The "Gospel" of Jesus Wife

Passing Off . . . A Deceit By Other Means

So, Jesus was married.  Ah . . . . no.  Just about every main stream media last week reported in high relief on an alleged fourth century Coptic manuscript fragment which purported to have Jesus speaking referring to His wife. 

When the fragment was released it was with accompanying caveats and qualifications.  Few of those made it through the MSM filters.  The New York Times did provide some of the qualifications:

The provenance of the papyrus fragment is a mystery, and its owner has asked to remain anonymous. Until Tuesday, Dr. King had shown the fragment to only a small circle of experts in papyrology and Coptic linguistics, who concluded that it is most likely not a forgery. But she and her collaborators say they are eager for more scholars to weigh in and perhaps upend their conclusions. . . .

She (Dr King) repeatedly cautioned that this fragment should not be taken as proof that Jesus, the historical person, was actually married. The text was probably written centuries after Jesus lived, and all other early, historically reliable Christian literature is silent on the question, she said.

Below are some initial sceptical reviews of the fragment:

Did Jesus Have a Wife?

Peter Williams, the Warden of Tyndale House in Cambridge, England, just sent out this evaluation of the manuscript discovery that to some people suggests Jesus was married. It also includes the evaluation by Dr. Simon Gathercole, another expert in these matters. Dr. Darrell Bock has also weighed in on this issue.  (Posted by BiblicalTraining.org)

Did Jesus have a wife?

The Web is by now awash with stories of an ancient text in which Jesus says ‘my wife’. The story which broke yesterday in the New York Times and some other sources, is being carried today by outlets too numerous to list. Some of the reporting is responsible, but not all. Consider this extract from The Daily Mail:
“If genuine, the document casts doubt on a centuries old official representation of Magdalene as a repentant whore and overturns the Christian ideal of sexual abstinence.”
We are of course in a context where there is so much ignorance of basic facts about Christianity that even when the media properly relay facts they get completely distorted and misunderstood in popular perception. This can be seen in the way derivative media put spin on the story and in the online comments below the news items.

Here we try to establish a few facts.

The scholarly article upon which almost all knowledge of the fragment is based is here (PDF).
What do we know from this?

What’s in a name?

First, let’s start with the name. The scholar involved, Professor Karen King of Harvard, has decided to call this The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. However, it might more appropriately be named The Fragment about Jesus’s Relations, since there’s no evidence that it was called a gospel and the text mentions at least two family members. Of course, such a name would not generate the same publicity. Despite this unfortunate choice of name, Professor King is to be commended for publishing a good photograph and detailed scholarly analysis of the fragment simultaneously with the press release. Usually in the case of controversial text the media hype comes long before the availability of the text.

Genuine or forgery?

Professor King has provided pictures of the papyrus, but it is not publicly known who owns it, or where it came from. If genuine, it almost certainly came from Egypt because that is where papyri like this are found.
Because it was not found in situ it is obviously possible to doubt its genuineness. Scholars at Tyndale House think that, on the basis of the limited evidence currently available, it is possible it is genuine, though there are good reasons for scepticism — see the comments of Dr Christian Askeland, an expert in Coptic manuscripts.

What about date?

It is written in Coptic, the language of Egypt which descended from the even earlier language of the Hieroglyphs. Coptic is Egyptian written in the Greek alphabet with a few extra letters. Because Coptic was only emerging as a written language in the third century and papyrus went out of use in the seventh century the 8 cm x 4 cm fragment has to be dated some time from the third to the seventh century and the scholars involved with this fragment have stated that it is fourth century on the basis of the handwriting.
Since we have virtually no firmly dated Coptic handwriting, this date is just an educated guess.
Then we turn to the date of the contents. Here Professor King puts the text in the late second century, but all that we really know is that the text is at least as old as the manuscript.

The papyrus at the centre of the publicity

What does it say?

This is King’s translation of the text, with square brackets used where the text does not survive:
FRONT:
1 ] “not [to] me. My mother gave to me li[fe…”
2 ] The disciples said to Jesus, “.[
3 ] deny. Mary is worthy of it[
4 ]……” Jesus said to them, “My wife . .[
5 ]… she will be able to be my disciple . . [
6 ] Let wicked people swell up … [
7] As for me, I dwell with her in order to . [
8] an image [
BACK:
1 ] my moth[er
2 ] three [
3 ] … [
4 ] forth which … [
5 ] (illegible ink traces)
We believe this to be a largely reliable translation. But is it evidence that Jesus had a wife? The answer is an emphatic ‘no’. Not even Karen King is claiming that it is, though it’s inevitable that some of the news outlets will present it otherwise.

What we have here is a typical sort of text which arose after Christianity had become very popular and when derivatives of Christianity began to emerge. The language of the text is very similar to the Gospel of Thomas, sayings 101 and 114, and the Gospel of Thomas saying 101 shows influence of Luke 14:26, as the Gospel of Thomas does elsewhere. This way of speaking belongs to the mid-second century or later, in other words generations later than the books of the New Testament.

We asked Dr Simon Gathercole, an expert on apocryphal gospels and Senior Lecturer in New Testament in the University of Cambridge, for his comments.
He concluded: “Harvard Professor Karen King, who is the person who has been entrusted with the text, has rightly warned us that this does not say anything about the historical Jesus. She is correct that “its possible date of composition in the second half of the second century, argues against its value as evidence for the life of the historical Jesus”. But she is also right that this is a fascinating discovery which offers us a window into debates about sex and marriage in the early church, and the way Jesus could be adapted to play a part in a particular debate. If it is genuine.
Best wishes,
Peter Williams,
Warden, Tyndale House, Cambridge

And this from Justin Taylor:

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: How a Fake Gospel-Fragment Was Composed

Francis Watson of the University of Durham has provided a six-page analysis (PDF) of the Coptic fragment which seems to say Jesus was married. This is the most in-depth examination I have seen yet. Professor Watson concludes that

The text has been constructed out of small pieces – words or phrases – culled mostly from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (GTh), Sayings 101 and 114, and set in new contexts.
This is most probably the compositional procedure of a modern author who is not a native speaker of Coptic.

Among other scholars weighing in, see Gary Manning Jr., Darrell Bock, Christian Askeland, Michael Kruger, Peter Williams and Simon Gathercole, Dirk Jongkind, Daniel Wallace.

The six page analysis by Francis Watson is particularly useful in proving the fragment to be a copy of parts of the gnostic apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, being passed off as a separate fragment. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Solid Joys and Lasting Pleasure

Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 31 January 2012

The world is charged with the grandeur of God, as the poet put it, and it will flame out like shook foil. The world is only a set of blinders for the blind. In all other respects, the world is front-loaded with God’s glory. And in order for us to see that glory, really see it, the world has to get thicker — not thinner.

C.S. Lewis, in his wonderful way, shows us this in the second half of The Last Battle, and throughout The Great Divorce. The world really is “transparent,” and it is such through being really solid. The world is that which enables us to see God’s glory, and those who try to help this process along by treating the world as ephemeral and wispy are making a great mistake. The world does not need to be diluted to help God’s glory shine through. Do you glorify the jeweller by smashing the diamonds?

God has chosen how to reveal Himself. The Bible says that the heavens declare the glory of God, not that they obscure it. They obscure it only for the obscurantists.

Thinning out the world, gnostic style, does not glorify God. Focusing on the world as it is, without reference to Him, does not glorify Him. But seeing what He has done, the way He has done it, with matter packed tight, does glorify Him. This is why Christian hedonism doesn’t not climb up to the Beatific Vision by means of a material ladder in order to then kick the ladder away. We will always have bodies, and God will always speak to us in this way. It can only get more solid — in the great words of Newton’s hymn — “solid joys and lasting pleasures, none but Zion’s children know.”

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>A Full Tank of Gas and Lots of Wyoming Ahead, Part II

Political Dualism – Dualism Is Bad JuJu
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, May 16, 2010

In the gnostic order of things, the material world is always convicted, damned. It is the problem. In the Christian world tugged on by gnosticism, the material world is not condemned — the orthodox faith forbids this because God made the world, and Jesus rose from the dead in it. But, when idolatry occurs, this doesn’t keep the material world from always being rounded up as one of the usual suspects.

It is assumed that where creation is thick — where the music is glorious, the beer stout, the women beautiful, the lawns rich, the architecture splendid, and so on — it presents a greater temptation to idolatry than where someone has mixed the paint thinner of ascetic striving into the created order in order to avoid the idolatrous distractions. But this does not work.

The apostle Paul says that this maneuver is of no value in checking fleshly indulgence. “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh” (Col. 2:20-23, ESV). Paul grants an appearance of wisdom here, but he says that it doesn’t work. A man can get the created order around him completely thinned out, and be as much in danger of idolatry as ever he was.

Read Augustine’s Confessions (33/49-50) for a good example of this mistake concerning where the temptation to idolatry actually lies. And I hasten to add that, while pointing out this mistake of Augustine’s, in a church with any decent standards I would not be qualified to be Augustine’s boot boy.

A man can worship an ornate idol, decked with gold and silver, and he can worship a Euclidian stick figure. The divide is a moral one. The divide has to do with whether God has given the man eyes to see. If God has given eyes to see, it does not hurt him to see a lot.
Here is the word of the Lord to Israel:

“Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee . . . Because thou servedst not the LORD thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things (Dt. 28:45, 47).

Here is a poem I wrote about this once.

Rocks in the Drive
When strings are pulled taut, the cello is tuned,
The wood holds the wine that is seasoned and old.
Dark music poured out and emptied the cask,
And rolled in my goblet, rich, tawny and told
How holiness tastes, how righteousness laughs.

You shall be as God, the great dragon had said,
Philosophers argue their shapes in the fire
And each to his shadow tenaciously clings;
They miss that our great father Abram aspired
To a city of solids, celestial marble.

But our earthly solids are fleeting, like faerie,
Far closer to ether than what we conceive.
Our granite is balsa, our oceans are floating,
Our atoms are rootless, and we, not believing,
We miss that this world speaks a fortiori.

Stop thinking that heaven means standing on clouds.

Why falter when told that our God remains good?
Why think the Almighty exhausted in sadness
His strength on the Alps or the plains of Dakota?
Will He not speak solid and substantive gladness
And bid all His people emerge from the shadows?

The carpets of heaven are thicker than moss.
With paint on the walls that is glossy to stay.
Hard wood for the tables is grown on the hillsides,
And rocks in the drive are all sapphire gray.
The breezes move curtains that are facing the sea

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>A Tornado With Boots

Christian Dualism
Written by Douglas Wilson

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

The perennial temptation for modern Reformed Protestants, especially after they get college degrees, is to float toward the sky in wisps of gnostic vapor. Doctrinalism is one kind of gnosticism, and pietism another. Literary structuralism is yet another one. Note that I did not say doctrine, of which the apostle Paul approved, and I did not say piety, of which my mother approves. Nor did I say literature, which feeds the right kind of soul.

I have often quoted that glorious passage in Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, where a junior officer in the War Between the States was being reprimanded by the general for his unit’s reluctance to charge. “Sir,” the hapless lieutenant replied, “I am convinced that any further demonstration of valor on the part of my troops will bring them into contact with the enemy.”

The early Reformers were not like this at all. They were about the most un-gnostic bunch ever assembled in the history of Christendom.
They were the most Christ-loving, world-affirming, money-making, beer-drinking, sword-wielding, music-making, kingdom-overthrowing, love-making, poetry-writing bunch of Christians the world had ever seen up to that point. And they kept it up, by and large, for several centuries.

But then the drift set in. Many of their intellectual heirs have become wan and pale in the more recent centuries, despite the occasional nuisance of eruptions of people like Kuyper. People like that come into the story like a tornado with boots, and they have all the history and all the theology on their side. Nothing can be done about it, so the curators of the Reformed museum are discomfited for a time, and do a sort of twiddly thing with their toe in the carpet, and wait for this affliction to pass. In their patience, they possess their deracinated souls.

But here is the odd thing. At the time of the Reformation, if there had been a gnosticism susceptibility line on the blackboard, on a scale of 1-to-10, the papists would be hitting the eights and nines. The monks would be sweating out sexual temptations in their dreary cloisters while the Puritans with plumes in their hats and lawn tops on their boots were striding home to make love to their wives.

But in recent years, most of the intellectual heirs of the Reformation have decided to switch places on that line, ceding the fight against gnosticism to the conservative Roman Catholics. It makes me want to say things like, “Hey!” Historically embarrassing, that’s what it is. And if any of us plunge into the fray, and get one of the horns on our helmet knocked off, we are likely to hear about it at presbytery. “Not very confessional.”

Modern airy-fairy Reformed theology, whether the conservative or liberal kind, wants to float off like a helium balloon, and if you want to anchor it to Christ’s love for this world, this earthy world, you will need more than stout beer and pipe tobacco to do it. That kind of thing teaches seminary students to feel very anti-gnostic because they can talk heady theology through wreaths of smoke — but they still leave the heavy lifting of world-engagement and real gospel proclamation (to actual sinners) to the baptists. And they learn to watch with real dismay if any of their Reformed brethren start to show signs of wanting to make actual contact with the enemy. It is enough to make them suspicious. Wielding a sword is a form of works, is it not?