Last September, there was a lot of fuzz in the media concerning a papyrus fragment that would describe Jesus as having been married. What is it about? After a papyri snippet of 8 by 4 cm containing a Coptic text, turned up, the (anonymous) current owner contacted professor Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School, granting her the permission to study and publish the fragment. The first lines of the fragmentary text read as follows in English translation:
“not to me. My mother gave me li[fe”
The disciples said to Jesus: “[
deny. Maria is (not?) worth it [
…” Jesus said to them: “My wife..[
…she will be able to be my disciple ..[
Given the obscure origin and circumstances of this ‘finding’, one automatically questions the authenticity of the text. According to Karen King, the papyrus might have originated in Egypt in the 4th century CE and might contain a copy of an earlier text from the second half of the 2nd century CE. To date, this is the only ancient snippet known to us that contains a text describing Jesus as referring to his own wife. The text demonstrates a strong affinity with other apocryphal texts from the same period that underscore the importance of female disciples of Jesus, as for example the apocryphal ‘gospel of Mary’ does. But let it be clear, 2nd century texts of that sort make absolutely no mention of whether or not the historical Jesus was married. They show us there existed a great variety of Christian factions and even subfactions holding diverse views on Jesus, which might possibly be influenced by the discussions on the ideal way of life (whether married or unmarried) that was hotly debated among Christians in 2nd and 3th century Egypt.
Other scholars think, however, that the text on the papyrus is a forgery. They find it not only striking that the little snippet contains several lines of text which are both relatively well readable and understandable. Moreover, it seems very coincidental, that, of all persons, those few lines happen to mention Jesus, his mother, his disciples and his wife all together. According to Francis Watson, professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Durham University, the Coptic text on the papyrus fragment has been copied line by line from another Coptic gospel, viz. the gospel of Thomas. According to Watson, the author of this text has taken over words and sentences from the gospel of Thomas and has simply placed them in a different order to create a new text. After this, Michael Grondin, compiler of a translation of the gospel of Thomas, gave strong evidence that the little papyrus is a forgery. He points to a spelling mistake in the first line of the Coptic text and puts forward that the exact spelling mistake is present in the easily accessible interlinear pdf-version of the gospel of Thomas (Coptic text with English translation) which he put online years ago. Did a modern forger make use of this modern text that is available online? A chemical investigation of the age of the ink on the papyrus might give the decisive answer. Undoubtedly to be continued…
Text translated by Laura Tack from Ezra 46 (16/2012)
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