Courtesy of KAREN L. KING
Petya Jordanoff
Staff Writer
@PetyaJordanoff
In September 2012, Karen King – a professor at Harvard Divinity School announced the discovery of a new Coptic manuscript that suggest that Jesus might have had a wife.
“Jesus said to them, my wife…” the text reads before breaking off.
Almost immediately scholars began to respond, first stating that this does not prove that Jesus had a wife and then sharing their increasing skepticism about the authenticity of the fragment itself. One of the main problems and the reason that the text was fast deemed a first class forgery were the grammatical errors and the similarities with another early text ” The Gospel of Thomas”. The fact that the donor of the small papyrus remained anonymous added more fuel to the widespread skepticism.
Now, however, almost 18 months later, The Harvard Theological Review has published a revised article by King stating that the papyrus should be dated somewhere between the 7th and 8th centuries and that the ink is consistent with the ancient material used on ancient manuscripts.
“All of the evidence points to it being ancient,” King says, ” As historians. The question then becomes, what does it mean?”
Although the text can’t prove whether or not Jesus really had a wife, it manages to raise some very interesting question about the role of women in churches.
“This is not evidence that Jesus was married. We don’t know.” King admits. ” But early Christians were extremely interested in questions about whether they should be married or be celibate.”
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