I don’t mind talking about whether this claim is or isn’t likely to be true, but even more I’d like to talk about what it would actually mean if it could be demonstrated to be true.
For Christians, would you care if this were true? Would it change anything?
For everyone else, would you care? Would it change your opinion about anything?
Is this a hoax? If not, is it meaningful or just something kind of vaguely interesting?
(If it’s not interesting, you’re in the wrong thread!)
It is papyrus from the 4th century, so I don’t see how it could prove much of anything, other than another belief of an early Christian sect. Early Christians believed all kinds of shit, like Jesus killed a playmate, or a giant floating cross had the power of speech.
Mary’s perpetual virginity seems to be very important to Catholics, but not to Protestants. I would expect Jesus having a wife to be the same, i.e. some denominations would refuse to accept it, and others wouldn’t care.
I’ll point out that Jesus’s lifestyle would preclude Him having a living wife, mostly.
But we hear virtually nothing of His early adult life. No reason why He couldn’t have been married at 21, then His wife died before Jesus began him ministry.
Note the Jesus did have active female followers, mentioned in the NT. None of his 12Disciples/Apostles were female, of course.
If you mean now, probably no real changes. If you mean that it was then, it would probably completely change Paul’s outlook and give us back the Jewish notion that marriage and sex are sacred, rather than how it devolved to being sacrilege. Fortunately, the pendulum seems to have mostly swung the other way, hence why it wouldn’t be such a problem now.
If Jesus were a womanizer, or, say, homosexual, that would have a much larger impact today. And, if well known in the past, I think Christianity would be completely different.
The only real problem I’d see is if it challenged the actual gospel narrative.
But I think the issue for the Catholic Church is that the Apostles were all men, and hence an all male clergy. If there was female Apostle, well then there goes the Boys’ Club!
Still. Jesus lived in a highly patriarchal society, and his teachings, egalitarian though they may be, were still influenced highly by the cultural norms of his time. IOW, it could go either way.
One of the three scholars who viewed that papyrus is my advisor with whom I am studying papyrology. It’s not every day that our little discipline gets so much attention. We talked about it today after I took (and passed, hooray!) my comprehensive exams.
It’s probably not a hoax. The people who analyzed it are very serious and careful and have each worked on thousands of papyri over decades. The characteristics of forged papyri are usually pretty well known. If this were a forgery, then it is an extraordinarily elaborate and well-crafted one that was seeded in what is probably a low-value collection decades ago. It is of course possible that the document is forged. But forgery would be contingent on a string of really implausible things.
Based on the look & feel of the document, the paleography, the quality of the Coptic, and the details of its preservation, the editors believe it is genuine. The only way to determine with absolute certainty is to carbon-date the ink. The ink would have to be rendered, thereby destroying the document.
The question is not the historicity of Jesus’ wife. This papyrus is of course dated long after Jesus’ death, and the author certainly had no special knowledge. What the document does suggest is that what historians believed was strictly an oral tradition was actually written down much earlier than we had thought. This might change what we think Christians, at least in Egypt, believed at the time.
I care a lot because I think discoveries of unique papyri are fabulously interesting. They’re why I am spending hours untold trying to decipher a totally mundane 2nd century tax declaration that no one but me cares about. I hope to find something awesome in a dusty archive someday. But this is not going to make the Pope reconsider clerical celibacy, does not prove anything about the Da Vinci code, is not a Jesuit conspiracy, nor any of the other wacky shit that seems to be sticking to this story. It was probably just a slow news day. I’m thrilled that suddenly lots of people are taking notice of something I really care about, but this too shall pass.
Kudos to you. Maeglin and to your colleagues.
Your work is unheralded usually, but is essential in our quest to understand our shared histories.
Personally, I thought it was likely (even when I was a Christian) that Jesus was married. He was of age and had the support of at least 11 other people and his mother. The wedding at Cana may very well be describing his marriage. But, what dogma would that change?
Protestants, by and large, wouldn’t really care that much. Marriage and sex would still be treated much the same way (depending upon the denomination) and the essential nature of this ‘heresy’ would be ignored. The underlying premise that women are evil isn’t as prominent in the Protestant branches of Christianity as it is in the Catholic branches.
The idea that women are the wells of Evil is a powerful idea that has caused great damage to generation after generation of women for well over 1500 years. From the concepts of Eve seducing Adam to the Immaculate Conception, women have been made into something symbolic and therefore inhuman. This reflects the fear of the priesthood for anything that challenges it, especially powerful women. By dehumanizing women, they made them easier to hate and subjugate. And their legacy is with us all, even now.
So, it can be hoped that this tiny scrap of our shared legacy might show us all a pathway to more gender equality.
We will see what happens.
Maegelin, that’s awesome! I love that someone on this board is so connected to the actual research! I agree that this is unlikely to be important theologically or to tell us anything about Jesus historically, but I still think this is an amazing and important discovery. I also think it brings to the fore how little we actually know about Jesus and about early Christian beliefs. The fact is, there is no earlier writing stating that Jesus wasn’t married! (Assuming that the text is at least a hundred years older than this particular papyrus, as believed.)
I remember reading something somewhere before that explained that Jesus not having a wife would have been absolutely outlandish in the culture and time he lived in. *Assuming you believe there was an actual person of course.
It would have been commented upon, it would have been so outside the norm it would have been of note. The fact it was not commented on was simply evidence that having a wife was the default position.
Maybe. I am not an expert on family practices among non-elites in the Near East in the early empire, but at least I can tell you about the Lex Papia Poppaea. This law was part of Augustus’ more general moral reforms and attempts to restore old Roman vigor (certainly unnecessary) through legislation. The purpose of the law was to make marriage more attractive and to discriminate against celibacy.
I don’t know if anyone was ever tried under this law or to what extent it was enforced in the Near East. But shoring up marriage was a big part of Augustan ideology, so there may well have been some additional pressure to marry.
It shouldn’t change anything. There is nothing in orthodox Biblical Christianity that would have JC’s Deity or sinless humanity tainted by marital sex or procreation. However, there are lots of less sophisticated believers & unaware dualists who think that it would & thus whose faith would be shaken.
One practical consequence that would arise would be a radical challenging of the authority of The Church and the reliability of the New Testament. If the Church & the NT could cover up something that big, what else are they not telling us?
Btw, from all reports, the fragment only says “Jesus said 'My wife…” The rest could be something like “- all who hear my words and do them are my wife, and my mother, and my brother, and my sister.”
Or the whole quote may be “My wife… take her, please.”
As noted by others in this thread, this particular papyrus fragment, no matter how authentic, doesn’t prove anything about Jesus himself. So if it could be demonstrated to be true that Jesus had a wife, that would mean that we had a new, previously unknown, significant source of information about Jesus. And that in itself might well be significant.
As far as the fact of him having had a wife goes, I don’t know that it would change anything, but it would raise some obvious questions. Like, Whatever happened to her? Why don’t we hear anything about her? When and why did Jesus marry her, and what did he think about the compatibility of marriage with his mission?
I think it would be much more interesting and impactful if it were to be shown that Jesus had children. I’m sure it could be hand-waved away with the whole “dual nature” thing, but it would still be rather shocking to know that God might have lineal descendants among us today.
On further reflection, if Jesus did have offspring, and you consider the Identical Ancestor point for Europe and the Middle East, then Jesus would either be an ancestor of no one, or an ancestor of almost everyone in that region.
I hope this isn’t a hijack, but how do we know the Jesus referred to on the Papyrus is the one revered by Christians? Could the name be ‘re-used’?
I understand the name ‘Jesus’ may not be subject to common use like Joe or Fred. I also thought ‘Jesus’ might have been a synonym of ‘Teacher’ or ‘Rabbi’ (I’m way out of my element there.)
Still, given the complexities of different languages, alphabets, and usage, could that name have been referring to another individual?
That was one of the things I was wondering about, too. There certainly were other people named Jesus (or the equivalent in whatever language), and still are today.
Catholic here. No, wouldn’t change anything whatsoever for me. Would it change anything in Catholic doctrine? Almost certainly not. And would like to point out that there is a difference between “not given much political power within the organization” (true of women within the Catholic church today) and “women are evil” (not true of modern Catholic teachings at all).
I’m already a very big fan of Mary Magdalene (the biblical one).