If Jesus had a wife, would that change anything?

[Maeglin]

@Voyager

Wouldn’t celibacy of the priesthood be much harder to support if Jesus himself were not celibate?

And wouldn’t it be funny if the next fragment was discovered and continued “my wife” with “his name is Simon.”

No. Priests weren’t formally required to be celibate for centuries. Many western bishops are attested to have had wives and children throughout the middle ages.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@FriarTed

Btw, from all reports, the fragment only says “Jesus said 'My wife…”

@Voyager

And wouldn’t it be funny if the next fragment was discovered and continued “my wife” with “his name is Simon.”

There is no next fragment, but in the previous fragment, some of his disciples were asking Jesus what his favorite song by The Who was.

[Malacandra]

@Voyager

Wouldn’t celibacy of the priesthood be much harder to support if Jesus himself were not celibate?

And wouldn’t it be funny if the next fragment was discovered and continued “my wife” with “his name is Simon.”

Yeah, dream on. :rolleyes:

[Kinthalis]

My wife,

Can’t live with her, can’t live without her! Am I right guys?!

[John_Mace]

@Maeglin

No. Priests weren’t formally required to be celibate for centuries. Many western bishops are attested to have had wives and children throughout the middle ages.

Yep. More likely, if it turned out that said wife was considered “an Apostle”, it would make it harder to justify the male only rule for priests. But all this stuff on non-canonical and it’s not going to become canonical, so it really doesn’t matter (as far as the RCC is concerned).

[Son_of_a_Rich]

@Gagundathar

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.

As the vast percentage of thieves, murderers, and war starters are men, it would seem demonizing women would be an uphill battle.

[kanicbird]

I believe Jesus has to have what we might call a soulmate, on earth He may have had numerous sexual encounters as He was certainly accused of hanging out with prostitutes. Jesus says that people will not marry or be married in the next life, so marriage as we know it is a worldly concept, not part of the eternal plan, though sex is certainly part of the eternal plan. If Jesus knew this* at the time of getting involved in a relationship to marry, it would be unlikely but not impossible that He would marry except if it was to have the love of God reach a person, in which case all bets are off and Jesus would do whatever is needed, even if considered sinful, to reach a person and let the Father judge His heart sinless.

From the * above: Jesus clearly did not know everything and could have married before it was revealed that marriage is a worldly construct, this is clear in scriptures in several places ‘who touched me?’, ‘Not the son, only the Father knows’,‘will I find any faith on the earth?’ all quotes of Jesus in scriptures showing He did not know everything.

So to me it would be a curiosity, but fits into how I do view Jesus, doing anything needed to have God’s love reach humanity.

[Aji_de_Gallina]

[nitpick]
The Immaculate Conception is a Catholic doctrince about the Virgin Mary. It states that, as a special grace from God, she was spared of the stain of the Original Sin at the moment of her conception.
Her parents had sex to have her.
The Virgin Birth is a doctrine about Jesus in which Jesus was conceived miraculously without sex.
[/nitpick]

[Voyager]

@Maeglin

No. Priests weren’t formally required to be celibate for centuries. Many western bishops are attested to have had wives and children throughout the middle ages.

Not to mention some Popes. But I was referring to the church today.

[astorian]

@jsgoddess

A Harvard scholar of divinity alleges that she has found a slip of papyrus text, written in Coptic, that refers to Jesus’s wife and to a female disciple.

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!)

I do have serious answers to all your questions, and I’ll get to them in a moment, but first…

1. I find it bizarre how quick the media are to latch onto iffy stories like this based on little or no evidence. Interestingly, it’s usually around Easter time that they trumpet stories like this (every year, right before Easter, you can count on Time and/or Newsweek doing a cover story publicizing some new theory about the “real” Jesus).

2. I find it equally bizarre that secularists who normally scoff at the New Testament on the grounds that “it wasn’t written until decades after Jesus’ death” show no similar skepticism toward a fragment of a document written 300 years after Jesus’ death.
   That said…

I do not believe Jesus had a wife. On the other hand, if he HAD gotten married (as at leats one of his Apostles did), had sexual relations with his wife, and even sired some flesh and blood kids, it wouldn’t bother me in the least. There’d have been absolutely nothing sinful or distatsteful in that, nor would it invalidate anything Jesus said or did.

On the other hand, I’m inclined to think that, if Jesus had a wife or kids, SOME early evangelist would have found that interesting enough to mention.

As it is, this is a fragment of a document from some Gnostic group living LONG after Jesus died. It’s no secret that the Gnostics had a host of beleifs that we Catholics (and most Protestants) dismiss completely. This is just one of the latest.
As I’ve said many times before, Jesus COULD have been married, just as he COULD have been bald, just as he he COULD have been 6’8" tall, just as he COULD have been left-handed, or just as he COULD have been a spectacular singer. NONE of those things would be bad, and NONE would detract from his message or his divinity.

There jus tisn’t any solid reason to believe any of those things IS true.

[Voyager]

@astorian

I do have serious answers to all your questions, and I’ll get to them in a moment, but first…

1. I find it bizarre how quick the media are to latch onto iffy stories like this based on little or no evidence. Interestingly, it’s usually around Easter time that they trumpet stories like this (every year, right before Easter, you can count on Time and/or Newsweek doing a cover story publicizing some new theory about the “real” Jesus).

2. I find it equally bizarre that secularists who normally scoff at the New Testament on the grounds that “it wasn’t written until decades after Jesus’ death” show no similar skepticism toward a fragment of a document written 300 years after Jesus’ death.

Please show me any secularist (or anyone else) who is treating this as proof that Jesus had a wife. The discoverer certainly did not. We have a more complete Gospel of Judas, for instance, and no one acts like that proves Judas was a good guy after all.
What people are saying is that this is interesting since it shows that the question of the married state of Jesus was still out there hundreds of years after his death.
The religious are the ones who consider things written long after the death of Jesus by people who never knew him “gospel truth”, not us.

[Maeglin]

@astorian

On the other hand, I’m inclined to think that, if Jesus had a wife or kids, SOME early evangelist would have found that interesting enough to mention.

That’s just a plain-vanilla argument from silence.

[Leaffan]

Well, one less-funny line in The Life of Brian, perhaps.

[Maeglin]

There was (and still is) quite a bit of nonsense about how this document is a cheap fake. This debate managed to drum enough money to launch the deepest and most systematic regime of papyrus testing to date. We now know more about ancient ink and paper than ever before. The results are also pretty clear, as we believed all along. It’s almost certainly not a fake.

Papyrus Referring to Jesus’ Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists...

[andros]

@Maeglin

There was (and still is) quite a bit of nonsense about how this document is a cheap fake. This debate managed to drum enough money to launch the deepest and most systematic regime of papyrus testing to date. We now know more about ancient ink and paper than ever before. The results are also pretty clear, as we believed all along. It’s almost certainly not a fake.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/science/scrap-of-papyrus-referring-to-jesus-wife-is-likely-to-be-ancient-scientists-say.html?hpw&rref=science&_r=0

Fuck yeah, science!

That said, however, it’s important to remember that

@NYT

The test results do not prove that Jesus had a wife or disciples who were women, only that the fragment is more likely a snippet from an ancient manuscript than a fake

[Czarcasm]

@andros

Fuck yeah, science!

That said, however, it’s important to remember that

IT’s important to remember for most religious texts.

[BrainGlutton]

@Maeglin

There was (and still is) quite a bit of nonsense about how this document is a cheap fake. This debate managed to drum enough money to launch the deepest and most systematic regime of papyrus testing to date. We now know more about ancient ink and paper than ever before. The results are also pretty clear, as we believed all along. It’s almost certainly not a fake.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/science/scrap-of-papyrus-referring-to-jesus-wife-is-likely-to-be-ancient-scientists-say.html?hpw&rref=science&_r=0

But, it still dates to the 4th Century, not the 1st, right?

[andros]

@BrainGlutton

But, it still dates to the 4th Century, not the 1st, right?

AIUI, they haven’t gotten that close, and I don’t know if they can given the small size of the fragment. I’d guess you’re probably right:

@NYT

it resembles other ancient papyri from the fourth to the eighth centuries

But

James T. Yardley, a professor of electrical engineering, said in an interview that the carbon black ink on this fragment was “perfectly consistent with another 35 or 40 manuscripts that we’ve looked at,” that date from 400 B.C. to A.D. 700 or 800

…so that’s quite a range.
For what it’s worth, the Columbia Ancient Ink Lab is crazy awesome. Here’s their report on the fragment. Highly recommended.

[Maeglin]

@BrainGlutton

But, it still dates to the 4th Century, not the 1st, right?

Of course not; the Coptic language itself wasn’t written that early. This text is testimony to a living religious tradition in Egypt in the later Roman Empire, not to the historical Jesus. If King’s interpretation is correct, then it’s amazing enough that people were even talking about Jesus’ sexuality within a few hundred years of his death. We certainly don’t talk about it now. This text tells us something we did not know about early communities of faith.

The ink lab is indeed awesome, but I admit my opinion is biased. One member of the team is my advisor and another is a friend and (soon-to-be) coauthor.

[pancakes3]

What are the odds that the note was written metaphorically or even satirically hinting at Jesus’s bromance? I guess it’s hard to pin any sort of meaningful likelihood to it but that was the first thing I thought of when I heard of this story.