    Reply
    1. Scott Smith

      @crystal watson – comment #9:

      The fragment, as it happens, has nothing to do with if Jesus was in fact married.

      If you want to have that discussion, it is fine, but this fragment does not help (even if it is “authentic” as defined, it would still be far too late to provide any evidence of Jesus’s life).

      Reply
    2. Mark Emery

      @crystal watson – comment #9:

      Father Martin’s viewpoints on various and sundry topics almost always strike me as being superficial and uncreative, and always developed with an eye to Establishment Approbation and Lay Adulation; which is regrettable considering his popularity. Whenever I read his stuff, it comes across like class notes from “Contemporary Catholicism 101”.

      This topic is a good example. It’s clear, as Father Martin argues from the arguments of others, that Jesus wasn’t married during His public ministry. All of his (and their) arguments are sound.

      But why not venture further afield (and into an admittedly speculative area) and wonder if Jesus might have been married earlier in life, prior to His public ministry, but lost His wife to death before He was widely known by others?

      Totally speculative, as I acknowledged. But how might the supposition that He was once married illuminate some of His teachings, such as, for one example, the obvious passion with which He spoke the words recorded in Mark 10:5-12? Did the real life experience of marriage prompt Him to reach back to the sacred, pristine reality of human sexual union and explicate it with such tender zeal?… Not to mention the many other passages in which the Lord metaphorically wove the images of wedding and marriage into his teachings…

      Read Jesus with the imaginative assumption the He was once married, and it illuminates His teachings in a way which the “mystique of celibacy” cannot.

      Reply
  7. Lee Bacchi

    Don Donaldson : The pressing question becomes, “What did she think of the new translation of the Roman Missal?”

    Or what does she think about women’s feet being washed as part of the Mandatum on Holy Thursday! 🙂

    Reply
  8. Lee Bacchi

    Pat Barkey : The story will be covered on the History, Nat. Geo, or Discovery Channels next month probably. That will make the matter utterly true and definitive, because they are a unbiased scholarly organization.. If the Catholic Church denies it, is obviously wrong and hiding some Ancient Truth that it covered up for centuries because of wanted earthly power and control over others.

    Well, if recent offerings are any example, the History Channel has given up on scholarly programs!!

    Reply
  9. crystal watson

    From a Q and A by Harvard Divinity School …
    “Does the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife prove that Jesus was married?”

    No, this fragment does not provide evidence that Jesus was married. The comparatively late date of this Coptic papyrus (a seventh to eighth century c.e. fragment of a gospel perhaps composed in Greek as early as the second half of the second century) argues against its value as evidence for the life of the historical Jesus. Nor is there any reliable historical evidence to support the claim that he was not married, even though Christian tradition has long held that position. The oldest and most reliable evidence is entirely silent about Jesus’s marital status. The first claims that Jesus was not married are attested only in the late second century c.e., so if the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife was also composed in the second century c.e., it does provide evidence, however, that the whole question about Jesus’s marital status arose as part of the debates about sexuality and marriage that took place among early Christians at that time. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better to marry or to be celibate, but it was over a century after Jesus’ death before they began using Jesus’s marital status to support their different positions. Christian tradition preserved only those voices that claimed Jesus never married, but now another newly discovered writing, The Gospel of Philip, shows that some Christians claimed Jesus was married, probably already in the late second century.
    – http://gospelofjesusswife.hds.harvard.edu/QA

    Reply
  10. Joseph Anderson

    Dr. Larry Hurtado’s observations have better detail and more depth and understanding than either the NY Times article or Father Martin, S.J. He is also quite good at making references to and providing links to other scholars who are in the process of responding to these latest attempts by the folks at Harvard to make sense of this Coptic fragment.

    http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2014/04/11/jesus-wife-fragment-further-observations/

    Reply
  11. crystal watson

    I’d add that Mark Goodacre, NT professor at Duke, also has some good links at his blog … http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/

    Reply
  12. John Larkin

    If Jesus had been married it,s beyond all doubt that such information would have surfaced in the early nascent church.

    There is not one iota of gospel or traditional oral evidence to support this contention and 2000 years later purported historical revisionism in this area is patently risible.

    Reply

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