A Harvard University professor has unveiled a fourth century fragment of papyrus she said is the only existing ancient text quoting Jesus explicitly referring to having a wife.
Karen King, an expert in the history of Christianity, said the text contains a dialogue in which Jesus refers to “my wife”, whom he identifies as Mary. Ms King said the fragment of Coptic script is a copy of a gospel, probably written in Greek in the second century.
Ms King helped translate and unveiled the tiny fragment at a conference of Coptic experts in Rome. She said it does not prove Jesus was married but speaks to issues of family and marriage that faced Christians.
Four words in the 1.5-by-3-inch fragment provide the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus had been married, Ms King said. Those words, written in a language of ancient Egyptian Christians, translate to “Jesus said to them, my wife”, Ms King said in a statement.
Ms King said that in the dialogue the disciples discuss whether Mary is worthy and Jesus says “she can be my disciple”.
Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was unmarried even though there was no reliable historical evidence to support that, Ms King said. The new gospel, she said, “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,” she said, “but it was over a century after Jesus’s death before they began appealing to Jesus’s marital status to support their positions”.
Ms King presented the document at a six-day conference being held at Rome’s La Sapienza University and at the Augustinianum institute of the Pontifical Lateran University.
The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes the second line, which another report says reads: "she will be able to be my disciple."
The provenance of the papyrus fragment is a mystery, and its owner has asked to remain anonymous. Until yesterday, Ms 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.
Even with many questions unsettled, the discovery could reignite the debate over whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and whether he had a female disciple. These debates date to the early centuries of Christianity, scholars say. But they are relevant today, when global Christianity is roiling over the place of women in ministry and the boundaries of marriage.
AP, New York Times