The news and Twitter-verse seem full of the astounding revelation that a Harvard professor has unearthed a 4th century papyrus fragment with an incomplete phrase referring to "Jesus's wife." I heard about it on both TV and the radio this morning. It's a rare day that 4th century Coptic texts get so much press. Apparently, the news folks got the idea that it might create some controversy and that it might mean that Jesus did, in fact, have a wife. I thought I would give some of my thoughts on the subject.
The scrap his not yet been completely verified. It might be a fake. Please don't throw your Bible in the garbage or throw your money away on the next mediocre novel only to find out the scrap is inauthentic. Even if it does come from the 4th century, it's so small that I would want to know about the full translation before I drew any conclusions about its meaning--for example, Jesus was a very common name, so I wonder how we know that the text is about our Jesus. Another thing--I don't know Coptic, but Greek is a cognate and the same word means "woman" and "wife." I'm curious about how the scrap has enough context to know how it should be translated when it does not have a complete sentence. Maybe these issues are addressed in an academic article, but the popular news stories give little indication that these old scraps in dead languages always come with these kinds of uncertainties.
I have news, friends--there is no news here. In recent years lots of people have made a lot of money and have made names for themselves (Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels, particularly) selling the idea that early Christianity was actually many Christianities with many texts, and that the Gospels we have in our Bible only represent the strain of Christianity that won. The general public has gotten the idea that lots of other texts were equally representative of ways early Jesus followers thought of Jesus, and that these texts were suppressed by the orthodox strain. Every time a new scrap or text comes to light, folks think that some amazing revelation has been made that undermines the canonical Gospels in some way, that the "lost text" was hidden away or suppressed or something.
This is, to use a term my grandmother used to say when I was a child and she didn't use the kind of terminology she adopted when I was older, "horsefeathers." Here's why.
There has been no scheme to cover up the diversity of Christian opinion or the reality that groups of people used the name of Jesus but believed things very different than the faith of the canonical Gospels. The fact that there were people talking about Jesus who believed something different about him is recorded in the New Testament itself. Even in the second century, Christian groups were determining what made for authentic Christianity and what was not the faith of the people who actually followed Jesus' teachings. The early church father Irenaeus recorded the teachings of many gnostic heretics in his book refuting these teachings (this work is usually called Against All Heresies, and was the subject of my college senior thesis). Every New Testament or Church History student in undergraduate religion studies or seminary gets bored to death learning what the Gnostics, Ebionites, Montanists, Nestorians, Apollinarians, and dozens of other splinter groups believed. There's no conspiracy. We've always known there were groups whose beliefs were outside the mainstream. What's new is the idea that there was no central faith of Jesus and the apostles from which these groups diverged.
Clearly, there were documents that were widely used in early Christianity whose scriptural reliability was in question for awhile. The earliest list of New Testament books that matches our list was the Muratorian Canon of 180 AD. There were many other lists that did not include some of our New Testament books (Jude, 2 Peter, Revelation were particularly in dispute). Some other very early works often were included in early canons and did not end up in our Bible. These include the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache, and the Epistles of Clement. In the case of the Gospels, scholars agree that all four canonical Gospels were complete by around 100 AD and were circulating together in the same order that we have them within a few decades.
Here's the thing--no matter how you slice it, the scrap that's making news, if authentic, was written at least three hundred years after Jesus died and was raised, a couple hundred years after Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were complete and circulating together, over a hundred and fifty years after the first canon that matches our canon was compiled, over a hundred years after Irenaeus explained clearly how groups outside the Christian mainstream differed from Christians descending from the faith of the apostles, and roughly the same time as the Council of Nicaea was codifying the creed and the finalized canon we continue to use. Incidentally, the complete Greek manuscript of the entire Bible best respected by translators of modern Bible versions (Codex Sinaiticus) was written around the same time this scrap was supposed to be made, as well.
I find it preposterous that anyone would consider a fourth century scrap written on papyrus in Coptic mentioning Jesus' wife as evidence that any significant portion of early Christians believed Jesus was married. In my opinion (and Lord knows I'm not a Harvard professor, so take it with a grain of salt), the scrap's only significance, if authentic, would be to teach us something about the beliefs of Coptic gnostic sectarians from a direct source rather than polemical writings of their orthodox contemporaries.
I bet that wouldn't wouldn't make the evening news, though.
Great commentary Nathan.
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