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‘Wife of Jesus’ fragment no threat to Christianity
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A scrap of Egyptian papyrus that might depict Jesus with a wife has drawn media attention, but a scripture professor says it should not affect Christians’ understanding of Jesus.
Mark Giszczak, Assistant Professor of Sacred Scripture at the Augustine Institute in Denver, said that those who use sources like the papyrus to continue a controversy over whether Jesus was married are “really seeking to revive the ghost of Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ novel.”
He told CNA Sept. 19 that some of the interest in these sources derives from an “obsession with making Jesus seem like nothing special, a mere human teacher rather than the Son of God.”
“Jesus, the incarnate Word, confronts every generation anew with his radical claims to be God and to die for the world,” he stated. “The story of his life should not be rewritten, but received and believed in.”
The text in question is a fragment of papyrus written in the Egyptian Coptic language. The fragment is about 1.5 inches by 3 inches.
It bears the phrase “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’” and on the next line it allegedly says “she will be able to be my disciple.”
The origin of the fragment is not known, though it was first examined in the 1980s. It appears to date to the fourth century and likely came from Egypt. Its owner remains anonymous and is trying to sell his collection to Harvard.
Harvard Divinity School historian Karen L. King reported on the fragment in Rome on Sept. 18 at the International Congress of Coptic Studies.
Giszczak said the Catholic Church has never taught that Jesus was married and the New Testament does not say he had a wife.
“A fourth century text that reports that Jesus said ‘my wife’ does not change what we know about Jesus from the New Testament,” he said. “Rather, it shows that certain fourth century Coptic-speakers might have believed that Jesus was married, a belief which contradicts the account of the gospels.”
Some Old Testament figures like the prophet Jeremiah and first-century Jews practiced celibacy, while Jesus himself encouraged the practice in Matthew 19, Giszczak noted.
King has consulted with experts who say that the fragment is likely not a forgery. She has suggested that the fragment is copied from a second-century Greek text. [More]
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Jim, stop already with those halutionations of little poor hungry kids and their projection of a dysfunctional father who can’t wait to punish his subjects. The whole premise of Mary pleading with God and getting mercy for his creatures is a sick image of God. No wonder other Christians laugh at us.
Right, Tony. Just ask the 70,000 people who saw the sun approach the Earth — they thought they were going to die. This miracle was reported in the secular press all over the world. The people who experienced the miracle were not all Catholic.
100,000 people could have meen deluded and obviously they were, I have not seen any scientific questioning of this miracle and you would think if 70,000 people really saw the sun spinning there would be greater investigation. But my problem with Fatima is the dysfunctional image of God.
The apostle John tells us in his Gospel that there are “many things” not recorded there — and maybe nowhere else in the New Testament, either. And that’s good, because we’ve seen plenteous disagreements, and worse, over what IS written! Maybe it’s God’s (and John’s) way of telling us that we don’t need to beat one another bloody over our disagreements. How ’bout that!
Jesus was a common name in Jewish circles during the time that our Lord Jesus Christ lived on earth. There was a Jesus the zealot and a Jesus who was a rebel and/or revolution leader.
There was a great deal of story-telling and story writing in the 4th century among the Egyptian Coptics, much of which can be read in the “Lost Books of the Bible” or similar books. Some of these accounts were absolutely ridiculous stories about Jesus’s childhood powers. The Coptics seemed to need to fill in the blanks concerning the missing years and missing details of who Jesus was. The fragment recently found that mentions Jesus’s wife is most likely just another one of these written stories by well-meaning early Coptic Christians. The RC Church has always been well aware of these additional written accounts and discarded them as not worthy of belief when the council chose the books that were deemed authentic and put those into the New Testament. One of the reasons the council was called was there was so much misinformation floating around that they felt they needed to clarify what was authentic.
P.S. In any event, it makes absolutely no difference whether Jesus was or was not married. In every apparition that Jesus has privileged someone to see, he always points to his “heart” — not any other organ of his body. So, it’s the “heart” that matters — that’s all.
P.P.S. It’s the “heart” that matters — not the “gonads.”
RC — the gonads affect the heart. The Blessed Mother told the Fatima visionaries that more souls go to Hell for sins of the flesh than for any other reason.
Take it from me, RC — sexuality (masturbation and young women in hot pants) led me out of the Church in my late teens, and kept me out of the Church for over 20 years. As Jesus brought me back, I had to deal with these sexual issues, and only by His grace was I able to do so. Sex is at the very center of a person’ being. This is why sexual victimization is so damaging to a person’s psyche. Therefore, you can’t be close to God until your sexual house is in order.