The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus

According to a top religion scholar, this 1,600-year-old text fragment suggests that some early Christians believed Jesus was married—possibly to Mary Magdalene

By Ariel Sabar
Smithsonian.com, September 18, 2012, Subscribe

Karen L. King, the Hollis professor of divinity, believes that the fragment's 33 words refers to Jesus having a wife (© Karen L. King)

In our November 2012 issue, writer Ariel Sabar reported from Rome on the reaction to King's discovery, both among the religious and academic communities. Read the full version of his report here.

Harvard Divinity School’s Andover Hall overlooks a quiet street some 15 minutes by foot from the bustle of Harvard Square. A Gothic tower of gray stone rises from its center, its parapet engraved with the icons of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I had come to the school, in early September, to see Karen L. King, the Hollis professor of divinity, the oldest endowed chair in the United States and one of the most prestigious perches in religious studies. In two weeks, King was set to announce a discovery apt to send jolts through the world of biblical scholarship—and beyond.

King had given me an office number on the fifth floor, but the elevator had no “5” button. When I asked a janitor for directions, he looked at me sideways and said the building had no such floor. I found it eventually, by scaling a narrow flight of stairs that appeared to lead to the roof but opened instead on a garret-like room in the highest reaches of the tower.

“So here it is,” King said. On her desk, next to an open can of Diet Dr Pepper promoting the movie The Avengers, was a scrap of papyrus pressed between two plates of plexiglass.

The fragment was a shade smaller than an ATM card, honey-hued and densely inked on both sides with faded black script. The writing, King told me, was in the ancient Egyptian language of Coptic, into which many early Christian texts were translated in the third and fourth centuries, when Alexandria vied with Rome as an incubator of Christian thought.

When she lifted the papyrus to her office’s arched window, sunlight seeped through in places where the reeds had worn thin. “It’s in pretty good shape,” she said. “I’m not going to look this good after 1,600 years.”

But neither the language nor the papyrus’ apparent age was particularly remarkable. What had captivated King when a private collector first e-mailed her images of the papyrus was a phrase at its center in which Jesus says “my wife.”

The fragment’s 33 words, scattered across 14 incomplete lines, leave a good deal to interpretation. But in King’s analysis, and as she argues in a forthcoming article in the Harvard Theological Review, the “wife” Jesus refers to is probably Mary Magdalene, and Jesus appears to be defending her against someone, perhaps one of the male disciples.

“She will be able to be my disciple,” Jesus replies. Then, two lines later, he says: “I dwell with her.”

The papyrus was a stunner: the first and only known text from antiquity to depict a married Jesus.

But Dan Brown fans, be warned: King makes no claim for its usefulness as biography. The text was probably composed in Greek a century or so after Jesus’ crucifixion, then copied into Coptic some two centuries later. As evidence that the real-life Jesus was married, the fragment is scarcely more dispositive than Brown’s controversial 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code.

What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not just any wife, but possibly Mary Magdalene, the most-mentioned woman in the New Testament besides Jesus’ mother.

The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, “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 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?”

How this small fragment figures into longstanding Christian debates about marriage and sexuality is likely to be a subject of intense debate. Because chemical tests of its ink have not yet been run, the papyrus is also apt to be challenged on the basis of authenticity; King herself emphasizes that her theories about the text's significance are based on the assumption that the fragment is genuine, a question that has by no means been definitively settled. That her article's publication will be seen at least in part as a provocation is clear from the title King has given the text: “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.”

* * *

King, who is 58, wears rimless oval glasses and is partial to loose-fitting clothes in solid colors. Her gray-streaked hair is held in place with bobby pins. Nothing about her looks or manner is flashy.

“I’m a fundamentally shy person,” she told me over dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in early September.

King moved to Harvard from Occidental College in 1997 and found herself on a fast track. In 2009, Harvard named her the Hollis professor of divinity, a 288-year-old post that had never before been held by a woman.

Her scholarship has been a kind of sustained critique of what she calls the “master story” of Christianity: a narrative that casts the canonical texts of the New Testament as divine revelation that passed through Jesus in “an unbroken chain” to the apostles and their successors—church fathers, ministers, priests and bishops who carried these truths into the present day.

According to this “myth of origins,” as she has called it, followers of Jesus who accepted the New Testament—chiefly the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, written roughly between A.D. 65 and A.D. 95, or at least 35 years after Jesus’ death—were true Christians. Followers of Jesus inspired by noncanonical gospels were heretics hornswoggled by the devil.

In our November 2012 issue, writer Ariel Sabar reported from Rome on the reaction to King's discovery, both among the religious and academic communities. Read the full version of his report here.

“So here it is,” King said. On her desk, next to an open can of Diet Dr Pepper promoting the movie The Avengers, was a scrap of papyrus pressed between two plates of plexiglass.

“She will be able to be my disciple,” Jesus replies. Then, two lines later, he says: “I dwell with her.”

The papyrus was a stunner: the first and only known text from antiquity to depict a married Jesus.

* * *

“I’m a fundamentally shy person,” she told me over dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in early September.

Until the last century, virtually everything scholars knew about these other gospels came from broadsides against them from early Church leaders. Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon, France, pilloried them in A.D. 180 as “an abyss of madness and of blasphemy against Christ”—a “wicked art” practiced by people bent on “adapting the oracles of the Lord to their opinions.” (It’s a certainty that some critics will view “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” through much the same lens.)

The line between true believer and heretic hardened in the fourth century, when the Roman emperor Constantine converted to—and legalized—Christianity. To impose order on its factions, he summoned some 300 bishops to Nicaea. This council issued a statement of Christian doctrine, the Nicene creed, that affirmed a model of the faith still taken as orthodoxy.

In December 1945, an Arab farmer digging for fertilizer near the town of Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, stumbled on a cache of manuscripts revealing the other side of Christianity’s “master story.” Inside a meter-tall clay jar containing 13 leatherbound papyrus codices were 52 texts that didn’t make it into the canon, including the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Philip and the Secret Revelation of John.

As 20th-century scholars began translating the texts from Coptic, early Christians whose views had fallen out of favor—or were silenced—began speaking again, across the ages, in their own voices. A picture began to take shape of early Christians, scattered across the Eastern Mediterranean, who derived a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory teachings from the life of Jesus Christ. Was it possible that Judas was not a turncoat but a favored disciple? Did Christ’s body really rise, or just his soul? Was the crucifixion—and human suffering, more broadly—a prerequisite for salvation? Did one really have to accept Jesus to be saved, or did the Holy Spirit already reside within as part of one’s basic humanity?

Persecuted and often cut off from one another, communities of ancient Christians had very different answers to those questions. Only later did an organized Church sort those answers into the categories of orthodoxy and heresy. (Some scholars prefer the term “Gnostic” to heretical; King rejects both, arguing in her 2003 book, What is Gnosticism?, that “Gnosticism” is an artificial construct “invented in the early modern period to aid in defining the boundaries of normative Christianity.”)

One mystery that these new gospels threw new light on—and that came to preoccupy King—was the precise nature of Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalene. (King’s research on the subject preceded The Da Vinci Code, and made her a sought-after commentator after its publication.)

Magdalene is often listed first among the women who followed and “provided for” Jesus. When the other disciples flee the scene of Christ on the cross, Magdalene stays by his side. She is there at his burial and, in the Gospel of John, is the first person Jesus appears to after rising from the tomb. She is also, thus, the first to proclaim the “good news” of his resurrection to the other disciples—a role that in later tradition earns her the title “apostle to the apostles.”

In the scene at the tomb in John, Jesus says to her, “Do not cling to me, because I have not yet ascended…” But whether this touch reflected a spiritual bond or something more is left unstated.

Early Christian writings discovered over the past century, however, go further. The gospel of Philip, one of the Nag Hammadi texts, describes Mary Magdalene as a “companion” of Jesus “whom the Savior loved more than all the other disciples and [whom] he kissed often on the mouth.”

But scholars note that even language this seemingly straightforward is hobbled by ambiguity. The Greek word for “companion,” koinonos, does not necessarily imply a marital or sexual relationship, and the “kiss” may have been part of an early Christian initiation ritual.

In the early 2000s, King grew interested in another text, The gospel of Mary, which cast Magdalene in a still more central role, both as confidante and disciple. That papyrus codex, a fifth-century translation of a second-century Greek text, first surfaced in January 1896 on the Cairo antiquities market.

In the central scene of its surviving pages, Magdalene comforts the fearful disciples, saying that Jesus’ grace will “shelter” them as they preach the gospel. Peter here defers to Magdalene. “Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than all the other women. Tell us the words of the Savior that you remember, the things which you know that we don’t because we haven’t heard them.’”

Magdalene relates a divine vision, but the other disciples grow suddenly disputatious. Andrew says he doesn’t believe her, dismissing the teachings she said she received as “strange ideas.” Peter seems downright jealous. “Did he then speak with a woman in private without our knowing it?” he says. “Are we to turn around and listen to her? Did he choose her over us?’” (In the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, Peter is similarly dismissive, saying, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.”)

As Jesus does in Thomas, Levi here comes to Magdalene’s defense. “If the Savior made her worthy, who are you then for your part to reject her?” Jesus had to be trusted, Levi says, because “he knew her completely.”

The gospel of Mary, then, is yet another text that hints at a singularly close bond. For King, though, its import was less Magdalene’s possibly carnal relationship with Jesus than her apostolic one. In her 2003 book The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle, King argues that the text is no less than a treatise on the qualifications for apostleship: What counted was not whether you were at the crucifixion or the resurrection, or whether you were a woman or a man. What counted was your firmness of character and how well you understood Jesus’ teachings.

“The message is clear: only those apostles who have attained the same level of spiritual development as Mary can be trusted to teach the true gospel,” King writes.

Whatever the truth of Jesus and Magdalene’s relationship, Pope Gregory the Great, in a series of homilies in 591, asserted that Magdalene was in fact both the unnamed sinful woman in Luke who anoints Jesus’ feet and an unnamed adulteress in John whose stoning Jesus forestalls. The conflation simultaneously diminished Magdalene and set the stage for 1,400 years of portrayals of her as a repentant whore, whose impurity stood in tidy contrast to the virginal Madonna.

It wasn’t until 1969 that the Vatican quietly disavowed Gregory’s composite Magdalene. All the same, efforts by King and her colleagues to reclaim the voices in these lost gospels have given fits to traditional scholars and believers, who view them as a perversion by identity politics of long-settled truth.

“Far from being the alternative voices of Jesus’ first followers, most of the lost gospels should rather be seen as the writings of much later dissidents who broke away from an already established orthodox church,” Philip Jenkins, now co-director of Baylor University’s Program on Historical Studies of Religion, wrote in his book Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way. “Despite its dubious sources and controversial methods, the new Jesus scholarship … gained such a following because it told a lay audience what it wanted to hear.”

Writing on Beliefnet.com in 2003, Kenneth L. Woodward, Newsweek’s longtime religion editor, argued that “Mary Magdalene has become a project for a certain kind of ideologically committed feminist scholarship.”

“Were I to write a story involving Mary Magdalene,” he wrote, “I think it would focus on this: that a small group of well-educated women decided to devote their careers to the pieces of Gnostic literature discovered in the last century, a find that promised a new academic specialty within the somewhat overtrodden field of Biblical studies.”

“Among these texts,” he continued, “The Gospel of Mary is paramount; it reads as if the author had obtained a DD degree from Harvard Divinity School.”

King didn’t hesitate to respond. Woodward’s piece was “more an expression of Woodward’s distaste for feminism than a review or even a critique of [the] scholarship,” she wrote on Beliefnet. “One criterion for good history is accounting for all the evidence and not marginalizing the parts one doesn’t like .... Whether or not communities of faith embrace or reject the teaching found in these newly discovered texts, Christians will better understand and responsibly engage their own tradition by attending to an accurate historical account of Christian beginnings.”

King is no wallflower in her professional life. “You don’t walk over her,” one of her former graduate students told me.

* * *

On July 9, 2010, during summer break, an e-mail from a stranger arrived in King’s Harvard in-box. Because of her prominence, she gets a steady trickle of what she calls “kooky” e-mails: a woman claiming to be Mary Magdalene, a man with a code he says unlocks the mysteries of the Bible.

This e-mail looked more serious, but King remained skeptical. The writer identified himself as a manuscript collector. He said he had come into the possession of a Gnostic gospel that appeared to contain an “argument” between Jesus and a disciple about Magdalene. Would she take a look at some photographs?

King replied that she needed more information: What was its date and provenance? The man responded the same day, saying he’d purchased it in 1997 from a German-American collector who acquired it in the 1960s in Communist East Germany. He sent along an electronic file of photographs and an unsigned translation with the bombshell phrase, “Jesus said this to them: My wife…” (King would refine the translation as “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife … ’”)

“My reaction is, This is highly likely to be a forgery,” King recalled of her first impressions. “That’s kind of what we have these days: Jesus’ tomb, James’s Ossuary.” She was referring to two recent “discoveries,” announced with great fanfare, that were later exposed as hoaxes or, at best, wishful thinking. “OK, Jesus married? I thought, Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Even after reviewing the e-mailed photographs, “I was highly suspicious, you know, that the Harvard imprimatur was being asked to be put on something that then would be worth a lot of money,” she said. “I didn’t know who this individual was and I was busy working on other stuff, so I let it slide for quite a while.”

In late June 2011, nearly a year after his first e-mail, the collector gave her a nudge. “My problem right now is this,” he wrote in an e-mail King shared with me, after stripping out any identifying details. (The collector has requested, and King granted him, anonymity.) “A European manuscript dealer has offered a considerable amount for this fragment. It’s almost too good to be true.” The collector didn’t want the fragment to disappear in a private archive or collection “if it really is what we think it is,” he wrote. “Before letting this happen, I would like to either donate it to a reputable manuscript collection or wait at least until it is published, before I sell it.” Had she made any progress?

Four months later, after making a closer study of the photographs, she at last replied. The text was intriguing, but she could not proceed on photographs alone. She told the collector she would need an expert papyrologist to authenticate the fragment by hand, along with more details about its legal status and history.

William Stoneman, the director of Harvard’s Houghton Library, which houses manuscripts dating as far back as 3000 B.C., helped King with a set of forms that would permit Harvard to formally receive the fragment.

King brushed aside the collector’s offer to send it through the mail—“You don’t do that! You hardly want to send a letter in the mail!” So last December, he delivered it by hand.

“We signed the paperwork, had coffee and he left,” she recalls.

The collector knew nothing about the fragment’s discovery. It was part of a batch of Greek and Coptic papyri that he said he had purchased in the late 1990s from one H. U. Laukamp, of Berlin.

Among the papers the collector had sent King was a typed letter to Laukamp from July 1982 from Peter Munro. Munro was a prominent Egyptologist at the Free University Berlin and a longtime director of the Kestner Museum, in Hannover, for which he had acquired a spectacular, 3,000-year-old bust of Akhenaten. Laukamp had apparently consulted Munro about his papyri, and Munro wrote back that a colleague at the Free University, Gerhard Fecht, an expert on Egyptian languages and texts, had identified one of the Coptic papyri as a second-to fourth-century A.D. fragment of the Gospel of John.

The collector also left King an unsigned and undated handwritten note that appears to belong to the same 1982 correspondence—this one concerning a different gospel. “Professor Fecht believes that the small fragment, approximately 8 cm in size, is the sole example of a text in which Jesus uses direct speech with reference to having a wife. Fecht is of the opinion that this could be evidence for a possible marriage.”

When I asked King why neither Fecht nor Munro would have sought to publish so novel a discovery, she said, “People interested in Egyptology tend not to be interested in Christianity. They’re into Pharaonic stuff. They simply may not have been interested.”

Neither, necessarily, would have Laukamp. Manuscript dealers tend to worry most about financial value, and attitudes differ about whether publication helps or hinders.

King, however, could not ask. Laukamp died in 2001, Fecht in 2006 and Munro in 2008.

For legal purposes, however, the 1982 date of the correspondence was crucial, though it — along with the fact that Laukamp, Fecht and Munro were all dead — may well strike critics as suspiciously convenient. The next year, Egypt would revise its antiquities law to declare that all discoveries after 1983 were the unequivocal property of the Egyptian government.

Though King can read Coptic and has worked with papyrus manuscripts, she is by training a historian of religion. To authenticate the fragment, she would need outside help. A few weeks before the collector came to Harvard, King forwarded the photos to AnneMarie Luijendijk, a professor at Princeton and an authority on Coptic papyri and sacred scriptures. (King had overseen her doctoral dissertation at Harvard.)

Luijendijk took the images to Roger Bagnall, a renowned papyrologist who directs the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. Bagnall, who had previously chaired Columbia University’s department of classics, is known for his conservative assessments of the authenticity and date of ancient papyri.

Every few weeks, a group of eight to ten papyrologists in the New York area gather at Bagnall’s Upper West Side apartment to share and vet new discoveries. Bagnall serves tea, coffee and cookies, and projects images of papyri under discussion onto a screen in his living room.

After looking at the images of the papyrus, “we were unanimous in believing, yes, this was OK,” Bagnall told me when we spoke by phone.

It wasn’t until King brought the actual fragment to Bagnall’s office last March, however, that he and Luijendijk reached a firm conclusion. The color and the texture of the papyrus, along with the parallel deterioration of the ink and the reeds, had none of the “tells” of a forgery. “Anyone who has spent any time in Egypt has seen a lot of fake papyrus, made of banana leaves and all sorts of stuff,” Bagnall told me.

Also convincing was the scribe’s middling penmanship. “It’s clear the pen wasn’t perhaps of ideal quality and the writer didn’t have complete control of it. The flow of ink was highly irregular. This wasn’t a high-class professional working with good tools. That is one of the things that tells you it’s real, because a modern scribe wouldn’t do that. You’d have to be really kind of perversely skilled to produce something like this as a fake.”

The Sahidic dialect of Coptic and the style of the handwriting, with letters whose tails do not stray above or below the line, reminded Luijendijk of texts from Nag Hammadi and elsewhere and helped her and Bagnall date the fragment to the second half of the fourth century A.D. and place its probable origins in Upper Egypt.

The fragment is some four centimeters tall and eight centimeters wide. Its rough edges suggest that it had been cut out of a larger manuscript; some dealers, keener on profit than preservation, will dice up texts for maximum return. The presence of writing on both sides convinced the scholars that it was part of a codex—or book—rather than a scroll.

In Luijendijk’s judgment, the scribe’s handwriting—proficient, but not refined—suggests that this gospel was read not in a church, where more elegant calligraphy prevailed, but among early Christians who gathered in homes for private study. “Something like a Bible study group,” Luijendijk told me.

“I had to not really let myself feel much excitement because of the disappointment factor—if it turns out to be a hoax or something,” King told me. “But once we realized what it was, then you get to start talking about the ‘Oh my’ factor.”

To help bring out letters whose ink had faded, King borrowed Bagnall’s infrared camera and used Photoshop to enhance the contrasts.

The papyrus’ back side, or verso, is so badly damaged that only a few key words—“my mother” and “three”—were decipherable. But on the front side, or recto, King gleaned eight fragmentary lines:

1) “not [to] me. My mother gave to me li[fe] … ”

2) The disciples said to Jesus, “

3) deny. Mary is worthy of it

4) ” Jesus said to them, “My wife

5) she will be able to be my disciple

6) Let wicked people swell up

7) As for me, I dwell with her in order to

8) an image

The line—“Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’”—is truncated but unequivocal. But with so little surrounding text, what might it mean? Into what backdrop did it fit?

This is where King’s training as a historian of early Christianity came to bear.

Some of the phrases echoed, if distantly, passages in Luke, Matthew and the Gnostic gospels about the role of family in the life of disciples. The parallels convinced King that this gospel was originally composed, most likely in Greek, in the second century A.D., when such questions were a subject of lively theological discussion. (The term “gospel,” as King uses it in her analysis, is any early Christian writing that describes the life—or afterlife—of Jesus.) Despite the New Testament’s many Marys, King infers from a variety of clues and comparisons that the “Mary” in Line 3 is “probably” Magdalene, and that the “wife” in Line 4 and the “she” in Line 5 is this same Mary.

In the weeks leading up to the mid-September announcement, King worried that people would read the headlines and misconstrue her paper as an argument that the historical Jesus was married. But the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” was written too long after Jesus’ death to have any value as biography—a point King underscores in her forthcoming article in the Harvard Theological Review.

The New Testament is itself silent about Jesus’ marital status. For King, the best historical evidence that Mary was not Jesus wife is that the New Testament refers to her by her hometown, Migdal, a fishing village in Northern Israel, rather than by her relationship to the Messiah. “The most odd thing in the world is her standing next to Jesus and the New Testament identifying her by the place she comes from instead of her husband,” King told me. In that time, “women’s status was determined by the men to whom they were attached.” Think of “Mary, Mother of Jesus, Wife of Joseph.”

For King, the text on the papyrus fragment is something else: fresh evidence of the diversity of voices in early Christianity.

The first claims of Jesus' celibacy did not appear until about a century after his death. Clement of Alexandria, a theologian and Church father who lived from A.D. 150 to A.D. 215, reported on a group of second-century Christians “who say outright that marriage is fornication and teach that it was introduced by the devil. They proudly say that they are imitating the Lord who neither married or had any possession in this world, boasting that they understand the gospel better than anyone else.”

Clement himself took a less proscriptive view, writing that while celibacy and virginity were good for God’s elect, Christians could have sexual intercourse in marriage so long as it was without desire and only for procreation. Other early Church fathers, such as Tertullian and John Chrysostom, also invoked Jesus’ unmarried state to support celibacy. Complete unmarriedness —innuptus in totum, as Tertullian puts it—was how a holy man turned away from the world, and toward God’s new kingdom.

Though King makes no claims for the value of the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” as, well, a marriage certificate, she says it “puts into greater question the assumption that Jesus wasn’t married, which has equally no evidence,” she told me. It casts doubt “on the whole Catholic claim of a celibate priesthood based on Jesus’ celibacy. They always say, ‘This is the tradition, this is the tradition.’ Now we see that this alternative tradition has been silenced.”

“What this shows,” she continued, “is that there were early Christians for whom that was simply not the case, who could understand indeed that sexual union in marriage could be an imitation of God’s creativity and generativity and it could be spiritually proper and appropriate.”

In her paper, King speculates that the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” may have been tossed on the garbage heap not because the papyrus was worn or damaged, but “because the ideas it contained flowed so strongly against the ascetic currents of the tides in which Christian practices and understandings of marriage and sexual intercourse were surging.”

* * *

I first met King in early September at a restaurant on Beacon Street, a short walk from her office. When she arrived, looking a little frazzled, she apologized. “There was a crisis,” she said.

A little over an hour earlier, the Harvard Theological Review had informed her that a scholar who was asked to critique her draft had sharply questioned the papyrus’s authenticity. The scholar—whose name the Review doesn’t share with an author—thought that grammatical irregularities and the way the ink manifested on the page pointed to a forgery. Unlike Bagnall and Luijendijk, who had viewed the actual papyrus, the reviewer was working off low-resolution photographs.

“My first response was shock,” King told me.

After getting nods from Luijendijk, Bagnall and another anonymous peer reviewer, King had considered the question of authenticity settled. But the Review would not now publish unless she answered this latest criticism. If she could not do so soon, she told me, she would have to call off plans to announce the discovery, at an international conference on Coptic studies, in Rome. The date of her paper there, September 18, was just two weeks away.

Because of the fragment’s content, she had expected high-wattage scrutiny from other scholars. She and the owner had already agreed that the papyrus remain available at Harvard after publication for examination by other specialists—and for good reason. “The reflexive position will be, ‘Wait a minute. Come on.’ ”

Once the shock of the reviewer’s comments subsided, however, “my second response was, Let’s get this settled,” she told me. “I have zero interest in publishing anything that’s a forgery.”

Would she need 100 percent confidence? I asked.

“One-hundred percent doesn’t exist,” she told me. “But 50-50 doesn’t cut it.”

* * *

“Women, Sex and Gender in Ancient Christianity” met on the first floor of Andover Hall. It was a humid September afternoon and the class’s first day. So many students were filing in that King had to ask the latecomers to heft chairs in from a neighboring classroom.

“I can just sit on the floor,” volunteered a young woman in a pink tank-top and a necklace bearing a silver cross.

“Not for three hours,” King said.

She asked the students to introduce themselves and say why they’d signed up for the class.

“Roman Catholic feminist theology,” one student said of her interests.

“Monasticism,” said another.

“The sexualized language of repentance.”

“Queer theory, gender theory and gender performance in early Christianity.”

When the baton passed to the professor, she kept it simple; her reputation, it seemed, preceded her. “I’m Karen King,” she said. “I teach this stuff. I like it.”

Harvard established its divinity school in 1816 as the first—and still one of the few—nonsectarian theological schools in the country, and its pioneering, sometimes iconoclastic scholarship has made it an object of suspicion among orthodox religious institutions. Students come from a raft of religious backgrounds, including some 30 different Christian denominations; the largest single constituency, King said, is Roman Catholic women, whose Church denies them the priesthood.

For King, being on the outside looking in is a familiar vantage. She grew up in Sheridan, Montana, a cattle ranching town of 700 people an hour’s drive southeast of Butte. Her father was the town pharmacist, who made house calls at all hours of the night. Her mother took care of the children—King is the second of four—taught home economics at the high school and raised horses.

For reasons she still doesn’t quite understand—perhaps it was the large birthmark on her face, perhaps her bookishness—King told me that she was picked on and bullied “from grade school on.” For many years, she went with her family to Sheridan’s Methodist Church. In high school, however, King switched, on her own, to the Episcopal Church, which she regarded as “more earnest.”

“The Methodists were doing ’70s things—Coca-Cola for the Eucharist,” she told me. “I was a good student. I liked reading and ideas. It wasn’t that I was terribly righteous. But I didn’t like drinking, I didn’t like driving around in cars, I was not particularly interested in boys. And intellectually, the Episcopal Church was where the ideas were.”

After high school, she enrolled for a year at Western College, a small onetime women’s seminary in Ohio, before transferring to the University of Montana, where she abandoned a pre-med track after her religion electives proved more stimulating. A turning point was a class on Gnosticism, taught by John D. Turner, an authority on the Nag Hammadi discoveries.

At Brown University, where she earned her PhD, she wrote her dissertation on a Nag Hammadi manuscript called Allogones, or The Stranger. (She met her husband, Norman Cluley, a structural engineer, on a jogging path in Providence.)

Over dinner, I asked what had first drawn her to these so-called “heretical” texts. “I’ve always had a sense of not fitting in,” she told me. “I thought, if I could figure out these texts, I could figure out what was wrong with me.”

Was she still a practicing Christian? Her faith, she said, had sustained her through a life-threatening, three-year bout with cancer that went into full remission in 2008, after radiation and seven surgeries. She told me that she attends services, irregularly, at an Episcopal Church down the block from her home, in Arlington, a town northwest of Cambridge. “Religion is absolutely central to who I am in every way,” she said. “I spend most of my time on it. It’s how I structure my interior life. I use its materials when I think about ethics and politics.”

As for her career, however, “I never regretted choosing the university over church.”

* * *

When I spoke with Bagnall, the papyrologist, I asked whether he agreed with King’s reading of the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” He said he found it convincing and appropriately cautious. Was there an Achilles’ heel? I asked. “The greatest weakness, I suppose, is that it is so fragmentary and it is far from being beyond the ingenuity of humankind to take this fragment and start restoring the lost text to say something quite different.”

Like King, he expects the fragment to inspire equal measures of curiosity and skepticism. “There will be people in the field of religious studies who say, ‘It’s Morton Smith all over again.’ ” Smith was a Columbia professor whose sensational discovery of a previously unknown letter by Clement of Alexandria didn’t stand up to scrutiny. Unlike King, though, Smith had only photographs of the alleged document, which had itself somehow vanished into thin air.

“Among serious scholars who work with this material, the reaction will likely be a lot of interest,” Bagnall said. “Outside the professional field, the reaction is likely to be”—he let out a short laugh—“less measured. I think there will be people upset, who will not have read the article and won’t understand just how measured and careful the treatment is.”

* * *

King had e-mailed the anonymous reviewer’s critique to Bagnall, and we were talking in her office when Bagnall’s reply arrived. She lifted her eyeglasses and leaned across the desk to look at the screen. “Ah, yeah, OK!” she said. “Go, Roger!”

What had he written? I asked.

“He’s saying he’s not persuaded” by the critique, “but nonetheless it would be good to strengthen the points the reviewer was raising.”

Four days later, King e-mailed me to say that her proposed revisions had satisfied the Review’s editors. She had shown the critical review to Bagnall, Luijendijk and Ariel Shisha-Halevy, an eminent Coptic linguist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who replied, “I believe—on the basis of language and grammar—the text is authentic.”

The scholars agreed with the reviewer’s suggestion that a noninvasive test—such as a spectrum analysis—be run to make sure the ink’s chemistry was compatible with inks from antiquity. But they were confident enough for her to go public in Rome, with the proviso that the results of the chemical analysis be added to her article before final publication.

She conceded to me the possibility that the ink tests could yet expose the piece as a forgery. More likely, she said, it “will be the cherry on the cake.”

King makes no secret of her approach to Christian history. “You’re talking to someone who’s trying to integrate a whole set of ‘heretical’ literature into the standard history,” she told me in our first phone conversation, noting later that “heretical” was a term she does not accept.

But what was she after, exactly? I asked. Was her goal to make Christianity a bigger tent? Was it to make clergy more tolerant of difference?

That wasn’t it. “I’m less interested in proselytizing or a bigger tent for its own sake than in issues of human flourishing,” she said. “What are the best conditions in which people live and flourish? It’s more the, How do we get along? What does it mean for living now?”

What role did history play? I asked. “What history can do is show that people have to take responsibility for what they activate out of their tradition. It’s not just a given thing one slavishly follows. You have to be accountable.”

As for “the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” “it will be big for different groups in different ways,” she said. “It will start a conversation. My thought is that that will be the longest real impact.”

Ariel Sabar is the author of My Father’s Paradise, winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award.

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Comments (81)

What exciting news!!! It keeps looking like Jesus had a wife, Mary Magdalene. Jesus came to us to teach us to love & take care of each other among other lessons. If he did not have a wife with whom he had a sexual & spiritual relationship, that would be odd & against what he taught us. I am very excited this is all coming to light & I am not so happy with those who hid & continue to hide Jesus' life from us for their own gain...

Posted by JD RAFFERTY on May 3,2013 | 01:20 AM

http://open.salon.com/blog/chicago_guy/2012/10/05/jesus_said_my_wife What if. . . . .

Posted by Roger Wright on May 2,2013 | 07:29 AM

Though I am not a religious scholar, this subject is my passion and I have read many books. Particularly Micheal Baigent, and Elaine Pagels. However, my curiousity was sparked by a paper a historian who did his degree at Macquarie University in Sydney NSW, Australia. I have his shorter version and its focus on the role of the Sicarii, and of which two were a special part of Jesus's disciples. I think that if the peripherical identities were studied, that a clearer picture of who Jesus was could be drawn. Warm Regards Glenys

Posted by Glenys Buselli on March 23,2013 | 12:59 AM

I believe the film "Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer" should be held in equal regard with all other historical records, films and documentaries about Abrahan Lincoln. It's reliable and extremenly credible. I believe the maker's agenda is to make an accurate record of Lincoln's life. Ancient documents written 400 years after an event should be held in equal esteme as those written within in 40-70 years after the same event. I don't see how anyone could believe anything else. I don't know what Christianity is going to do with this brand new allegation. It's all going to crumble over night and fade away. Oh the damage of one single fragment can do to over 6000 other documents thought to be reliable! What is the world going to do?

Posted by Alex Booyse on February 25,2013 | 09:09 AM

This is not the only recent discovery. A page from the Oxyringhus trash heap in Egypt was also read in 2005 with similar ideas. Amazingly, the above report does not include it. See part of one report below Jesus and Mary Magdalene: A New Gospel Fragment Discovered By Jonathan Sheen The Liverpool Observer 19 April 2005 In what may eventually prove to be a serious challenge to traditional Christian ideas of the life of Jesus, scholars at Oxford University announced Tuesday the discovery of a previously unknown Gospel fragment among a collection of ancient Egyptian papyri. The single papyrus sheet was found among the collection known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a horde of ancient texts uncovered in Egypt in the last century. The fragment contains dialogue between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and the words spoken suggest something that can only come as a shock to mainstream Christians: that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife. "A revelation of this kind, at this time, is beyond ironic," said Lisa Heist, project director at the Oxford Paleographic Center. "It is uncanny." Heist pointed to the great irony in the discovery's timing. see http://news.liverpoolobserver.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=630165

Posted by H. Tailor on January 8,2013 | 03:49 AM

Please!! Ms King is just another overly educated false prophet. Christ also talks about His bride in the New Testiment. His Bride is the Church and the Church incorporates all believers from all Christian denominations. It does not mean that He was married to one specific woman and that He took her to be his wife. I am not very educated but even I know a false prophet when I hear one. The Bible is the true Word of God not a fairytale. Not to be changed to suit us today. The book of Jude warns Christians that certain men and women will worm in unnoticed. It was going on back then and will continue until Christ's return.

Posted by zee thomas on January 6,2013 | 01:59 PM

I appreciate the information & thoughts given in this article. However, I would like to hear what some literary specialists think about this literary fragment. I believe a fuller examination is important because it will provide a well-rounded understanding of the fragment. The fragment itself falls into the fields of linguistics, ancient languages, archaeology, papyrology, general literary studies, & possibly others. Although King may be a language expert, she may not be a literary expert. I think a literary expert would bring to the discussion valuable literary considerations such as the fragment's genre, author, circumstances out of which it was written, the purpose for which it was written, audience, & more. All of these things bear significantly on how the fragment should be interpreted, then understood, that is, if it is possible to correctly understand such a small fragment. The fragment is a pixel of a larger picture. So, after the authenticity of the fragment is settled, this question remains, what is the larger picture? That is the goal of scholarship and the various fields of research concerning the fragment.

Posted by Dozier Lee on December 1,2012 | 02:11 AM

'The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, “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 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?” So you are already way off from the start with or without your new evidence, celibacy is not the ideal of Christianity its the ideal of pagan religions like catholicism. The ideal of Christianity is to seek the kingdom of God, so it means you do have a wife and children, and promote the agenda of God, not the agenda of the pope, and God happens to say that we are to bring the good news of the gospel everywhere so that others may be saved. Revelation tells us that Jesus will return only once all places on earth have heard the good news, then and only then will the kingdom of God come, thus the Christian ideal is to preach the good news of the gospel to all corners of the earth, celibacy is not a prerequisite.

Posted by Clem on November 6,2012 | 05:43 PM

Et tu, Jesus?

Posted by Mesut Tigli on October 25,2012 | 08:01 AM

Jesus was a rabbi. I believe rabbis were expected to be married. Not a big deal.

Posted by jorod on October 7,2012 | 10:27 PM

I'm really sorry, but the Bible says that when a man and a woman get married they become one. A perfectly holy person can't become one with a sinner.

Posted by Ester on October 2,2012 | 07:53 AM

Nothing news worthy here...Jesus often referenced His church in the termonology as His "bride". (see as example the parable of the 10 Virgins) Really trying to make some news...keep trying

Posted by Eleni on October 1,2012 | 01:16 PM

i am surprised that professor king did not sort out the technicalities of the text,ink and papyrus before her public statements in rome at the international conference.it has resulted in much negativity to theological investigation,encouraged by outrageous statements by some uncritical scholars.thank goodness smithsonian have delayed the broadcast-hopefully it will be critically assessed before transmission. peter long,global co-ordinator:the international pseudepigrapha study network.

Posted by rev.dr.peter long on September 30,2012 | 12:58 PM

Whether Jesus was married or not is simply unimportant when one realizes that who he was and what he had to say about our sinful nature and escaping the consequences of our sin and establishing a renewed rellationship with the Lord God are the important results of his life on earth. His marital state has no bearing on that. But when I read in the 19th chapter of the Gospel of John, how a crucified and suffering Jesus meticulously made arrangments from the cross for John to take care of his mother, I wonder how such a man could completely ignore his wife (who if indeed Mary Magdelene was his wife) who was standing there with his mother. That was making a pointed statement that "Let her hang, I'm not concerned with what happens to her." I do not think any interpretation of his life and identity would find that in character for him.

Posted by Robert F. Foster on September 29,2012 | 11:03 PM

HJ Silver.....Best comment on the site.

Posted by Pulseguy on September 29,2012 | 04:22 PM

There are still earlier 'Gospels' that portray Jesus making birds from clay and killing children who insult his mom. How come we don't have a 'Jesus the child-killer?' article? Because this is all about us and nothing about the New Testament

Posted by Prof Robert Davis on September 28,2012 | 05:23 PM

His suffering would not have been complete otherwise.

Posted by H.J. Silver on September 25,2012 | 05:47 PM

This has got to be an intentional move from science to sensationalism with this controvsary about Jesus. Have you merged with one of the supermarket tabloids ??? Your credability is at stake here.

Posted by Don on September 25,2012 | 11:08 AM

If Jesus was married, I do not find it all that strange that the canonical gospels make no mention of the fact. What mattered to the evangelists was his teaching and example, his death and his resurrection. His wife, if she existed, had very little relevance to any of this. The same is true of the disciples. We happen to know that Peter was married, because one of the first people to be healed by Jesus was Peter’s mother-in-law (Mk 1.30-31), and Paul says so too (1 Cor.9.5). But we don’t know her name; we don’t know whether she was among the many women who accompanied Jesus and supported his mission (Lk 8.2-4), we do not hear of her at all in Acts. Similarly we don’t know how many of the disciples were married. If it were not for the passing reference by Paul in 1 Cor.9.5, we should not know that any of them were, or that at least some of them were accompanied by their wives on their missionary travels, or that Jesus’ brothers were married. If the existence of a wife was irrelevant to the story, the evangelists saw no need to mention her. And the same may well be true of the hypothetical wife of Jesus, whether she was Mary Magdalen, Mary the sister of Lazarus or Martha or anyone else. I do not think the new papyrus, written centuries after the canonical gospels, adds anything to what the evangelists intended to tell us, even if (which seems unlikely) it contains a germ of truth which was previously not hinted at by any Christian or non-Christian writer. Incidentally, I prefer to think that the wedding at Cana was the wedding of one of Jesus’s sisters. This would account for both the part that Mary clearly played in the wedding arrangements, as the mother of the bride, and also the fact that the wedding was not in the bride’s home town of Nazareth but in her new husband’s home town, which I believe was in accord with the custom of the time.

Posted by Edward Nugee on September 24,2012 | 12:48 PM

Kudos to Dr. King for maintaining her stance of scholarly objectivity. However, Irrenaeus cannot be easily dismissed. He was only twice removed in successiion from the Apostle John and knew his school of thinking well. John's line of thinking was embedded in the earliest liturgies of Christian worship as scripture, which in those days was laboriously hand copied as texts wore out. Recopied texts were vetted by the metrical beat of chant, so that even illiterate hearers could detect errors. These would throw the beat off. Such text was usually retired, not destroyed. Such text was always renewed physically having gone through the automatic vetting process contained in chant. Groups called Gnostics today were so far removed from John's school, accepted during the first three centuries following Jesus' resurrection by most believers in Christ, that these Gnostics did not participate even in agreed upon ways to settle disputes. It is these far removed groups in religious thinking that Irrenaeus rails against. In none of the center groups was there a notion that Jesus, regarded as God or as God's son, was not cellibate. The fragment although of interest to scholars is not of John's school. Furthermore when chanted in Coptic,it bears discordant metrical beats, identifying it as never used in Coptic worship or that of John's school and as a retired text. And so like the ancient codices, the oldest containing Biblical text, the Vaticanus and the Sianaticus, which also fail the metrical beat chant, this small bit of text fits the designation, very old and retired error text deserving of a place in museum settings but not in Christian worship following the school that the Apostle John and his successors Pollycarp and Irrenaeus established and which dominates the worship services of most Christians today.

Posted by James Haidos on September 23,2012 | 12:32 AM

Lol, I love M B's comment about people in the 6th century writing fan fiction! I'm glad to see that most people commenting are rational, well-informed people who recognize that this "discovery" is just another trivial drop in the apocryphal scriptures bucket. What other commenters don't seem to realise is that historians and academics treat the Bible as an informative historical text, which has time and again had its contents been supported by archaeological discoveries. It's all very well for ignorant people to dismiss the Bible as a fairytale, but you do realise, don't you, that there is more historical evidence for the existence of Jesus than there is for Julius Caesar? And that Jesus, his life, his execution, and the controversy of his resurrection are mentioned in other secular contemporaneous historical texts? It's fine to choose to reject its impact on your life and world view, but please, don't be so ignorant as to dismiss it as myth and nonsense.

Posted by esther on September 23,2012 | 09:47 PM

I am of the belief that it is more reasonable to assume that Jesus was married than to assume otherwise. For the continuation of the line of David and the relationship with the Essene community it is difficult to comprehend anything else despite the change of emphasis by the Roman Church. I find Laurence Gardner's book - "The Bloodline of the Holy Grail" eminently believable.

Posted by Jack Taylor on September 23,2012 | 04:19 PM

A fragment dating to at least 268 years after the origin of the Church, which is not cited, not sourced, and not mentioned in any Early Christian writings-- not even to refute it. This is revolutionary? This is shocking? Are the readers unaware that the Church endured persecution for the first three centuries and was hardly in a position to be, much less in the business of, carrying out global conspiracy? There is academic confidence in the received Canon of Scripture-- and for good reason. For example: *The (First) Letter of Clement* was authentic (we know who Clement was) and popular (it made sense and was orthodox), and yet was rejected for inclusion because it was non-Apostolic. We take something written 200 years after THAT and expect a revolution and questioning? Amateurs.

Posted by Crews Giles on September 23,2012 | 01:52 PM

Dr King is probably right, Jesus did indeed have a wife. Jesus became high priest of Jerusalem, as Hebrews 7 clearly says. And yet the Talmud says that any high priest must have not one, but two wives. Thus the wives of Jesus were Mary and Martha, of Bethany. But that was not the real problem for the biblical scribes. The real problem was that Mary was also Jesus sister. Shocked? Actually, sibling betrothals like this were perfectly normal in this region. All the Ptolemaic pharaohs had sibling marriages, as did Queen Ourania of Persia, Queen Helena of Adiabene, Simon Magus of Judaea and King Agrippa II of Judaea. Even Saul (St Paul) asked James if he could have a sister-wife. Yes, the man who wrote the New Testament also wanted a sister-wife: Have we not power to lead about a sister-wife, as well as other apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas? (1Cor 9:5) (Only three Bibles translate this verse correctly, as 'sister-wife'. In the Greek, the meaning is obvious.) Regards, Ralph Ellis However, in addition to this, we now know who Jesus really was and what he looked like. He has at last been discovered in the historical record. Please see book advert and book article below, plus an image of what Jesus really looked like. See the book 'Jesus, King of Edessa'.

Posted by ralph Ellis on September 23,2012 | 11:15 AM

Rabbis were married, if he was married, was that a sin? Of course not so if he was the sinless sacrifice who had known the trials and temptations of humans well being married is one part of being human. He was crucified and Yahweh resurrected him. The Resurrection of the Shroud has enough proof of that for anyone, does his marital status matter at all? Only to a group that tries to say they speak for him and we should be celibate. Note to idiots celibacy for everyone means the end of the world, no kids, no future.

Posted by Delia on September 22,2012 | 09:47 PM

Pol Dubh's comment on Jesus' age and marital status require consideration. There is the possibility, obviously, that Jesus could have been a widower. To augment the picture, I read recently the view (in a German publication?) that all Catholic priests, bishops, and cardinals are intrinsically homosexual. The evidence? Their feminine dress, complete down to a cardinal's red socks, shoes and polished buckles. What more evidence do you need than that?

Posted by j. p. ward on September 22,2012 | 05:37 PM

Hope the writer of the article doesn't hope to equate Baylor University, the world's largest Southern Baptist Bible college, with scholarly opinion on early Christianity. Talk about agendas!

Posted by Robert on September 22,2012 | 05:34 PM

The Church has also been mentioned as Jesus's wife? And he defended it on a regular basis!

Posted by Tom Cunningham on September 22,2012 | 10:10 AM

Some years ago a Rabbi told me that there can be no doubt that Jesus was married and that the evidence is in the New Testament. In Mark and in John Jesus is called Rabbi or Rabboni titles that observant Jews NEVER apply to unmarried men. For him that made the case and given the long written history of the Jewish people I was fairly convinced. For me this bit of papyrus confirms that others believe, or at least believed, it too. I await the screams of rage and denial from the Catholic hierarchy and "christianist" zealots.

Posted by Jeff R on September 22,2012 | 03:33 AM

King asks, “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?" Perhaps because he really was Celibate; thus, documentati

Posted by Joel Sartoris on September 21,2012 | 09:44 PM

No test results yet to prove its authenticity... so seems like a lot of fuss about something may turn out to be a hoax.

Posted by spencer on September 21,2012 | 09:31 PM

I think Smithsonian should have better things to do than take a few words on a scrap of papyrus, without any context around it, very seriously. I don't care if Jesus Christ - or any other Jesus was married or not. Don't you have historians to advise you that genealogies were highly important & well documented (& still are among Jewish peoples) & that both Jesus & Mary were extremely common names during the era in question? Noone has any idea what the paper is, who it was about, or when it was actually written!! It is ludicrous to assume, out of thin air, one scholar's (King's) claims that the document is only about JesusChrist !!! The document has only been authenticated by King. Where is the proof? Shouldn't the Smithsonian research a bit before spreading rumors? Since when is history assumed by one instead of researched for authenticity by many? Where is your professionalism?

Posted by Freta Villanueva on September 21,2012 | 09:10 PM

One must note that those rightly rejecting the "sexist master story" that the Church twisted the gospel into feel obliged to reject the scriptures that the Church abused to enslave women. This shows elementary failure of logic and a disinclination to actually carefully read the canonical scriptures. As these people are not stupid they can only be described as dishonest and prejudiced. Women as chattels and slaves is not orthodox canonical scripture and never has been. But that the Christian Church has made them so makes them heretical - but this Ms King refuses, as she refuses the term So King would rather reject Jesus Christ, the real One not the gnostic comic book image, than reject the church which so abused His teaching, as if she had ever heard of the dictum abusus non tollit usum. Be it on her head that she contents herself with such shoddy scholarship based on a sexist (feminism is as sexist as misogyny is) agenda

Posted by Steve Meikle on September 21,2012 | 02:40 PM

. . But if the text fragment were entirely orthodox it would be ignored utterly. Ms King's disalllowing of thh term "heretical" means she is gullible and will believe any nonsense propounded just because an ancient manuscript by cultists appropriating the name of Jesus Christ wrote it. They did not tell lies back then? To hie off after any hint of Jesus contradicting the canonical gospels, this is the kind of prejudice that passes itself off as "scholarly" these days: they are fascinated by Jesus Christ as long as it is not the canonical Jesus Christ. As For King's dismissing an orthodox critique as showing the "author's distaste for feminism" this is simply ad hominem. The texts which claimed Jesus may have been married were gnostic. I would ask gnostic fanciers not to cherry pick ideas from these. If they are to believe this let them believe the whole absurd apparatus of gnosticism, namely that matter is evil, the body is a tomb, life is vile, that either extreme asceticism or debauchery were the only rational responses to this, that Jesus could not have had a physical body as matter was evil and so was a phantom, etc etc. Oh, and yes, such a Jesus was not "more human" than the canonical Jesus, but less, being a phantom without a body who only seemed to die and who spoke like a cardboard comic book cutout as invented by people with an agenda the gnostic fanciers like to leave this stuff out. this shows their intrinsic dishonesty. I am not fazed by this. Not at all.

Posted by Steve Meikle on September 21,2012 | 02:32 PM

The names Jesus and Mary. Are these the same names mention in the BIble? I've read over the years their were around 20 to 40 people name Jesus in that time period, in that part of the world. Also Mary. If I bought a old musket that had the name George carved on the handle, could I say it belonged to George Washington?

Posted by Rich39 on September 21,2012 | 01:54 PM

Two questions for consideration: 1. The Hebrew name for Jesus was Yeshua, a form of Joshua. This was not a unique name. Other people have used it over time & this was 400 years after Christ. Could this be referring to another rabbi named Jesus? 2. There were many rabbis. Is it possible that in honoring Jesus by using his name other people honored the disciples by using their names? Similar to the nuns & monks who change their names.

Posted by Carole on September 21,2012 | 01:30 PM

Interesting! I hope that everyone has a great and safe weekend!

Posted by Mike on September 21,2012 | 01:15 PM

“Harvard researcher Karen King today unveiled an ancient papyrus fragment with the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife.’” The text also mentions “Mary,” arguably a reference to Mary Magdalene.“ First, Jesus often refers to the church as His bride so this statement does not seem uncommon to me. Second, it doesn’t tell you where the text mentions the name Mary nor does it give considerable evidence that it meant Mary Magdalene. “The fragment’s 33 words, scattered across 14 incomplete lines, leave a good deal to interpretation. But in King’s analysis, and as she argues in a forthcoming article in the Harvard Theological Review, the “wife” Jesus refers to is probably Mary Magdalene, and Jesus appears to be defending her against someone, perhaps one of the male disciples.” The text is not complete. There are still parts missing. The thought that the ‘wife’ Jesus mentions being Mary Magdalene is King’s theory and lacks substantial evidence. “She will be able to be my disciple,” Jesus replies. Then, two lines later, he says: “I dwell with her.” Again, we are not told where this is mentioned in the context of the text nor are we told what is said around it. Overall, this appears to be someone taking a few words, interpreting them how they wish, and running with it. Without looking at the full text, knowing the context that it is held within, or having the parts of the text that are missing, could we accurately decipher what this text means. Next time there should be more study and evidence before a claim is made.

Posted by Nicole on September 21,2012 | 01:15 PM

TRy, try, and try again. So in the year 2012 a piece of rag is presented by some collector with some key words that imply something that may be controversial if proven to be not a fake. The story presents itself as fact when it's too early to tell. That is, if it ever will be "proven". There is always someone trying to destroy the christian believe in the Word of God for some there's good money to be made doing it in writing of books, giving speaches, or whatever.Is that the idea of this "finding"? I don't think so. I think it's the money. "That people still believe in this designed ideavirus 2000 years later is remarkable." Yes it is remarkable and it really has been longer than that and it will last until the end of time.No one will be able to destroy it so don't waste your time trying. In my opinion this "find" is another way to make a buck.That BS about a "wife" should help increase the price for that piece of rag. Sell it fast--it won't be worth much fairly soon. The Smithsonian always seems to latch on to these kind of things--good for PR maybe. Better watch out, you just may be shooting yourself in the foot with trash like this "text". The Smithsonian will than become a two-bit "beieive it or not" place to go.

Posted by Deventury on September 21,2012 | 12:05 PM

Didn't Dan Brown ALREADY present the topic of Mary Magdeline being the WIFE of Jesus - and there were children? I believe it was in either "The DaVinci Code," or "Angels and Demons."

Posted by Jackie on September 21,2012 | 11:30 AM

There are hundreds of text fragments that have been found but not documented because they were considered 'not worthy". They very well could have mentioned that Jesus had a wife but were discarded due to standardized Christian beliefs. It's all what they would like us to believe.

Posted by Oakley on September 21,2012 | 11:18 AM

So you would think that a Religious scholar would know that the wife (bride) of Christ was the congregation (his followers). Revelation supports this idea. Not to mention the fact that he identified on various occations that his purpose here on earth was NOT to do his will but his fathers. The bible identifies what the purpose of marriage of fleshly man is and that was not his purpose so it wouldnt stand to reason for him to deviate from that coarse.

Posted by NoNonsense on September 21,2012 | 10:45 AM

Karen King is right to be skeptical about the 'master story' created by the theologies of the early church. And as the moral cred of this ancient borg continues to dissolve amongst it own in house scandals, confirmation that Jesus was married would virtually wipe out their authority to claim any right to interpret scripture. Missing such a momentous piece of the religious puzzle also reminds us that there was no definitive revelation passed on by Jesus to a 'church' and that the church is an all to human and fallible theological contruct. Is this house of cards ready for a fall? http://www.energon.org.uk

Posted by Robert Landbeck on September 21,2012 | 06:53 AM

That people still believe in this designed ideavirus 2000 years later is remarkable. I hope to live another 40 years and see a world that has moved beyond religion. I think much, much better things are ahead.

Posted by Django on September 21,2012 | 04:09 AM

A few things that call for greater scrutiny: Professor King has a vested interest in this fragment being revolutionary. Not so much for the sake of money but of her view of early Christianity. It is odd, is it not, that the fragment is just tantalising enough to lead those who wish to believe that Jesus had a wife and that wife was Mary of Magdala. What if Jesus is saying something along the lines: Who is my wife, my children, my mother, my father - who is worthy to be such - only those who forsake all in order to seek the Kingdom of God - alone. If you study the Gnostics and other religions/cults of that time you see that they synthesise every religious belief coming down the pike. If Jesus was married there is no reason for the four Gospels not to report it. Being Mocked and Scourged and then being Crucified is far more difficult for any Christian to present to non-believers than a Prophet/Rabbi who was or was not married - and let's not forget Jesus being presented at the only Son of the Living God- who rose from the Dead and is the Saviour of the World.

Posted by Skanik on September 20,2012 | 02:41 AM

The word "wife" in the ancient text does not refer to an actual physical female entity. It means--church, religion, belief architecture. JC was not, and neither is Christianity, in it's true form, a religion of the superficial, or material physical world/existence. Adam and Christianity are the same or kindred. Adam is not an individual, but rather a small group of migrants from Africa that settled in the tigress Euphrates region. It is they that became Adam. Adam is one of enlightenment of a particular understanding of humanity. Within the Guardianship Adam is a people we refer to as "Adamites". Adam is a "religion" not an individual. JC and Adam are considered kindred spirits not in the physical but spiritual. Wife (Eve)is equal to "religion/belief.

Posted by Alpha Guardian on September 20,2012 | 09:05 PM

There's money to be made in faking these things, or otherwise reputations, notoriety at least. I'll wait till the jury comes in with their verdict. The only certainty is that Jesus was the first and last Christian. After that the gentiles took his name and movement over.

Posted by j. p. ward on September 20,2012 | 02:54 PM

When commenting on touchy topics such as this, I always feel that any reaction other than calm, rational consideration is misplaced and unhelpful. As a Christian, as a follower of Christ and as a lifelong (informal) scholar of His life and His significance in human history, I am highly interested to hear of this discovery. The account given to us by the Bible (even if one adds in the Apoycrypha, the pseudepigrapha and all the rest of the fragmentary papyrus soup) of Jesus of Nazareth is frustratingly sparse. It is this very mystery which gives spice to my own life and keeps me trying to explore the dusty leaves of the past. King seems to have shown self-restraint and integrity, both in her analysis and her conclusions. While the document does not prove whether or not Jesus had a wife, it certainly proves that there existed Christian sects in the ancient world who thought and taught so. As such, it helps me understand the climate of the times and gives me a richer context against which to read New Testament epistles in which radical and, yes, detrimental creeds are so frequently addressed. For me, this confirms the authenticity of the writings of Paul, showing that his concern over adhering to the true gospel was not the product of some later writer's imagination. It is important to squarely face EVERY piece of evidence regarding the life of Christ. He was quite simply the most important figure ever to walk this planet. Truth that has not been weighed in the balance is not truth. Thanks to King and her colleagues for their painstaking and valuable work.

Posted by Gwen Simonalle on September 20,2012 | 02:53 PM

The best evidence we have of Jesus' life is the Four Gospels and Paul's letters as they were written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. Nowhere in these is it even hinted at that Jesus was married. As well, no other sources written at the time of Jesus mention such a thing. Reputable scholars have long discarded the marriage idea as a falshood based on no facts. The fragment mentioned in the article was written hundreds of years after Jesus, when eyewitnesses were no longer around to dispute false claims. The bible also doesn't say that Jesus had an elephant for a pet, so it might be true that he did have one. Please people. We can safely place this in the "Second-rate-scholar-wants-to-get-noticed" file.

Posted by Byron on September 20,2012 | 11:36 AM

I'm (yawnnnnnnn) stunned. Really. Long held christian beliefs will be overturned by this document. Again. Back to sleep for me.

Posted by FormFactor on September 20,2012 | 11:14 AM

Wishful thinking will always remain a powerful force?

Posted by Norman Hanscombe on September 20,2012 | 07:11 AM

Interesting how those who believe it is a forgery attack the writers and their beliefs. They certainly don't offer any academic arguments to their opinions.

Posted by Ty Jones on September 20,2012 | 05:26 AM

The chances of a Rabbi during that period, in fact in any era, being unmarried is negligible. Jesus was allegedly a Rabbi.

Posted by Pol Dubh on September 20,2012 | 03:56 AM

Discovery the fragment of papyrus derives on fourth century contains Jesus' words "my wife," whom Jesus identifies as Mary Magdalene. Jesus does not have a wife and was not married. The Bible overrules very clearly that Jesus was not married: http://koti.phnet.fi/petripaavola/marymagdalene.html

Posted by telson on September 20,2012 | 03:33 AM

After so many centuries of highest level, reputable, credentialed and critically reviewed scientific and scholarly investigations millennia of tradition, culture and civilization, let alone fundamentally important theological treaties, you are now proposing or attempting to negate all that on the grounds that a no-name source produced a gossip written in a way enabling multiple interpretations, almost unlimited interpretations??? Are you serious??? Who are you trying to please? For what material benefits expected? This all is a ridiculous attempt to divert peoples' attention from important issues and make them not think of grave situation but play and excite themselves about trivia and lies. This is revolting. Shame on you all, and God's punishment's imminent.

Posted by Tomasz J Popielicki on September 20,2012 | 03:29 AM

Harvard? Figures.

Posted by pj on September 19,2012 | 10:58 PM

Sure it wasn't that opener for Borscht Belt routines of 'take my wife'.

Posted by Jim Spivack on September 19,2012 | 10:58 PM

How would Christ being married send shock waves though the Christian world? One would expect that he was actually married. The problem is constatine and the catholic church destroyed a lot of early christian writing that they did not agree with, so we will probably never really know the truth.

Posted by Henry on September 19,2012 | 07:19 PM

To all believers of Jesus Christ the son of God almighty the creator of heaven and earth; such findings and interpitations are further proof of what is written in the Bible in the book of Mattew 24:24 Jesus said, "For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great SIGNS and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect." Therefore my brothers and sisters don't be disturbed, keep the faith and stay in prayer. God Bless!

Posted by sosse Pambakian on September 19,2012 | 06:22 PM

I am with "Fred" here. when God chose His first priest(Levi), Levi was a family man with children. consequently, his sons followed suit. When the pope who put together the New Testament of our bible, he made a lot of changes to the original writings to suit his so-called "agenda". fabrications were commonplace, bent the truth here and there. finally done, he sent missionaries all over the globe to "christianize" its people to one faith. those who opposed met with their lives being taken. mary of magdala suffered from this, also. that same pope portrayed her a a woman of ill-repute. i have a tendency towards her being the bride of Jesus. during their time, a wife was the only one allowed to wash their husband;s feet. that pope did a huge disservice to all of us descendants of all those opressed people who chose life over death. we lived through centuries of lies, deception and murder, all in the name of the"catholic religion". thanks to our modern technology, we are able to see the truth.....

Posted by kore on September 19,2012 | 04:43 PM

Stories like this one reveal far more about the preoccupations and presuppositions of some scholars, the general public, and segments of the media (the more 'reputable' parts, and the sensationalist parts not occupied with celebrities), than they do about historical reality. Whether it's the little newspaper man in Britain with his TV show on the origins of Islam, or more reputable scholars in the States carting out their repackaged late-nineteenth century higher criticism, it all speaks to the political and cultural commitments in vogue among the upper classes of the late-capitalist West, and probably not a great deal more. Well, and the desire of certain scholars and others to get a little notoriety, work up conservatives, and hopefully get on some talk shows and sell a few books; or, if less mercenary and more in the line of genuine believers, to make some earnest strikes for their version of late Western liberalism and all that it entails.

Posted by Jonathan Allen on September 19,2012 | 04:40 PM

I find it interesting that some of the people who've commented are taking this so seriously. Let's face it, whether "Jesus" was married or not, it changes nothing. It's all a big fairy tale. Changing the details makes the fairy tale no more or no less imaginary.

Posted by Mike on September 19,2012 | 04:02 PM

My first thought is "another Sahidic Gnostic document." Given the content of the Gnostic documents discovered and the numbers there were I lean that way on second thought as well, that is if the document in context really said Mary Magdalen was Jesus' wife. We don't have enough material to be sure it wasn't speaking along more conventional lines as in Jesus' wife the Church. But a Gospel varying so greatly from the others is more what I would expect of the Gnostics.

Posted by Stan on September 19,2012 | 02:40 PM

Sabar does a great job with the scholarly drama inherent in this field. But the claims of significance are alarmingly exaggerated.

Posted by Francis Morrone on September 19,2012 | 02:02 PM

This is not going to send any shock waves through Christianity. The Christian Canon has been more or less set since the fourth century. Loads of gnostic material was excluded. Discovering scraps of gnostic gospels or whatever this turns out to be will have no impact on Christianity.

Posted by Mike Twedt on September 19,2012 | 12:56 PM

All this document shows is that someone wrote something that implied that Christ married St. Mary Magedelana. I do not understand this fascination with Gnosticism. Actually, the Nag Hammadi and all the other fragments that have been found do not tell us anything that we did not already know about this movement. I have yet to see a serious study that shows how large and influential the Gnostic following was. I have noticed that the fans of Gnosticism down play its more bizarre teachings. It was an elitist movement that taught that its followers had secret knowledge denied to the ordinary carnal Christian. It also taught that matter is evil and was created by a lesser deity, who sadistically trapped the spark of the higher deity in corruptible human bodies. It also taught that Jesus only seemed to have a body (Docetism) It would be rather difficult for a phantom to get married and engage in something so physical as sex with St. Mary Magdelania or anyone else. Of course many Gnostics considered sex evil and unsuitable for truly spiritual beings. Fr. John W. MOrris

Posted by Fr. John W. Morris on September 19,2012 | 12:56 PM

Addendum to Ms. King: ~I think there is no surviving "literature" outside the Bible which matters regarding whether Jesus was married or celibate. On that topic, the literature is silent. It supports neither claim. So even a fragment or even a full scroll made centuries later makes no difference. What matters is logic. My prior post lays out some, using the only reliable source I know about. Thus, does it matter if we know for sure in scholarly circles? I am a well educated male, and I choose to believe that women have no need to prove their relevancd to a disrespectful world. I KNOW already that they are indispensibld on every level, and my personal conviction is sufficient for me. When I was in a position to do so, I paid them equally for their services as employees, no less than men. And in other arenas, my respect continues. Sometims that should be enough. If you are convinced that Jesus was likely married, who cares what others think.

Posted by Fred on September 19,2012 | 12:24 PM

nothing conclusive, just too far fetched, nothing in writing to prove this story except people trying to make sensational news. Even the Koran which has penned the coming of jesus, his birth, his death and ascension along with mention of Mother Mary would surely have included a wife if ever it was. Media trying to make money as much as unsuccessful people trying to claim discovery by means of cheap sensational news. it does'nt hurt me one bit, i am able to see right through it.

Posted by thomas kuruvilla on September 19,2012 | 12:16 PM

Putting this article together with several others I have read on the above subject, one feels that the whole affair is rather dubious. However, in the highly unlikely event that the fragment is genuine, it still means nothing. There were more Yeshua's running around the Middle East in the first few centuries than there are Jesus's in Latin America today. And if the text is referring to Jesus of Nazareth, it still could be addressing the "Bride of Christ" meaning the church (as used throughout New Testament literature, rather than an actual woman. This seems like an unfortunate attempt by a believer of a different sort, to wed their personal ideology and beliefs to biblical archeology. Another James Ossuary of sorts. It's a pity Harvard's involved.

Posted by Edwin Duthie on September 19,2012 | 11:22 AM

To Whom It May Concern; I in no way wish to come off as cruel or unkind. But speaking as a lifelong history buff who isn't interested in anything but the CONFIRMED facts this "academic" grasping at straws has long since become tiresome and frivilous. A debateable and inegmadic fragment from the scrap baskets of history shows up via the "informed" source of a private collector who thinks it's cute and hip to have a piece of the past as a dining room accessory and the talking heads of the IV league jump on it like hyenas on a rotted corpse. What happened to professional integrity, academic standards, and evidencial bare minimums. This is not academia, this is not history. This is a few hotshots trying to get advertising for their latest best seller and the system trying to wheesle more grants so they can "teach" NOTHING. So because these hypocritical flim flams say so-regardless of the facts-PROVEN accepted academic concensus and 2,000 years of Orthodoxy-not counting c.3,800 years in the case of Judaism-is wrong until the next piece of sensationalist trype comes along? GIVE ME A BREAK! No wonder our youth think the Alamo is where the British defeated the French and can't carry on a coherant conversation. Sincerely; Christopher B. Zalonis

Posted by Christopher B. Zalonis on September 19,2012 | 11:17 AM

It doesn't surprise me. Although the bible is one of the oldest pieces of literature it also has been the most altered. Its improbable that from those times until present day that the text is verbatim especially with times of documented and well known religious corruption and suppression. Their are very few women in the bible held in high regard, and it makes since that Jesus could of had a wife. The whole 33yr old virgin story is somewhat difficult to believe considering that every historic figure in the bible namely the old testament had a wife and children. Moses, Noah, Abraham. I don't buy this story but it definitely is a possibility

Posted by Dave Johnson on September 19,2012 | 11:01 AM

This stuff fascinates me. But what always seems the most tricky about something like this is the tendency of we monotheists to conflate history with mythology. Whether or not Jesus actually had a wife is as irrelevant as whether the man, as we understand him, actually existed at all. King's comments come closer to relevance when she speaks of varying traditions. Did Diana, virgin goddess of the moon, ultimately share Knowledge with the shepherd Endymion? If that's the story you want to tell, there are, no doubt, fruitful conclusions to be drawn from it.

Posted by Joe McGrath on September 19,2012 | 11:00 AM

Why should anyone be shocked to discover something so logical? 1. Jesus taught neither is the woman without the man nor the man without the woman. To bolster the idea that marriage wasn't just for others, check his reply regarding his own baptism to John the Baptist (KJV Suffer it to be so now, for it becometh us to fulfill ALL righteousness.) Would't his pronouncement about marriage also be a righteous act? 2. Foryears, students of the Gospels have speculated that the wedding at Cana was Jesus' own. Why else would his mother have been worried about the refreshments? 3. As a rabbi, Jesus would have been expected to be married. He was, after all, Jewish, and would have followed Jewish custom. 4. Who was she? Why not Mary Magdalene? Wasn't she the first to see him after his reserruction? Didn't he address in tender tones? Didn't she call him by an intimate word for master? Wasñ't it she who was so demeaned by a pope who considered her closeness with Jesus to be dangerous to his authrity regarding the oppression of women by the catholic church? Why else would she have seemed so important? 5. We have a record of only three yeears of his life, with glimpses into some instances from his birth to age 12. It is only logical tha he grew up, had a profession and very likely a family of his own in the intervening years. In other words, befor his three year mission, maybe he had a real life. Didn't he also come here to learn and grow and xperience mortality and all the trials ordinary mortals must go through? Makes sense to me, though "scholars" seem to find the idea somehow outside the realm of the possible without proper documdentation. Finally, why should anyone find the possibility of a married "Savior of the World" such a revolutionary idea? Who knows? Maybe God himself was merried too, or still is . . .but in a male dominated world, while marriage might be ok here, perhaps their thought or being married in the hereafter is just too daunting.

Posted by Fred on September 19,2012 | 09:47 AM

Another fairy tale.

Posted by kilingtonskier on September 19,2012 | 07:32 AM

When you interpret something said or done about Christ, it behooves you to consult with Scriptures. For this, I would suggest starting with Ephesians 5 and then taking a look at Revelation 21.

Posted by Thomas Mitchell on September 19,2012 | 04:30 AM

Wow, a 33 word gospel. If compression is the first grace of style this must be grace incarnate, as it were. Oh well, as long as it supports currently popular notions I believe we are safe in taking it as divinely inspired.

Posted by fgill on September 18,2012 | 12:39 AM

This is mildly news. First, there is no Biblical evidence one way or the other about whether Jesus was married and speculation as to whether he was married is hardly new. Second, there are tons of heterodox early writings ranging from innocent imaginative filling in of narrative gaps to pretty wild claims. So even if this translation stands up, it will just be another entry in the apocryphal writings.

Posted by Steve D on September 18,2012 | 11:39 PM

"The announcement at a religious studies conference in Rome is sure to send shock waves through the Christian world." That actually made me laugh. Every so often, the latest discovery that will send "shock waves" through the Christian world is announced. The burial box of James. Finding Jesus' family tomb. The Gospel of Judas. The search for the historical Jesus. The publications of the Jesus Seminar. Why is that? Because, in the minds of moderns, the historical texts of orthodox Christianity (ie: the New Testament and Church Fathers) possess no credibility whatsoever, while a business-card sized papyrus fragment on which is written partial sentences out of context is regarded as authoritative on the historical record of Jesus of Nazareth. Curb you enthusiam, please. The idea that such a thing will send shock waves through the Christian world is more wishful thinking than a sure thing.

Posted by Bob Hunt on September 18,2012 | 11:25 PM

Interesting. I'll wait for the 'final' (if there is such a condition in the matter) determination of authenticity before I get all worked up, one way or another. I hope readers know this is not the first time the notion of Jesus being married has been advanced. Among others, the LDS Church holds Jesus was married to both Mary and Martha, sisters of Lazarus. There have been others prior to that. Of course, the fact it seems to go back no further than the Second Century is a consideration. In one point, Professor King says regarding the historical evidence for Jesus' marital status, '...just coincidence no evidence survived, or was it suppressed...' (or similar words). I suggest a third possibility; Jesus was never married and therefore there was no real evidence He was. Still, little bits and bobs show up and they must all be reconciled. God speed in the process.

Posted by R. G. Montgomery on September 18,2012 | 09:40 PM

There are several other documents that fall into a similar time frame of around 280-400 yrs after Jesus's time on earth, i.e. the "Gnostic Gospels". This appears to be similar, at this point unless there are other earlier carbon dated copies found, which could be better considered for veracity, e.g. author's relationship to the subjects, ability to cross-reference, etc. I think the "Canon" gospels are carbon-dated a bit earlier, such as

Posted by Practical on September 18,2012 | 07:57 PM

So we have a fragment of a heretical document from nearly 5 centuries after Christ's death, written in what looks like child's scratch (compared to earlier fragments.) Why is this news at all? I'm sure folks in the 6th century were writing all sorts of fan fiction.

Posted by M B on September 18,2012 | 05:22 PM

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The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus

According to a top religion scholar, this 1,600-year-old text fragment suggests that some early Christians believed Jesus was married—possibly to Mary Magdalene

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