Jesus Had a Wife, Newly Discovered Gospel Suggests

[Muthukali]

By Life's Little Mysteries Staff | LiveScience.com – 11 hours ago

A Harvard historian has identified a faded, fourth-century scrap of papyrus she calls "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife." One line of the torn fragment of text purportedly reads: "Jesus said to them, 'My wife …'" The following line states, "she will be able to be my disciple."

The finding was announced to the public today (Sept. 18) by Karen King, a historian of early Christianity, author of several books about new Gospel discoveries and the Hollis professor of divinity at Harvard Divinity School. King first examined the privately owned fragment in 2011, and has since been studying it with the help of a small group of scholars.

According to the New York Times, King and her collaborators have concluded that the business card-size fragment is not a forgery, and she is presenting the discovery today at a meeting of International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome.

The fragment, written in Coptic, the language of a group of early Christians in Egypt, has an unknown provenance, and its owner has opted to remain anonymous. Questions about the fragment abound, but scholars say it will nonetheless reignite several old debates: Was Jesus married? If so, was Mary Magdalene his wife? And did he have a female disciple? [Jesus Christ the Man: Does the Physical Evidence Hold Up?]

Scholars say these controversies date to the early centuries of Christianity, but they remain relevant today. In the Roman Catholic Church, for example, women and married men are barred from priesthood because of the model thought to have been set by Jesus.

King has cautioned that the new discovery should not be taken as proof that Jesus was actually married. The text appears to have been written centuries after he lived, and all other early Christian literature is silent on the question of his marital status.

But the scrap of papyrus — the first known statement from antiquity that refers to Jesus speaking of a wife — provides evidence that there was an active discussion among early Christians about whether Jesus was celibate or married, and which path his followers should choose, King told the Times.

"This fragment suggests that some early Christians had a tradition that Jesus was married," King said. "There was, we already know, a controversy in the second century over whether Jesus was married, caught up with a debate about whether Christians should marry and have sex."

The significance of this fragment was known by scholars previously, and then forgotten. When its current owner acquired it in a batch of papyri in 1997 from its previous owner, a German, it came with a handwritten note. The note cited a now-deceased professor of Egyptology in Berlin as having called the fragment "the sole example" of a text in which Jesus claims a wife.

According to the Times, papyrologists and Coptic linguists who have studied the artifact thus far say they are convinced by its genuineness by the fading of the ink on the papyrus fibers and the traces of ink adhered to the bent fibers at the edges. The Coptic grammar, handwriting and ideas represented in the text would also have been nearly impossible to forge.

"It's hard to construct a scenario that is at all plausible in which somebody fakes something like this. The world is not really crawling with crooked papyrologists," Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at New York University, told the New York Times.

Certain lines of the text resemble snippets from the Gospels of Thomas and Mary, both believed to have been written in the late second century and later translated into Coptic. King surmises that this fragment is also copied from a second-century Greek text.

Further study will be needed to work out the details, but the meaning of the words "my wife" is beyond question, King said. The text beyond "Jesus said to them, 'My wife …'" is cut off.

2012-09-18T214216Z_1177055640_TM3E89I1D2201_RTRMADP_3_RELIGION-JESUS-MARRIAGE.JPG
A previously unknown scrap of ancient papyrus written in ancient Egyptian Coptic …

[Dreamer1]

Jesus and Mary Magdalene,it is quite well known now.
Not too sure whether they went to India .South America or France after Jesus resurrection.

[saratogas]

Their children should have special powers...

[Toronto]

When various pieces from within and outside the bible are pieced together, it points to a common well known conclusion....

[Toronto]

It depends on who you ask.
If you asked a Valentinian Christian, the answer would have been a definitive "yes".
If you asked an early Catholic Christian, the answer would have been "no".
If you ask a scholar or angmo atheist today, depending on the methods they use to reconstruct the historical Jesus, you will get "yeses" and "noes'.

[Toronto]

The new gospel fragment supports the Valentinian picture. If it turns out to be an authentic gospel fragment from antiquity, it likely came from a page of yet another Valentinian gospel that contained sayings of Jesus. Valentinian Christians were very prolific and they preserved an entire sayings tradition of counter-memories that supported their creative metaphysical outlook and Gnostic spirituality.

[Toronto]

Despite any supporting scriptural evidence, the Catholic Church tried to turn Mary Magdalene into a prostitute. This allegation was made by Pope Gregory the Great, assumed by many to be God's representative on earth.

Why it is called Roman Catholics ? It's a pagan worship being christenised to look like the original 'Christianity'. This is like a wolf being clothed with a sheep skin and try to pass it off as a 'sheep'.

I know of the wickedness of the system.

[Toronto]

Saint Conqueror,
This one of the wickedness of the RC system you are hinting?

And, of course, if Jesus were married, the RC Church's stand on celibacy for priests would be severely undermined.

Early priests were married and had families, and it was 1,000 years after Jesus left the scene that the RC church imposed the celibacy restriction -- even on the priests who were married at the time. It appears that the reason for this injunction had very little to do with spirituality and more to do with acquiring and preserving and RC church property.

[Toronto]

There is evidence that for primarily political reasons the early Christian church expunged the role of women from church history.

If this were the case it would nullify the church's position not only on women, but upon sex, itself. People like St. Augustine, who had major and well-documented personal and family problems with both women and sex, made these ideas two of the cornerstones of Roman Catholic (and later general Christian) belief.

[Toronto]

Biblical Evidence I:

First, we'll remind you of the story of the woman anointing the head and feet of Jesus in what was seen (and condemned) in Jewish culture as being a sensual, suggestive and highly inappropriate act.

John's gospel account is the only one that does not see this as some sort of sacrilege against Jewish tradition. The only seemingly way to explain this is if this woman, who is identified as "Mary," was Jesus' wife. ("Mary" was a common name in those days, which has added a lot of confusion to historic accounts; but, then again, the name "Jesus" was also a common name.)

We know that the other gospels were "shaped" to meet the personal, political and religious needs of the early church. Possibly the account in John, which appears not to be based on the same shared documents as some of the other gospels, was somehow left relatively intact.

[Toronto]

Biblical Evidence II:
Remember the story in Luke about Martha, Mary's sister, rebuking her for sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to him teach? Recall that in those days women were not supposed to be educable and this act was highly unusual, if not totally inappropriate -- especially within Jewish culture.

But, Jesus defends Mary's act, suggesting that she has been selected for a higher role than attending to domestic (womanly) chores.

Maybe this is not really startling—until you consider that Martha does not talk directly to Mary (her own sister), but asks Jesus to tell her to "get to work."

In those days husbands held the power over their wives and if you wanted to get them to act, you would request that they do so through their husbands. Possibly this is just another clue that was missed by Bible redactors.

[Toronto]

Biblical Evidence III:

Next, is the suggestion that Mary, the sister of Martha, was actually Mary Magdalene, portrayed in the scriptures as the leader of the female disciples that followed Jesus all the way from Galilee.

Only wives and prostitutes would follow an itinerant band of men. Contrary to the later trashing that Mary Magdalene would get from a Catholic pope, as we've noted there is no evidence anywhere in the Bible that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute....which leaves only...wife.

[Toronto]

Biblical Evidence IV:

"Mary" (not further identified) refers to Jesus in the scripture as "my lord" and "raboni" in the fourth gospel—titles in Jewish society as only being appropriate for a wife addressing her rabbi husband.

[Toronto]

Biblical Evidence V:

Contrary to popular belief, there never was a city called "Magdala" from which Magdalene was supposedly derived. But, there is a Hebrew word, migdal used in the Bible that refers to a tower of great significance.

The word also implies a great person or great figure. "Mary, the great," or "the great Mary," might be translated as "Mary Magdalene" (things sometimes got a bit twisted in the translation process), a phrase writers may have originally used to describe Mary, the wife of Jesus. In this instance the scriptures seem to rule out this being Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Very much related, there is scriptural evidence from Jesus, himself, that Mary Magdalene was the "one who understood" [the most esoteric dimension of his teachings*]. And scriptures say that she was the one that "Jesus loved the most" -- even to the point that the other disciples were jealous. (The fact that she was a woman in that era of Jewish culture only made it even worse!)

[Toronto]

Biblical Evidence VI:

Some modern Jewish historians have pointed out that marriage was an expected part of Jewish culture at the time and it would have been unusual for Jesus not to have taken a wife. This would have made it an important fact to include in the gospels -- but, as we know, nowhere is it mentioned.

[Toronto]

Biblical Evidence VII:

After his death, Mary was allowed to visit the tomb of Jesus with his burial cloth—an act that under Jewish tradition was reserved only for family members, such as wives.

[Toronto]

Biblical Evidence VIII:

Finally, after Jesus arose from the dead, the first person he appeared to was reportedly Mary Magdalene. The reason, according to some scholars, was that Jesus knew that this Mary would be grieving more than anyone else. Thus, he singled out his wife (or consort) for special consolation.

[bullfrog]

you mean, the Prostitute?

[IamHandsome]

I found this, sharing with you guys ...

[Toronto]

you mean, the Prostitute?

I would say there is no conclusive evidence from the bible to suggest Mary Madalene was Prostitute, only a likelihood.

But the papyrus added a very strong and conclusive evidence that Jesus was indeed married.

And the Xtians in this forum like the humble Psalm23 and the very arrogant(how lian) St Conqueror dare not jump in to declare the papyrus is fake or there is a certain conspiracy going on. -