Jesus' Wife Without DaVinci

The objective of science is Truth. The objectives of people in science can be more complicated.

The government is pressing the notion of global warming of late and its critics always raise the possibility that science and scientists can be undermined by financing, grants and the spotlight. This is the exact worry Eisenhower raised in his famous "military-industrial complex" speech but has been eclipsed. Science has always seemed pristine--calculations and truth seemed to be involved which surely raised the level. This confidence persists despite the trans fat fiasco, the DDT curse upon Africa, the Malthus model and other abuses of the scientific trust.

On September 18, 2012, Karen L. King, a professor at Harvard Divinity School and a longtime publicizer of Gnosticism and other “alternative Christianities” of the ancient world, spoke at an academic Coptic conference in Rome and revealed a papyrus document that she said dated to the fourth century A.D.. The papyrus, actually a tiny 1.5-by-3-inch scrap, contained eight lines of the ancient Egyptian language Coptic on which was written “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife.’ ” King had dubbed the piece of papyrus “The Gospel of Jesus' Wife.” She declared confidently that the fragment had come from a larger fourth-century Coptic “codex”—an entire handwritten papyrus book. She also asserted that the “Gospel” of which the scrap was a part had consisted of a now-lost “dialogue between Jesus and his disciples” that had probably been composed, possibly in Greek, during the second century, 150 years or so after Jesus’ death.

While there is no complete sentence in the fragment it contains, besides the “my wife” clause, such phrases as “my mother,” “the disciples said to Jesus,” “Mary is worthy of it,” “she will be able to be my disciple,” and “I dwell with her.” “The Gospel of Jesus' Wife makes it possible to speak with certainty of the existence of a tradition affirming that Jesus was married (probably to Mary Magdalene), and it is highly probable that this tradition dates to the second half of the second century,” King wrote. She argued that the “Jesus’ wife” text was part of an ongoing theological debate among Christian groups, starting in the second century, over proper attitudes toward marriage and sexual desire, with some Gnostics having a more pro-sex, pro-marriage stance than their orthodox opponents.

The papyrus scrap had no provenance. It had belonged to a private collector who wished to remain anonymous, and it seemed to have surfaced only a few decades (if that) before the collector bought it in 1999 on the assurance of some earlier correspondence apparently involving two now-deceased professors at a German university. More, whole phrases in it were identical to phrases in the Gospel of Thomas, the best-known and most widely reprinted of the Nag Hammadi texts.

 

The papyrus was retested by Harvard biologist Noreen Tuross in January and February 2014. Tuross found that the “Jesus’ wife” papyrus dated from between 681 A.D. and 877 A.D., with a median, or most probable, date of 741 A.D.. By the 700s, the official language of Egypt was Arabic, not Coptic or Greek.

Charlotte Allen, the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus, in an article in the Weekly Standard about the papyrus (where most of this is from), writes: "The most acrid denunciation came from Leo Depuydt, a professor of Egyptology at Brown University who wrote a 19-page article in the Harvard Theological Review, a kind of rejoinder to King’s article, in which he declared that he was “personally 100% convinced that the Wife of Jesus fragment is a forgery” cribbed from the Gospel of Thomas. Depuydt speculated that the alleged forger had been motivated by a desire to “make points of a theological kind” about Jesus’ celibacy and other traditional Christian beliefs about him. Unlike the careful-with-the-press Karen King, who did not respond to my emailed request for an interview, Depuydt neither hoards nor minces words. In an hour-long telephone conversation with me, he pronounced the choppy, seemingly non sequitur clauses of the fragment “mumbo-jumbo.” He explained: “I’m a grammarian—I’ve written a grammar of Middle Egyptian. I did my doctorate in Coptic manuscripts at Yale. This is unlike anything you see in a Coptic literary text. The people who wrote Coptic literary texts wrote fully grammatically. Reading one of those texts is like reading the New York Times.” Depuydt characterized King’s lengthy interpretive analysis of the context of the fragment and its supposed place in early Christian thought as “overkill.”

In other words, no one connected to the “Jesus’ wife” fragment can account for the presence of fourth-century Gnostic or Gnostic-derived material on an eighth-century papyrus sheet manufactured long after much of Egypt had become Islamic—as even Karen King concedes in an afterword to her published article.

“For my dissertation I catalogued all the Coptic manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library,” Leo Depuydt said in our phone conversation. “I’ve never seen a Gnostic text later than the fifth century. Gnosticism must have vanished after the fifth century. The fourth century was the great century of Christianization. In the year 300 in Egypt everyone lived side by side: pagans and Christians and Gnostics. By the end of the fourth century Christians were persecuting pagans and Manicheans and Gnostics. By 425, it was like medieval France, where everybody’s a Catholic. I’ve never seen any evidence of any Gnostic sects surviving past then.”"

King's Smithsonian television documentary has been postponed.