Jesus wife ancient papyrus ‘not fake’
- From: News Corp Australia
- April 11, 2014
TESTS on an ancient document that refers to Jesus being married have revealed no evidence of modern forgery.
Referred to as the ‘Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’, the controversial text contains the first-known explicit reference to Jesus being married. The document, written on ancient Egyptian papyrus, was introduced to the world at a conference in Rome 18 months ago, the Boston Globe reports.
The new findings, published in the Harvard Theological Review, support the argument of Harvard professor Karen L King that the document is authentic.
It is Professor King’s theory that the document was part of a debate that took place between early Christians about the role of women, family and celibacy in spiritual life.
Although carbon dating reveals the papyrus dates to eight-century Egypt (about 400 years later than King initially thought) and the ink is consistent with that used by ancient Egyptians, the tests do not definitively prove the text was written in ancient times. It could have been produced by a highly skilled modern forger who applied the right kind of ink and applied it to an ancient blank piece of papyrus.
Microscopic imaging of the document did not, however, reveal tell-tale ink pooling that would have suggested a modern forgery, but determining the age of the ink would destroy the business card-sized document.
There may soon be a way of dating the ink without harming the document, developed by researchers at Columbia University.
The fragment appears to be cut from the middle of a larger document and contains just eight partial lines, one of which says, “And Jesus said to them, ‘My wife,’ ” The next says, “She will be able to be my disciple.”
Professor King has not suggested that the fragment is evidence that Jesus was married, but is interested in the issues it raises for the history of Christianity. “I’m basically hoping that we can move past the issue of forgery to questions about the significance of this fragment for the history of Christianity, for thinking about questions like, ‘Why does Jesus being married, or not, even matter? Why is it that people had such an incredible reaction to this?’ ” she said.
Professor King says her thinking about the document has evolved since first encountering it: “Now when I come back and read the fragment, it seems the major issue being talked about was that Jesus was affirming that wives and mothers can be his disciples.”
Professor King began examining the fragment in 2011 at the request of its owner, who told King he bought it and five other papyri in 1999 from a collector who said he acquired them in the 1960s in East Germany.
An undated, unsigned photocopied note in German accompanying the fragment said that a professor Fecht had examined the papyrus and thought it could be the only text in which Jesus speaks of having a wife.
The new article does not promise to end the controversy around the document. A rebuttal to Professor King’s belief in the authenticity of the document is also published in the Harvard Theological Review.
Leo Depuydt, an Egyptologist at Brown University said none of the test results alter his view that the document is a modern-day fraud, with glaring grammatical blunders that a native speaker of Coptic would never commit.
One line, he said, appears to read, “An evil man does not he brings. You can’t make sense of it as a fluent Coptic text,” he said.
“Nothing is going to change my mind,” he said in an interview this week. “As a forgery, it is bad to the point of being farcical or fobbish. . . . I don’t buy the argument that this is sophisticated. I think it could be done in an afternoon by an undergraduate student.”
Professor King argues that it does not make sense that a forger with poor Coptic and scribal skills could also manage to acquire the right kind of papyrus and ink, and leave no ink out of place at the microscopic level. “In my judgment, such a combination of bumbling and sophistication seems extremely unlikely,” she wrote in her article.