A fragment of an ancient Egyptian papyrus known as the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife," unveiled in 2012, shows no evidence of being a modern forgery, as some critics had charged, according to an article published in the Harvard Theological Review. Certainly, this will cause millions of bowels to be blown around our nation and indeed the world but I don't see how this changes anything.
Does it make Him less of the Son of God if He was married? No. He was a rabbi and there were no priests during that time that took vows of celibacy. He and His wife would stand as shining examples of a loving, committed relationship that should be emulated. After all, He spoke frequently of the evil of adultery and how couples should stay committed to one another. It seems now that He not only talked the talk but walked the walk and that illustrates just how perfect and deep his integrity ran.
1 comment:
You're jumping the gun here. There are many who believe that this fragment is simply too convenient to be true. There needs to be some other kind of corroboration other than this tiny scrap of papyrus. As the article says, even the most ardent proponents of the fragment's historical authenticity, Karen King, says that it is not proof Jesus was married.
The scientific analysis indicates that the material is only 1500 years old or so, and the text is 1600 to 1800 years old. It's not contemporaneous with Jesus, so it can't have been written by anyone with personal knowledge of him. Just because someone wrote something down centuries ago doesn't mean it was true. People lie and make things up in all ages.
However, I tend to believe that Jesus was married, and this papyrus was a fragment that escaped the revisionist purges of early Christendom. As Mark said, all rabbis married -- it was simply what everyone did back then. But the entrenched pattern of misogyny in the early Christian Church and the elevation of Jesus into a coequal with god most likely resulted in the removal of any kind of earthly relations Jesus had from the Gospels during various Councils of the early church.
Some have argued that grammatical errors in the Coptic text are absolute proof that it was not written by native speakers, and is therefore a forgery. That's rather naive: native speakers make all kinds of errors, including completely non-grammatical "typos." Errors like this could have also been introduced by non-Coptic speaking copyists transcribing holy books. A Greek- or Latin-speaking priest could have easily screwed up and not even intended or realized it.
(Coptic was spoken commonly in Egypt; it is descended from Ancient Egyptian, and is related to Arabic. Coptic has given linguists many clues into the grammar and pronunciation of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Coptic is written with a version of the Greek alphabet, because the Greeks dominated Egypt in late antiquity after Alexander the Great conquered the civilized world, forming the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. Cleopatra was Greek. As many as 15 million Coptic Christians still live in Egypt.)
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