4th century Coptic Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ Wife

Some quick thoughts:
Is this manuscript authentic?
Manuscripts today speak of Jesus’ wife; that does not make them anymore true than a 1700 year old document.
People had great imaginations in the AD 300s just as they do today.
There were many manuscripts in the AD 300s, just as in the AD 2000s.
There were heretics, and those on the “edge” of orthodoxy then, just as today.
Honest books and dishonest or untruthful books were written back then, just as today.
Is there an alternate translation or interpretation?
Is the lettering on the manuscript obscured or altered.
But then, Jesus does have a wife; the church is called the bride of Christ. Could that be what the manuscript refers to?

Finally, as believers in God’s inerrant Word, we don’t have to fear archaeological discoveries. Archaeology has matched up with God’s Word time and time again. And the Bible is our final rule.
Of course, I know you guys already know this.

Interesting article; I look forward to further developments.
David R. Brumbelow

So?

I read the article, the fragment has been vetted and is seen as being of the period in question.

You have a very old Papyrus fragment that mentions Jesus and “wife”

You have much older manuscripts that are the basis of the NT. They don’t say He had a wife. I would think that had He a wife, it would have been significant enough to be mentioned by Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.

The Coptic Papyrus is interesting but not earth shattering.

Again, so? Not directed at you Rob, but the whole story just makes me shrug my shoulders. No matter how old it is, it doesn’t represent any truth. So i say, so what.

The scholarly integrity of the “historian” is already pretty iffy if she immediately dubs the document “the gospel of Jesus’ wife.”

They know absolutely nothing about who wrote the document, why it was written or even what kind of document it claims to be.

… and Jesus had lots of female “disciples.” We already know that.

Didn’t mean it represented the truth. I agree it is fictional piece of writing. But, a fictional piece written in the posited time period

[Chip Van Emmerik]

Again, so? Not directed at you Rob, but the whole story just makes me shrug my shoulders. No matter how old it is, it doesn’t represent any truth. So i say, so what.

Am I the only one that finds it ironic this woman (who is well-known among Gnostic “Christian” “the-New-Testament’s-a-bunch-of-revised-history-from-exclusivist-sexually-repressed-males” circles), gets her bread and butter from Harvard, a stellar evangelical school in the early part of our nation’s founding?

And she’s getting all excited over a fragment from the fourth century that even she argues proves nothing about whether Jesus was married?

Unbelief makes people do some crazy things.

1. What makes this particular find any different from the multitude of other non-canonical books (i.e. the Gnostic gospels and New Testament apocrypha) whose existence have been widely known for centuries needs to be explained. If those other books didn’t change the predominant view of Jesus Christ, why should this one?

2. Why the multitude of very credible ancient documents, archaelogical finds, etc. that confirm orthodoxy gets ignored while the few and spurious items that oppose orthodoxy gets all the attention needs to be explained.

3. If it weren’t for the great impact made by Jesus Christ of orthodoxy, there would be no interest whatsoever in the false Christs of sinners’ imaginations. Any Jesus other than the Christ of orthodoxy is an insignificant figure unworthy of study by this Harvard academic - or anyone else for that matter - in the first place. Yet no one asks people like this who reject the real Christ why they are wasting so much energy and time that would be better spent on other pursuits on a fake one.

[DRAlves]

Am I the only one that finds it ironic this woman (who is well-known among Gnostic “Christian” “the-New-Testament’s-a-bunch-of-revised-history-from-exclusivist-sexually-repressed-males” circles), gets her bread and butter from Harvard, a stellar evangelical school in the early part of our nation’s founding?

And she’s getting all excited over a fragment from the fourth century that even she argues proves nothing about whether Jesus was married?

Unbelief makes people do some crazy things.

There’s nothing wrong with Karen King’s research or her interest in this fragment. Orthodoxy/heterodoxy studies have been going on for over 100 years, and it’s an important sub-field in early Christian studies. The only distasteful thing is the media’s Dan Brown-esque attempt to make something out of this.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/09/the-bible-refers-to-jesus-wife-too/262545/?google_editors_picks=true

I agree that doing studies in that field is not a bad thing. But there is “something wrong with her research” when she dubs the finding “the gospel of Jesus’ wife” before she even knows anything about it other than it’s likely age. I think critics can be excused for thinking they’re seeing wishful thinking at work there.

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/18/13945001-reality-check-on-jesus-and-his-wife?lite

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Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar at the Asbury Theological Seminary, noted that the latest find fits King’s perspective on scriptural scholarship. “She does have a dog in this hunt,” he told me. “She’s an advocate for the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Judas, telling us of early Christian experiences of various kinds, particularly of the Gnostic kind.”

The fragment that King calls the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife could well contribute to the study of Gnosticism in the second or fourth century, but Witherington said it’s not a game-changer for our view of the first-century Jesus. “While this fragment is interesting, if you are interested in the historical Jesus, this is much ado about not very much,” Witherington said via email.

King makes no claim for its usefulness as biography. The text was probably composed in Greek a century or so after Jesus’ crucifixion, then copied into Coptic some two centuries later. As evidence that the real-life Jesus was married, the fragment is scarcely more dispositive than Brown’s controversial 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code.

What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife… .

(The term “gospel,” as King uses it in her analysis, is any early Christian writing that describes the life—or afterlife—of Jesus.)

In the weeks leading up to the mid-September announcement, King worried that people would read the headlines and misconstrue her paper as an argument that the historical Jesus was married… . For King, the text on the papyrus fragment is something else: fresh evidence of the diversity of voices in early Christianity.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Inside-Story-of-t…

A pastor friend of mine (Brian Shealy) posted this on Facebook today, and the irony is so great, I thought it was worth sharing here;

”NYTimes runs story on the age old apocryphal story that Jesus supposedly had a wife, nothing happens. French paper runs cartoon of naked Mohammed, they have to close 20 embassies, a bomb explodes in a kosher market …”