I got this from the sounds weird though..pls read...
A Harvard historian has identified a faded,
fourth-century scrap of papyrus she calls "The
Gospel of Jesus's Wife." One line of the torn
fragment of text purportedly reads: "Jesus said to
them, 'My wife …'" The following line states, "she
will be able to be my disciple."
The finding was announced to the public today
(Sept. 18) by Karen King, a historian of early
Christianity, author of several books about new
Gospel discoveries and the Hollis professor of
divinity at Harvard Divinity School. King first
examined the privately owned fragment in 2011,
and has since been studying it with the help of a
small group of scholars.
According to the New York Times , King and her
collaborators have concluded that the business
card-size fragment is not a forgery, and she is
presenting the discovery today at a meeting of
International Congress of Coptic Studies in
Rome.
The fragment, written in Coptic, the language of a
group of early Christians in Egypt, has an
unknown provenance, and its owner has opted
to remain anonymous. Questions about the
fragment abound, but scholars say it will
nonetheless reignite several old debates: Was
Jesus married? If so, was Mary Magdalene his
wife? And did he have a female disciple? [ Jesus
Christ the Man: Does the Physical Evidence Hold
Up? ]
Scholars say these controversies date to the
early centuries of Christianity, but they remain
relevant today. In the Roman Catholic Church,
for example, women and married men are
barred from priesthood because of the model
thought to have been set by Jesus.
King has cautioned that the new discovery
should not be taken as proof that Jesus was
actually married. The text appears to have been
written centuries after he lived, and all other
early Christian literature is silent on the question
of his marital status.
But the scrap of papyrus — the first known
statement from antiquity that refers to Jesus
speaking of a wife — provides evidence that
there was an active discussion among early
Christians about whether Jesus was celibate or
married, and which path his followers should
choose, King told the Times.
"This fragment suggests that some early
Christians had a tradition that Jesus was
married," King said. "There was, we already
know, a controversy in the second century over
whether Jesus was married, caught up with a
debate about whether Christians should marry
and have sex ."
The significance of this fragment was known by
scholars previously, and then forgotten. When
its current owner acquired it in a batch of papyri
in 1997 from its previous owner, a German, it
came with a handwritten note. The note cited a
now-deceased professor of Egyptology in Berlin
as having called the fragment "the sole example"
of a text in which Jesus claims a wife.
According to the Times, papyrologists and
Coptic linguists who have studied the artifact
thus far say they are convinced by its
genuineness by the fading of the ink on the
papyrus fibers and the traces of ink adhered to
the bent fibers at the edges. The Coptic grammar,
handwriting and ideas represented in the text
would also have been nearly impossible to
forge.
"It's hard to construct a scenario that is at all
plausible in which somebody fakes something
like this. The world is not really crawling with
crooked papyrologists," Roger Bagnall, director
of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient
World, at New York University, told the New York
Times .
Certain lines of the text resemble snippets from
the Gospels of Thomas and Mary, both believed
to have been written in the late second century
and later translated into Coptic. King surmises
that this fragment is also copied from a second-
century Greek text.
Further study will be needed to work out the
details, but the meaning of the words "my wife"
is beyond question, King said.
culled from
LiveScience.com
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