Jesus's Wife

None other than Smithsonian Magazine is running the story of Professor Karen King who unveiled "an ancient papyrus fragment" that "is sure to send shock waves through the Christian world." The claim? Jesus was married.

The hubbub is over a papyrus. Or, rather, a fragment of one. 33 words. 14 incomplete lines. And the papyrus is -- get this -- 1600 years old. That's right. Ancient. Certainly older than I'd ever care to be.

Oh, wait. That's not as old as we thought, was it? I mean, the texts of the New Testament are all more than 1900 years old. All were written within 100 years of Jesus's life. All others were rejected as unreliable. And, look, it's not just the Church that says this. According to the article, "King makes no claim for its usefulness as biography." Get that?

Still, Professor King is taking the "high road". It's a conspiracy, you see. "Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100% happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?"

Now, concluding that "celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity" from biblical texts like "Let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband" (1 Cor 7:2) or the affirmations that Jesus gave of marriage in His attendance at the wedding of Cana (John 2:1-11) and His affirmation of marriage for life in Matthew 19:1-12 takes more "thinking" than I can muster. I mean, look, Karen, maybe there was some grand conspiracy where all texts were eliminated for an ideal that Christianity does not hold or maybe the only text that "survived" that said Jesus was married was because He wasn't. Maybe all the writers who wrote when Jesus was alive and all the readers who were alive when Jesus was and could critique those texts were liars or maybe the one document written long after all the rest without possible corroboration is less reliable? Maybe?

King is quite sure that the New Testament documents, written within "35 years after Jesus' death", were "heretics hornswoggled by the devil." (That's what the article said. I wouldn't think to use "hornswoggled" on my own.) Christianity for 2000 years has suffered from the "myth of origins". Luckily the Gnostics, a group soundly marked as heretics by Paul (the purpose of the Epistle to the Colossians), had the true story centuries later. Judas was no turncoat. Jesus did not rise from the dead. Paul was sorely mistaken on that point. Basic humanity included the Holy Spirit already, not requiring some obscure "faith" to receive salvation. Good thing we got that all sorted out, eh?

Does the papyrus she found say that Jesus was married? Well, maybe. Does this prove a conspiracy? Not really. Does it bring into question the Gospels? Not for me. Is it going to "send shock waves through the Christian world"? No. Not the Christian world. Like Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, it might stir up some, but people of genuine faith won't be too disturbed about ambiguous texts written hundreds of years after the fact about, in all honesty, a topic that really doesn't much matter in the scheme of things.

Now here's a side question, connected to this and to current affairs. Given that the King and the Smithsonian believe that this will "send shock waves through the Christian world", that this will reveal Christianity as a religion designed by "heretics hornswoggled by the devil", does anyone really think that Christians are going to rise up, storm Harvard and the Smithsonian, and demand an apology or burn the places down? Does anyone actually fear that Christians around the country are going to start fiery protests outside schools of higher learning? And, on the other hand, does anyone believe that there will be a public outcry to "Stop attacking Christianity and just be tolerant"? Yeah ... I didn't think so.

Update:
One more good piece on the subject is here.