Did Jesus have a wife?

In September 2012, at the International Congress of Coptic Studies meeting in Rome, the discovery of a tiny papyrus fragment that contained the phrase "Jesus said to them, 'My wife'..." was announced to the world by Karen L. King, a professor at Harvard Divinity School.

Her work soon appeared in the media and on the internet and it was subsequently widely discussed and debated by scholars around the world. The text – which is only a fragment of the original – is purported to be a fourth-century translation of an earlier Greek text dating from the mid-second century. From the outset, however, King has insisted that the fragment "should not be taken as proof that Jesus, the historical person, was actually married."

She noted that even as a translation of a second-century Greek text, the original – now lost – would still have been written more than 100 years after the death of Jesus. According to King, the earliest and most reliable information about Jesus is silent on the question of his marital status. But she insists that this text provides the "first evidence that at least some early Christians believed Jesus had been married." She postulates the date of the hypothetical original – from which this fragment was copied – to the second half of the second century because it shows close connections to other recently discovered gospels written at that time, especially the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip. The fragment is very small and is rectangular in shape. It measures approximately 1.6 x 3.1 inches – about the size of a business card. The fragment has eight incomplete lines of writing on the obverse and is badly damaged on the reverse, with only t hree faded words and a few letters that are only visible when examined with infrared photography and computer-aided enhancement. Because this fragment contains writing on both sides, Professor King suggests that it was originally a part of a codex, a bound book, and not a scroll.

She also notes that the fragment is written in Coptic – a language that was in use 1600 years ago. On the reverse only faint traces of letters remain. The ink has literally been worn away. This suggests that the writing is in fact ancient. What does this tiny fragment actually say? There are eight lines of text. Each one is incomplete. Lines 4 and 5 are the most interesting.

1 not to me. My mother gave to me life 2 The disciples said to Jesus, 3 deny. Mary is not worthy of it 4 Jesus said to them, "My wife 5 she is able to be my disciple 6 Let wicked people swell up 7 As for me, I am with her in order to 8 an image So what are the possibilities for assessing the significance of this document?

Essentially there are but two: (1) it is a clever forgery or (2) it is genuine and ancient. An analysis published by American researchers in April 2014, that relied upon carbon-14 dating technology, concluded that the fragment is ancient and dates somewhere between the sixth and ninth centuries – somewhat later than Professor King initially suggested, but, nonetheless ancient.

A further test performed by researchers at Harvard University in conjunction with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute produced a date of origin for the papyrus fragment between 659 to 859 CE. Other tests using FT-IR microspectroscopy at MIT examined the homogeneous chemical composition of the papyrus together with its patterns of oxidation. This research also confirmed its antiquity.

Researchers at the Center for Integrated Science and Engineering, Columbia University, used a technique called micro-Raman spectroscopy and determined that the carbon character of the ink matched samples of other papyri known to have originated from the first to eighth centuries CE. Yet on the other hand, a Vatican newspaper has declared this fragment to be a "very modern forgery." The newspaper claims that a number of independent scholars have provided evidence demonstrating that this papyrus includes typographical errors that are identical to those made on a particular modern-day online translation service provided for ancient texts.

Craig Evans of the Acadia Divinity College, suggested the "oddly written letters" are "probably modern." Others have noted that the handwriting, grammar, shape of the papyrus, and the ink's color and quality are all suspect.

Professor Francis Watson of Durham University published a paper on the papyrus fragment suggesting the text was a "patchwork of texts" from the Gospel of Thomas which had been "copied and reassembled out of order." So the jury is still out of the question of the fragment's antiquity although many, if not most interpreters – but by no means all – are nonetheless satisfied, based on pure science, that the fragment is indeed ancient. So the question then becomes what does it tell us? What could be the reason(s) that someone would make this assertion? On a televised documentary broadcast in 2012 Professor King said: "The question on many people's minds is whether this fragment should lead us to re-think whether Jesus was married. I think however, what it leads us to do, is not to answer that question one way or the other, [but it] leads us to re-think how Christianity understood sexuality and marriage in a very positive way, and to recapture the pleasures of sexualit y, the joyfulness and the beauties of human intimate relations." Professor Ben Witherington of Asbury Theological Seminary has suggested flatly that this fragment should not be considered a "game-changer" for those studying the historical Jesus. He notes that during the rise of the monastic movement in the early Christian centuries it was common for people who were monks or evangelists to travel in the company of a "sister-wife."

Applied here, this phenomenon could render the term "wife" open to interpretations that would include non-literal ones, e.g., a context in which the reference, if valid, may not have been to a literal wife at all. So some scholars regard the fragment as being of a historical interest, rather than a faith interest. The modern notion that Jesus was married is largely attributable to the tradition about the Holy Grail which held that Jesus had been married to Mary Magdalene. On the basis of that supposed marriage, legends grew about the Holy Grail and culminated in various myths about a surviving bloodline in Europe. The theory became widely known after the publication of "The Da Vinci Code," a best-selling 2003 novel written by Dan Brown.

Professor King is quick to reject any link between her work and The Da Vinci Code, telling the New York Times that she "wants nothing to do with the code or its author: 'At least, don't say this proves Dan Brown was right'." But it does seem reasonable to conclude that this text may well suggest at least some Christian – however few – in the early centuries of the faith accepted the tradition that Jesus was married. And they may have done so for reasons relating to clarifying the role of women in Christianity. In this regard, the fragment also includes the line, "she is able to be my disciple." The New York Times article notes that scholars trace the debates over "whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and whether he had female disciples to the early centuries of Christianity." For the most part, the texts and narratives that support the notion of female discipleship are found outside the Bible. This reality does not come as a great su rprise to modern interpreters because the canonical New Testament was assembled many decades after Jesus's death by an emerging church dominated by males.

Today the mere study of the ancient texts not included in the Bible is often associated with liberal bias because in at least some instances these texts bring into focus the marginalized voices of women.

Professor King's research has been in the area of non-canonical writings, and thus she was drawn to this particular papyrus fragment from the outset. Unlike the sensational media interests that focus only upon Jesus' marital status, her interests were less in its late and unreliable mention of Jesus' wife and more in its support of the emerging role of women in the church.

Thus this tiny fragment is useful because the conversation it recorded constitutes a fine – however minor – contribution to the history of early Christian thought. Indeed, it would be yet another piece of evidence that the first few centuries of Christianity were not nearly so unified in belief and practice as conventional narratives tend to suggest, but rather that its viewpoints about inclusiveness were still evolving.

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MILLS IS BIBLE SCHOLAR

Dr. Watson E. Mills is a noted Bible scholar and author.

He is professor (emeritus) of New Testament studies at Mercer University and pastor (emeritus) of Sharpsburg Baptist Church.

Mills has written and published extensively on biblical texts. He edited "Mercer Commentary on the Bible," "Mercer Commentary on the Old Testament: Including the Deuterocanonical Literature," "Mercer Commentary on the New Testament" and "Mercer Dictionary of the Bible." 

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