I suppose we don’t talk about it because it’s not really relevant to his message – is it?
Congratulations - that’s awesome.
But why would it take four hundred years? The Gospels are unquestionably earlier than that, and they contain references to how Jesus’ enemies accused him of being a friend of tax collectors and prostitutes.
As far as this document goes, it looks to my highly uneducated eyes to be like Gnostic stuff like the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip.
Regards,
Shodan
We don’t talk about it because the idea of Jesus’ historical celibacy is so deep that it doesn’t even merit a conversation anymore. To put it simply, Christians are supposed to live a vita apostolica, a Christ-like life. In other words, don’t just do what Jesus says but what he does. Whether or not the life of a householder is compatible with the apostolic life used to be a subject of great controversy before views more or less converged. I don’t think one scrap of papyrus is going to reignite that debate, but that doesn’t mean it’s not relevant.
You might be thinking about it backwards. The significance would be if there was a tradition of a married Christ still after 400 years. The Egyptian church was a bit wacky for a bunch of reasons, and this would help round out our picture.
It looks very much like material from the Gospel of Thomas. I don’t read Coptic so I can’t say too much more about the details.
No offense, but I am not following you. The earliest traditions available - i.e. the Gospels - have no tradition of a married Christ. The emphasis on Mary Magdalene came later, and it may be from that emphasis that the idea of Jesus being married arose.
I am trying to remember my early Church history - were the Egyptians the Nestorian branch of the church? IIRC they denied that Jesus has a mortal nature, only a divine one. If so, it is evidence of the Gnostic tradition among the Coptics.
Anyway, congrats again on your pending publication. Is it going to be publicly available?
Regards,
Shodan
I have often wondered if John calling himself the apostle that Jesus loved would mean he was Gay. In our society if a person says," I am the person that so and so loves it would mean a different kind of love than usual.
This document does not have to be in the Mary Magdalene tradition at all. The most interesting possibility is that there was a native tradition of a married Jesus that, with the ascendance of the Gospels as the most important sources for Jesus’ life, would have expired. By this time a lot of people who identified as Christians probably didn’t know very much about Jesus at all, so they could easily conflate what they knew about his life with the more well-known stories of pre-Christian “saints.” There’s a lot of really neat possibilities here.
Nope, the Egyptians were radically Miaphysite. Nestorians were the opposite. The See of St. Mark officially broke with the mainstream after Chalcedon in 451.
I am not sure where we will publish the piece. I have to finish writing my part. 
I don’t really see why it would matter if Jesus had a wife. All that celibacy stuff is apocryphal anyway. Now, if he had children, that would be interesting!!
Where the non-Christian “saints” you mentioned, who were conflated with Jesus so as to give rise to a married Jesus tradition, typically married themselves?
I was wondering if the “married Jesus” came about as an expression of some theological ideas about Jesus’ divine vs. human nature, or because he was an expression of the Demi-Urge, or something like that.
Figures that I would get it exactly wrong. It’s been thirty five years, and all that Nestorianism vs. Arianism vs. Miaphysite vs. Modal Monarchianism vs. God knows what-ism made my head spin, and I never did figure out exactly what the differences between them and orthodoxy were anyway.
Discussions of the early Church of the Trinity and the nature(s) of Jesus, and especially of their resolution, remind me of a line from Ring Lardner somewhere or other -
:eek:
Regards,
Shodan
I think what you’re describing there is Monophysitism, not Gnosticism. But there definitely was Gnostic Christianity in Egypt.
Well, the orthodox view is that Jesus had/has a dual nature, human and divine (that’s why in the Middle Ages he sometimes was represented by a griffin, like the one in Dante’s Purgatorio) – ISTM that if that were true and he had kids, they would inherit only his DNA, not his divinity, no big deal.
Here’s the problem I’d have with it: if Jesus is God Incarnate, here for a very limited time on a particular mission, and he gets married…that’s sure a big diversion from his mission. It just doesn’t fit.
I mean, I’m married and have a son, but that isn’t a distraction from my real mission in life; it’s the better part of what my life is all about. That’s my calling.
If one buys into this crazy Christianity stuff, it’s hard to see Jesus’ mission (can’t call it a ‘calling’ because per Christian belief, he wasn’t ‘called’ by God, he was and is God) as anything less than all-consuming, from his baptism by John forward. And it’s one thing to leave behind your parents and siblings (if you’re Protestant) and kin for one’s all-consuming mission, but it’s a very different thing to leave one’s wife behind.
It suggests it was a bad choice to have made that commitment in the first place - and presumably Jesus would have understood who he was, and what he was ultimately going to be doing, for his adult life. (Certainly one Biblical story suggests that he was starting to grasp the idea by age 12.)
And it seems improbable that his wife wouldn’t be mentioned if Jesus brought her along on his ministry, especially in the accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection, stories which name Mary his mother, Mary Magdalene, and a number of other women as well. Heck, Mary his mother wasn’t along on his ministry, but she was there for the concluding act, according to the Bible. So why wasn’t his wife there?
No, I just can’t make it fit. It doesn’t make sense to me with respect to who I believe Jesus to be, and it doesn’t make sense in the context of the Bible.
I don’t know; I’m spitballing. A lot of what we know about pagan precursors to Jesus comes from much later and often unreliable sources, like Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana. He was an ascetic, but to my (albeit limited) knowledge he was by no means the only popular pre-Christian religious hero. These are thorny and interesting questions that I don’t know nearly as much about as I might like.
That I doubt. This would have been a local, popular tradition. People who were attracted to that kind of theology, at least in this period, would have been more drawn to Neoplatonism. The merging of Christian religious belief with Hellenic theological sophistication was only just now happening at the highest levels and had not really trickled down to local traditions. We’re still in a period where self-identifying as a Christian but owning amulets sacred to local Egyptian cult would have been pretty commonplace.
I absolve you. I suspect that when people learn about this stuff, especially when they are young, it is just taught as dry history of doctrine. IMHO it is much more interesting to learn alongside the political and institutional history of the Late Empire. This wasn’t just an academic argument to learned theologians, these differences caused riots, unrest, rebellion, and the commandeering of the entire grain fleet of Alexandria by its bishop. The story has wild-eyed monks, backroom politics, wide-scale demagoguery, and siege warfare.
You also probably learned it from the perspective of a fully-defined, mature, and even dominant faith. While these conflicts were raging, it was not a sure thing that the church would survive at all in any form. I can think of few other times where the value of intangible ideas ever loomed so large. It’s great stuff.
I recently read Aslan’s “Zealot”. The fellow discusses the context of Jesus’ times.
He suggests that Jesus was a follower of John the Bapist, who took up the same path after the arrest and execution of JtB. He began preaching his message around his home near the Sea of Galilee, then worked his way down to a triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
Aslan suggests the same as others mentioned here - that a common laborer (before he became a wandering religious zealot) would very likely have ended up married. It would be remarkable if he were late 20’s and not married.
But if he was married, odds are either he walked away from his family life, or she died, or something. The gospels never mention her, and certainly the role of wandering preacher does not accomodate dragging along the household. he wouldn’t have been the first guy in any society to abandon his family to pursue other interests. OTOH, it is also possible he actually started follow John much earlier and did not have the life that includes getting married.
We’ll never know unless we find more current documentation than this.
I haven’t read Aslan’s book so I don’t mean to criticize it specifically. But the basic problem is that it makes little sense to try to infer things about Jesus’ life from what we know about ordinary people. His life was extraordinary, and I say this as a non-believer. There does not seem to be much warrant to believe that he lived an ordinary life in all of the areas we know nothing about. We simply don’t know enough about the lives of ordinary people to make that judgment one way or another. It’s possible to tell a lot of stories about Jesus by connecting the dots between the fragmentary fixed points of his life, but it is hard to tell which of them could ever be more plausible than any other.
One of the posters mentioned that his adviser was studying the document, and said that to carbon-date the document it would have to be destroyed.
Don’t you only need to take a small sample of the ink to determine its age? Isn’t that how the Gnostic Gospels and Dead Sea Scrolls are still intact?
The document itself is tiny. To perform an ordinary carbon dating would require rendering enough ink to more or less destroy it. That’s why more sophisticated (if less precise) methods were used.
Is it this level (in your opinion) at which syncretism of myth occurred? One might almost expect identifying Jesus with some Hellenic or pagan god, and then marrying Him off to his consort goddess, like happened with Zeus and the other gods as their adherents encountered/conquered other peoples with other gods.
There I was luckier in my later church history professors than for the history of the early church. My later church history professor was the best kind of teacher - absolutely in love with his subject, and eager to the point of fanaticism to get over to us how wonderful it was. And he was full of anecdotes about these bizarre figures and their machinations and the backdrop of the times. Great stuff.
I remember my professor saying much the same thing. It was triggered by a discussion of Athanasius contra mundem and the history of Arianism, and the violent disagreements over homoousion and homoiousion. All that fighting over one vowel. :eek:
Anyway, I am grateful to you for your insights. And let us know when you are published - I for one would love to read it.
Regards,
Shodan
For some reason, I just thought of the lyrics to How Blue Can You Get?. That could have been quite a different Sermon on the Mount.
What I got from Zealot… The point was that (as far as we know) Jesus spent a decade or more are a tekton - a day laborer, construction worker, or carpenter. Given the times, it was most likely a few hours walk from the piddly village of Nazareth, helping build Herod Jr’s new capital Sephoris where there was plenty of work. He does not start anything like his later life for a while. A person in that situation would most likely be married.
Aslan makes some interesting points.The land at the time was full of messiahs (why do keep hearing lines from *Life of Brian *in my head?); messiah at the time simply meant deliverer, i.e. from the Herod and Roman domination and their corruption of the temple heirachy.
Jesus then appears to have started his religious career as a follower of John the Baptist. (Later obvious redactions in the gospels had John acknowledging Jesus’ divinity) John was preaching a different sort of resistance, more repentance rather than armed insurrection, possibly borrowing from the nearby Essenes. Jesus appears to have followed in this path. His actions when he got to Jerusalem appear to me that he thought to deliver his people’s freedom he expected some thunderbolts from heaven or something to take out the oppressors and the unholy corrupt high priesthood.
The Essenes professed celibacy over marriage, so the question to me is - how early did Jesus drop tools and start following a nutbar wandering preacher across the Jordan valley? That is the key question. If he had his conversion early, no marriage. If he had spent a decade or more (age what - 14 to 29?) as a laborer, then it would be surprising if he did not marry. Then, if he saw his calling, he would do what so many mortal men had done before and since - drop everything including family and walk away.
I suppose the other question is, was there an oral or underground tradition of some sort in the Coptic church about Jesus being married? Why would this be written down? As a “herectic splitter group”(?) according to mainline (Roman) Christianity, how active were the Egyptian authorities in tracking down and suppressing dissident points of view? Would it be logical for a person in 400 or 800 AD to have such a text? (Of course by 800AD wouldn’t Egypt be Muslim and so official suppression of dissident Christian texts would be minimal?)
I really, really, really wish that people would quit trying to force modern usages onto other times and cultures.