Posted on 05/01/2014 5:51:04 AM PDT by Petrosius
(CNN) – It seemed real; it seemed fake; it seemed real again; now we’re back to fake.
"It” is the controversial little scrap of papyrus, written in Coptic, that seems to have Jesus referring to “my wife,” in contrast to the traditional stance that affirms Jesus’ perpetual bachelorhood.
The quick backstory: In 2012, a Harvard professor, Karen King, brought this papyrus to the attention of scholars and the public.
Both the material and the script looked authentically ancient at first glance, and though the notion of Jesus having a wife was remarkable, these “lost” Christian writings, such as the Gnostic Gospels, are full of unorthodoxies.
It was good enough for King, who is widely respected in the scholarly world.
From the beginning, there were doubts, however, beyond the unlikelihood that the tiny scrap that survived the centuries would happen to be the one that contained the reference to Jesus’ wife.
(Excerpt) Read more at religion.blogs.cnn.com ...
Jesus’ wife is The Church (All believers).
But that’s a bit too difficult for the “scholars” and CNN to understand....
These people are so predicable.
Ya think? DUH! It is amazing the things that people want to believe so as not to have to believe the real Biblical record!
What exactly does it say?
“Just like you, off stuffing your face with bread and drinking wine with your friends, while I’m left here with a screaming baby and a donkey to shovel-up after!”
We love to edit the Jesus story to our liking.
Any biblical scholar worth his salt learned in first year about the prevalence of spurious gospels and accounts of the life of Christ.
Many were written to advance a particular Christological heresy, some to fulfil natural curiosity about the unrecorded years of His life, and others to promote gnosis of the supposed secret teachings of Christ.
This fragment does no more than to add to the long list of pseudo-gospels, which were rejected for good reason from the Canon by the early Church—people in a position to know, unlike the journalists of today.
Realizing that this “gospel” is most likely a fake, a serious question: what would be the big deal if Jesus really did have a wife? Obviously, that would likely have been mentioned in one of the real gospels, so it’s pretty unlikely that Jesus was married, but what would be different if He was? Would Jesus not still be the Son of God? Would He still not have died so that we could be saved? Why is being married such a big issue?
“....scrap of papyrus, written in Coptic....”
.
What does the Coptic Church in Egypt have to say about it?
Why don’t they go to the source instead of guessing?
Heh, that reads almost like Sam Kinison's old "Jesus didn't have a wife" skit.
"No wife would buy this story in a million years. First of all, he leaves on a Friday with twelve other guys. He's gone for three days, no messages, no way to get in touch with him..."
Jesus having a wife would not be a big deal...but claiming all the gospels lied about it, and that the early church fathers lied about it IS a big deal.
Fair enough, but it would not be necessary to say that the gospels lied, just that they were incomplete on the subject of Jesus’ wife. After all, nobody can claim that the Gospels are complete accounts of the life of Jesus. For instance, most notably, the time between Jesus’ birth and the beginning of His ministry is quite poorly documented in any of the Gospels. That’s because that part of the story of Jesus’ life is not important to the main message of the Gospels, namely that Jesus is the son of God who was sent to earth to be sacrificed for our salvation. Similarly, whether or not Jesus was married is unimportant to this message.
It certainly seems that the Coptic “gospels” are fakes, but it does raise a question WRT the marriage of Jesus. There weren’t too many bachelors in 1st Century AD Judea. If someone gained the notoriety that Jesus did, it would have been a very notable fact about him that He was a bachelor, so notable that someone writing an account of his life might well mention the fact. Being married, at that time, would have been very commonplace, the type of thing that might well go unnoted in an account of his life, especially if the events of that account really didn’t involve his wife.
Further, the Gospels were all written several decades after the death of Jesus. Jesus had really riled up the Jewish authorities at that time (obviously, so much so that they went to the Roman governor to have him executed). It is possible that if Jesus had descendants, the authorities would have persecuted those descendants. Maybe the gospel writers just left out the presence of a wife and descendants in order to protect them.
Please note: I don’t necessarily actually believe any of this. It’s just not necessarily true that anyone had to actually lie for any of this to be true. It also does not affect the message of the Gospels in any way if any of this actually is true.
Ah,but Jesus relatives werewell known leaders in the early church. Why hide a wife.
wouldn’t she have been at the cross with his mom, his aunt, etc?
And nothing in the early pseudo gospels or writings of the church fathers.
Read Phillip Jenkins book Hidden Gospels on how the scholarship is being manipulated.
This idea was stsrted with the davinci code...which implies Jesus was not God, merely someone with magic powers...whose decendents were Merovingian kings.
One needn’t be a christian to see bad scolarship.
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