The "Jesus Said My Wife" Fragment, Redux and Biblical Reliability

            *****IT TURNS OUT AFTER FURTHER RESEARCH THIS SCRAP OF PAPER WAS ALMOST CERTAINLY FROM MEDIEVAL TIMES AND VERY UNLIKELY TO BE AN ORIGINAL WORK FROM ANY TIME NEAR THE EARLY CHURCH DAYS.*****

Over a year ago, a Harvard religion professor produced a scrap of paper that supposedly indicated Jesus said something like “my wife.”  This, of course, became grand news, particularly for many who want so desperately for Jesus to be anything other than what Scripture clearly proclaims him to be: God in flesh, the promised Messiah of all mankind.  Now, however, it appears apologies are in order, as there are some difficulties with this fragment, not the least of which is that its age may well be several hundred years after Jesus lived.  I wonder how this fragment would have been received had it said something different.

Suppose a conservative scholar came up with a piece of paper with the same amount of information on it, written in a fragmentary way.  However, this one says “And Jesus said” followed by “a man having sex with a man is evil.” What then?  The scrap would likely be immediately denounced as lacking reliability and possibly a forgery by the same people who were leaping at the chance to claim Jesus had a wife.  Of course, this assumes it would receive any publicity at all.  Such is the bizarre state of reporting on Christian matters.  Professor King, who is the focal point of the current discussion, is a liberal  scholar (in the religious, Christian sense) with a preconceived, and almost desperate, desire to prove that women have had their role in the formation of Christianity improperly under-reported.  Thus, she initially leaked the story to the secular press, which gleefully picks up on any story which calls into question the biblical account of who and what Jesus was.  Now, Professor King has significantly backed off her initial enthusiasm with a lukewarm claim that we can’t be completely sure what the fragment means.

Why does it matter if Jesus was married, you might ask.  None of the four gospel accounts have any information in them which even remotely suggest Jesus had a wife.  Thus, such a claim is in direct contradiction to the biblical reporting.  Moreover, it seems utterly unlikely the writers of the New Testament would have simply overlooked this major fact – too many people would have been aware of this, making the gospels extremely suspect.  For instance, Peter’s mother in law gets mentioned in Mark, which tells us, by definition, Peter was married.  If the gospels saw fit to mention this, certainly the main character’s wife would have appeared somewhere, particularly at the cross, if nowhere else.

The constant attempts by so-called Christian historians to re-frame the historical narrative attempts to undermine biblical Christianity.  Because Ms. King wants the narrative to be different, she initially claimed this piece of parchment somehow proved there was an ongoing debate about whether Jesus was or wasn’t married.  That is the kind of logical tomfoolery no reasonable mind should accept, regardless of convictions on the matter (more on this idea in a moment).  What this tells us, at best, is that someone at some point long after Jesus and his immediate disciples were gone, scribbled down a few words on a parchment.  These words lack context and they lack any notion of source identity.  We don’t know who wrote the words, why they wrote the words, or even whether the author intended the words to be taken as true.  If a conservative scholar were to suggest Jesus denounced homosexual behavior based on my analogy noted above, people like Ms. King would be suggesting the very things I am suggesting and rightly so!  

            I said I’d get to convictions.  If you are a Christianity hater, then you should want something you can really trust before you decide to hang your intellectual hat on it.  This kind of nonsense gives you nothing but vague, amorphous possibility.  If you accept it wholesale, then what you are saying is that anything, no matter how unlikely, that suggests the Bible is incorrect, is good enough for you.  Is that really where you want to be intellectually?  Supposedly all you atheists and other Christian-haters are the rational, logical ones.  If so, then get with the program. Bring something more than Dan Brown fantasies and scraps of paper written hundreds of years after Jesus was dead before rushing into judgment.  Moreover, you would never accept such silliness in support of anything with which you agree – why would you be willing to accept it as the basis for things with which you disagree?

Lastly, it is worth noting that mainline Christian denominations have been falling into dismal irrelevancy over the past 50 years.  There are good reasons orthodox Christianity is thriving in Africa, South America, and the Far East – they are actually prepared to believe the Bible is true!  This is unlike America and Europe, where so-called Christian sophisticates have thumbed their noses at Biblical truth in favor of man-made notions.  Frankly, I much prefer the agnosticism of my good friend, Mike, who is intellectually honest, than the nonsense spouted by many so-called Christians in mainline Protestant denominations, who eschew Biblical truth in favor of beliefs in almost anything else.  The fundamental problem with the kind of “scholarship” engaged in by Professor King and others like her is that they start from the proposition that the Bible is not a reliable document.  As a result, they come to the text with preconceived ideas but deny that is what they are doing.  Under the guise of “objectivity” people like Professor King claim they are just doing history in an objective, scholarly way.  This is just not true.  As a result, any scrap or wisp of paper that appears to have even the most remote hope of undoing some of the Biblical narrative is deemed worthy of belief and acceptance, often touted as having import far beyond what it actually says.  Recent reviews have suggested the document may well be a clever forgery, which then makes Professor King’s revelation of it even more disturbing, as it proves her ideology is more important than the history which she claims to desire finding.

            Professor King rushed in because her ideology got in her way.  Instead of eyeballing this matter with appropriate scholarly concern, Professor King has embarrassed herself and her ‘cause’ with something that might even be a hoax.  I hope, for Professor King’s sake, the document is real, although even if it is, it proves nothing other than someone, sometime, in some place, for some reason wrote down some words that included the word Jesus.  While this might excite Dan Brown, it provides nothing of value to the rest of us, no matter where we stand.