If you have any form of news media that you regularly watch or read it has been impossible to miss the furore over Harvard scholar, Karen King, publishing and discussing the small piece of codex parchment now generally being called The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.
As with all things in the non-specialist media, the claims have been somewhat over-, and misrepresented. This being the case, I thought I’d try and put a little clarity into this issue. But, of course, I don’t have the first clue about the Coptic language, so I can’t comment with the degree of competence of the likes of one Simon Gathercole, an expert on what are called Apocryphal Gospels, and Senior Lecturer in New Testament in the University of Cambridge.
What’s all the fuss about?
To answer that, we’ll begin with Dr. King’s own translation of the parchment.
As is the usual convention, squared brackets indicate where the text is lost or illegible, and a best guess, if any, has been put in by the translator. A number at the start of the line is the line number of the text:
1 ] not. My mother has given me [life]
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 a disciple to me, and [
6 ] Let evil man ??? […
7 ] As for me, I am with her because [
8 ] an image [
And that, as they say, is it. The whole fragment is now read. Not much really, except, of course, the rather explosive statement by Jesus indicating a wife. But what does it really tell us about the Jesus recorded in the Gospels? In the words of Dr. King – nothing!
The very scholar who has published this fragment (bit of a stretch to call it a “Gospel” really) has been more than fair in saying that this fragment should be treated with caution, and that it tells us precious little about the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth.
This is very far from the claims of the Daily Mail, who say that it casts doubt on the centuries old tradition of Mary Magdalene as a “repentant whore”, and the Christian ideal of sexual abstinence – that’s an awful lot to glean from this fragment.
And, oh yeah, Pope John Paul II had already said that the ascription of Mary Magdalene as a “repentant whore” was a wrong interpretation, so I guess the Daily Mail needs to catch-up a little bit. 😉
The debate continues.
What you will not have found out from the news is that there are a number of extremely competent scholars who doubt the authenticity of the fragment, and even argue that it is nothing more than a set of statements cribbed from the Gospel of Thomas in a Coptic translation of the Greek original. The Gospel of Thomas is an extremely difficult writing to date, and no consensus exists as to its provenance.
What is certain is that Coptic, as a written language, didn’t develop until the third century AD, with papyrus dying out as a medium in the seventh century AD. And that is the time frame for the fragment which has caused the fuss.
The other ‘Gospels’.
There are a large number of other Gospels, most of which date to the second century AD or later. They are readily available, and I have a one volume collection of them on my shelf, called, “The Nag Hammadi Library”. After Nag Hammadi, in Egypt, where they were found.
Let’s take a very small tour: Our reading will take us from the mysterious circumstances of Mary’s birth in the Protoevangelium of James, through the scandalous tales of young Jesus cursing anyone who crosses him in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, to the disciples’ jealousy of Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Judas’ (only published much more recently, but on my shelf) suggestion that Judas and Jesus had a Snape-Dumbledore relationship to Jesus’ descent into hell in the Questions of Bartholomew.
All of these writings made an appearance after Christianity was established as a religion, and another movement, known by the umbrella term of Gnosticism, was latching onto Christian teachings and stories, and fusing them with a hotch-potch of Jewish, polytheistic and philosophical concerns to form religions of their own.
And they all tell us much more about the concerns of the communities which produced them than they do about Jesus, or, even, Christianity.
What the so-called Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is shedding light on is a group of people who may be a Christian community, or may be loosely affialiated with Christianity (in much the same way as the Gnostic groups), and their concerns over sexuality.
In the Early Church, in line with some of the greatest Roman Moralists, the idea had crept in that sex was devilish, and bad, and should not be indulged in, even to the extent that the ideal marriage was a marriage without sex – hence the tradition in Roman Catholicism that Mary and Joseph remained celibate after Jesus’ birth. But the group behind this text (as with the others who are assigning Jesus a wife or special female friend) may be reaffirming the goodness of sexuality and marriage as a whole.
Who is the Mary mentioned?
Your guess is as good as mine, though it is most likely meant to be Mary Magdalene, which some early splinter groups had put in a relationship with Jesus. Just as the little mentioned Salome (only appears 2 times in the Gospels in the Bible) was pictured as sharing Jesus’ seat at the last supper by some groups – and given that this is, culturally speaking, a clear indication of a sexual relationship, even marriage – it appears that there is more than one candidate for Jesus’ supposed wife.
So, was Jesus married?
All the earliest stories and traditions don’t mention a wife. We know that the Apostle Peter had a mother-in-law (Mark 1: 30), and that the Apostle Paul wasn’t married (1 Corinthians 7: 8), but nothing else is said about actual spouses.
Although it was unusual for the time, it is most likely that Jesus wasn’t married, and that the earliest stories and traditions of Jesus should take precedence over this fragment. But, quite frankly, if Jesus was married it really wouldn’t make that much difference to myself or most of the Christians I know. But it might make Dan Brown a little happier. 😉
If you want to read The Nag Hammadi Library, find it here in Amazon, or in various online sources. Just use any convenient search engine.
