A whole load of folks have got their knickers in a bunch about an announcement by a Harvard Divinity School professor that she has discovered an ancient Christian document that claims Jesus had a wife.
However before we get round to completely rewriting Christ’s Gospel it is worth examining the source of the document—gleefully dubbed The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife—and the institution at which the discovery was made.
The so–called “gospel” was written in 4th–century AD Egypt and is written in Coptic, the language spoken by the Egyptians of the time. The professor who discovered it, Karen L. King, and other scholars have solemnly proclaimed it to be genuine.
There is absolutely no reason to doubt them. Egypt of the 4th century has long been known as a rich source of bizarre fabricated accounts of the lives of Jesus and his disciples.
A similarly strange find—dubbed the Gospel of Judas [Iscariot]—was unveiled amid much ballyhoo a year or so back. This “gospel” has since dropped off all but the most obscure academic radar—a fate destined to be shared by the Gospel of Jesus Wife.
Publish or perish academia, aided and abetted by an overwhelmingly anti–Christian big media, have been feverishly trying to portray the “newly discovered gospel” as possibly shedding light on “a controversial aspect” of Jesus’ life.
They wish!
There is so much similar stuff floating around—all utterly discredited by reputable scholars as works of fiction—it is difficult to see what a “business card size” piece of papyrus containing a mere eight lines of barely legible script could contribute to our knowledge of the heretical Egyptian Gnostic sect that produced it, much less the true Gospel.
A key to understanding the wholly over–blown nature of the controversy lies in the discoverer’s academic speciality. The focus of Professor King’s studies are Coptic literature, Gnosticism and women in the Bible.
In fact, she has also published the aforementioned Gospel of Judas and the similarly fictional Gospel of Mary of Magdala. She presented her research earlier this month in Rome at the International Congress of Coptic Studies.
“Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim,” King said.
“This new gospel doesn’t prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage.
“From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus’s death before they began appealing to Jesus’ marital status to support their positions.”
Jesus’ marital status has long been a focus of feminist, and other “cutting edge” theologians, to discredit the four canonical Gospels and establish their own radically revised orthodoxy.
Indeed, a bonus in unveiling the controversial scrap of papyrus in Rome was probably the prospect of cocking a snook at Pope Benedict XVI and the Roman Catholic Church which requires its priests to be celibate. The agenda was spelled out by Michael D’Antonio, who writes a blog about the Roman Church for the left–leaning Huffington Post. “Beyond internal Catholic Church politics, a married Jesus invites a reconsideration of orthodox teachings about gender and sex,” he said.
“If Jesus had a wife, then there is nothing extra Christian about male privilege, nothing spiritually dangerous about the sexuality of women, and no reason for anyone to deny himself or herself a sexual identity.”
Professor King and her supporters are trying to argue the document is a translation of an earlier one that was written in Greek. This seems a stretch. There is no reason to believe that the origin of this document is any different from that of the many other Gnostic writings that have been unearthed in Egypt over the centuries.
In fact, it is possible that this “gospel” fragment is associated with the source of the major cache of such writings found at Nag Hammadi, the site of the ancient Egypto–Greek city of Chenboskian, in Egypt just after World War II.
These writings, all originating centuries after the Apostolic era, were widely published in the 1950s. Some decades later they were “resurrected” by feminist theologians in their efforts to support feminist religious theories.
Gnosticism flourished in Egypt long after it had ceased to be a major thorn in the flesh of Christian orthodoxy elsewhere. But then Egypt had a multimillennia history of mystery cults.
Indeed, it had a tradition of blatantly inventing gods in the whole—for example Serapes, introduced by the Ptolemies [Cleopatra’s forbears]—order to embrace and synthesize both ancient Egyptian and Greek religious thought. Small wonder, then, that early Egyptian Coptic Christians—raised on a diet of mystery religion—felt free to do the same to a Christianity they found a tad too plain–spoken and straightforward for their tastes.
Furthermore, it is curiously apt that the “discovery” was made by a Harvard Divinity School professor. The institution in recent years has developed something of a reputation for unorthodox theological speculation—becoming a sort of North American Nag Hammadi, in fact. GPH✠