Four
words on a previously unknown papyrus fragment provide the first
evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus had been
married, a Harvard University professor says.
Karen King, a
professor of divinity at the university, told the 10th
International Congress of Coptic Studies on September 18 in Rome
that she is awaiting further test results to help confirm the
object’s authenticity.
The four words on the fragment
translate to, “Jesus said to them, my wife.” The words, written in
Coptic, a language of ancient Egyptian Christians, are on a
papyrus fragment of about 1½ by three inches.
“Christian
tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no
reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim,”
King said. “This new gospel doesn’t prove that Jesus was married,
but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of
vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage. From the very
beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not
to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus’s death before
they began appealing to Jesus’s marital status to support their
positions.”
Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for
the Study of the Ancient World in New York, said he believes the
fragment to be authentic based on examination of the papyrus and
the handwriting, and Ariel Shisha-Halevy, a Coptic expert at
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, considers it likely to be
authentic on the basis of language and grammar, King said.
Final
judgment on the fragment, King said, depends on further
examination by colleagues and further testing, especially of the
chemical composition of the ink.
One side of the fragment
contains eight incomplete lines of handwriting, while the other
side is badly damaged and the ink so faded that only three words and a
few individual letters are still visible, even with infrared
photography and computer photo enhancement. Despite its tiny
size and poor condition, King said, the fragment provides
tantalizing glimpses into issues about family, discipleship,
and marriage that concerned ancient Christians.
King and
colleague AnneMarie Luijendijk, an associate professor of
religion at Princeton University, believe that the fragment is
part of a newly discovered gospel. Their analysis of the fragment
is scheduled for publication in the January 2013 issue of
Harvard Theological Review.
King has posted a draft of the
paper, an extensive question-and-answer on the fragment and its
meaning, and images of it, on a page on the Divinity School
website.
The brownish-yellow, tattered fragment belongs to an
anonymous private collector who contacted King to help translate
and analyze it, King said. The collector provided King with a
letter from the early 1980s indicating that Professor Gerhard
Fecht from the faculty of Egyptology at the Free University in
Berlin believed it to be evidence for a possible marriage of
Jesus.
King said that when the owner first contacted her about
the papyrus, in 2010, “I didn’t believe it was authentic and told
him I wasn’t interested.” But the owner was persistent, so in
December 2011, King invited him to bring it to her at Harvard.
After examining it, in March 2012 King carried the fragment to New
York and, together with Luijendijk, took it to Bagnall to be
authenticated. When Bagnall’s examination of the handwriting,
ways that the ink had penetrated and interacted with the papyrus,
and other factors, confirmed its likely authenticity, work on the
analysis and interpretation of the fragment began in earnest,
King said.
Little is known about the discovery of the fragment,
but it is thought to have come from Egypt because it is written in
Coptic, the form of the Egyptian language used by Christians there
during the Roman imperial period. Luijendijk suggested that “a
fragment this damaged probably came from an ancient garbage heap
like all of the earliest scraps of the New Testament.” Since there
is writing on both sides of the fragment, it clearly belongs to an
ancient book, or codex, not a scroll, she said.
The gospel of
which the fragment is but a small part, which King and Luijendijk have
named the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife for reference purposes, was
probably originally written in Greek, the two professors said, and
only later translated into Coptic for use among congregations of
Coptic-speaking Christians. King dated the time it was written to
the second half of the second century because it shows close
connections to other newly discovered gospels written at that
time, especially the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the
Gospel of Philip.
Like those gospels, it was probably ascribed
to one or more of Jesus’s closest followers, but the actual
author would have remained unknown even if more of it had survived.
As it stands, the remaining piece is too small to tell us anything
more about who may have composed, read, or circulated the new
gospel, King said.
Courtesy of B.D. Colen/Harvard University and World Science staff
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