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Papyrus Referring to Jesus’ Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say (Mention Of Egypt Absent From Every Article).
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Papyrus Referring to Jesus’ Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say
By LAURIE GOODSTEINAPRIL 10, 2014
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A fragment of papyrus, known as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” has been analyzed by professors at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembled other ancient papyri. Credit Karen L. King/Harvard University, via Reuters
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A faded fragment of papyrus known as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” which caused an uproar when unveiled by a Harvard Divinity School historian in 2012, has been tested by scientists who conclude in a journal published on Thursday that the ink and papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery.
Skepticism about the tiny scrap of papyrus has been fierce because it contained a phrase never before seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ” Too convenient for some, it also contained the words “she will be able to be my disciple,” a clause that inflamed the debate in some churches over whether women should be allowed to be priests.
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Related Coverage
Harvard scholar, Karen L. King, presented the papyrus as a fragment of a fourth-century gospel at an international conference of Coptic scholars this month in Rome.
Vatican Says Papyrus Referring to Jesus’ Wife Is Probably FakeSEPT. 28, 2012
Professor Karen L. King, in her office at Harvard Divinity School, held a fragment of papyrus that she says contains a reference to Jesus' wife.
Coptic Scholars Doubt and Hail a Reference to Jesus’ WifeSEPT. 20, 2012
A historian at The Harvard Divinity School has identified this ancient piece of papyrus as the first known piece of writing to reference a wife of Jesus.
A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ WifeSEPT. 18, 2012
The papyrus fragment has now been analyzed by professors of electrical engineering, chemistry and biology at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembles other ancient papyri from the fourth to the eighth centuries. (Scientists at the University of Arizona, who dated the fragment to centuries before the birth of Jesus, concluded that their results were unreliable.)
The test results do not prove that Jesus had a wife or disciples who were women, only that the fragment is more likely a snippet from an ancient manuscript than a fake, the scholars agree. Karen L. King, the historian at Harvard Divinity School who gave the papyrus its name and fame, has said all along that it should not be regarded as evidence that Jesus married, only that early Christians were actively discussing celibacy, sex, marriage and discipleship.
“I took very seriously the comments of such a wide range of people that it might be a forgery,” Dr. King said in an interview this week. She said she is now very confident it is genuine.
“When you have all the evidence pointing in one direction, it doesn’t make it 100 percent, but history is not a place where 100 percent is a common thing,” Dr. King said.
The new information may not convince those scholars and bloggers who say the text is the work of a rather sloppy forger keen to influence contemporary debates. The Harvard Theological Review, which is publishing Dr. King’s long-delayed, peer-reviewed paper online on Thursday, is also publishing a rebuttal by Leo Depuydt, a professor of Egyptology at Brown University, who declares the fragment so patently fake that it “seems ripe for a Monty Python sketch.”
[link to www.nytimes.com]
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