Update 2 (May 2014): A Tyndale House scholar, Christian Askeland, thoroughly debunks the authenticity of the fragment as a forgery on the Tyndale House website following the publication of yet another article on the fragment in the Harvard Theological Review.
Update: The authenticity of the Coptic text that supposedly claims Jesus had a wife has been challenged by several experts. But this is not at all surprising; that’s par for the course for scholarship: experts release their findings for review from other experts. My colleague Darrell Bock points out that Huffington Post writer Jaweed Kaleem continued the conversation about the Jesus wife text with reports about suspicions regarding its authenticity. And Kaleem isn’t the only one: Jay Lindsay and Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press reported more of the story on the ABC News website. The current decision by Harvard Theological Review not to publish the fragment just yet probably is not the result of controversy—just more of the facts regarding who will publish what are coming out.
It’s really amazing how media reports can sensationalize a discovery that adds quite little to the discussion. Huffington Post writer Jaweed Kaleem headed his report under the sensational but misleading title “‘The Gospel Of Jesus’ Wife,’ New Early Christian Text, Indicates Jesus May Have Been Married.” Actually, the piece is somewhat even handed, but the title should have been «Second to Fourth Century Christian Text Might Indicate That Some Might Have Claimed Jesus May Have Been Married.» The editor would likely have nixed it, though.
In this connection, you will have to grant that most people use the term Christian in a much looser sense than I typically would. When I use the term, I mean someone who has experienced God's forgiveness in Jesus Christ by putting one's trust in him. For most people, Christian means simply any form of religious expression that attaches any sort of claim to Jesus. So, for most of the world, texts like The Gospel of Jesus' Wife and the Gospel of Thomas count in that latter sense as Christian. I've read a pre-publication draft available online of Karen King's work on this text. It's an interesting discovery for those who study texts from antiquity. I'll defer to Cambridge professor Simon Gathercole's analysis of this find. But, in a nutshell, here’s what I think. The text in question is a fragment of a page from a papyrus book written about the fourth century after Christ. The text it preserves might be from something about a century or a century and a half earlier, but it is a fragmentary text of about eight mostly legible but damaged lines in the Coptic language (Egyptian written using the Greek alphabet with a few additional letters). Dr. King has not revealed where the manuscript was found or who owns it, but it's likely with a text of this apparent age on papyrus that it was found originally on an ancient trash heap in Egypt. Many such texts, and many of them far more complete than this one, have been found. And the texts of this sort that can be read in more complete forms have revealed a group of people in Egypt (often called “Gnostics” from the Greek word for knowledge) who were fascinated by Jesus and miracle-working, but who were far from mainstream Christians, both geographically and theologically. The claims made about him in Gnostic literature are often wildly implausible when compared to the New Testament. Gnostics held a much different view of theology and of who Jesus was than the people who wrote documents collected in the New Testament. And claims about Jesus and his relationship to some of his female followers abound in such literature. Much of what they say about women is completely the opposite of what the NT says. For instance the Gospel of Thomas 114 reads,
Update: The authenticity of the Coptic text that supposedly claims Jesus had a wife has been challenged by several experts. But this is not at all surprising; that’s par for the course for scholarship: experts release their findings for review from other experts. My colleague Darrell Bock points out that Huffington Post writer Jaweed Kaleem continued the conversation about the Jesus wife text with reports about suspicions regarding its authenticity. And Kaleem isn’t the only one: Jay Lindsay and Nicole Winfield of the Associated Press reported more of the story on the ABC News website. The current decision by Harvard Theological Review not to publish the fragment just yet probably is not the result of controversy—just more of the facts regarding who will publish what are coming out.
It’s really amazing how media reports can sensationalize a discovery that adds quite little to the discussion. Huffington Post writer Jaweed Kaleem headed his report under the sensational but misleading title “‘The Gospel Of Jesus’ Wife,’ New Early Christian Text, Indicates Jesus May Have Been Married.” Actually, the piece is somewhat even handed, but the title should have been «Second to Fourth Century Christian Text Might Indicate That Some Might Have Claimed Jesus May Have Been Married.» The editor would likely have nixed it, though.
In this connection, you will have to grant that most people use the term Christian in a much looser sense than I typically would. When I use the term, I mean someone who has experienced God's forgiveness in Jesus Christ by putting one's trust in him. For most people, Christian means simply any form of religious expression that attaches any sort of claim to Jesus. So, for most of the world, texts like The Gospel of Jesus' Wife and the Gospel of Thomas count in that latter sense as Christian. I've read a pre-publication draft available online of Karen King's work on this text. It's an interesting discovery for those who study texts from antiquity. I'll defer to Cambridge professor Simon Gathercole's analysis of this find. But, in a nutshell, here’s what I think. The text in question is a fragment of a page from a papyrus book written about the fourth century after Christ. The text it preserves might be from something about a century or a century and a half earlier, but it is a fragmentary text of about eight mostly legible but damaged lines in the Coptic language (Egyptian written using the Greek alphabet with a few additional letters). Dr. King has not revealed where the manuscript was found or who owns it, but it's likely with a text of this apparent age on papyrus that it was found originally on an ancient trash heap in Egypt. Many such texts, and many of them far more complete than this one, have been found. And the texts of this sort that can be read in more complete forms have revealed a group of people in Egypt (often called “Gnostics” from the Greek word for knowledge) who were fascinated by Jesus and miracle-working, but who were far from mainstream Christians, both geographically and theologically. The claims made about him in Gnostic literature are often wildly implausible when compared to the New Testament. Gnostics held a much different view of theology and of who Jesus was than the people who wrote documents collected in the New Testament. And claims about Jesus and his relationship to some of his female followers abound in such literature. Much of what they say about women is completely the opposite of what the NT says. For instance the Gospel of Thomas 114 reads,
Simon Peter said to him, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”Jesus’ women followers are treated with great respect in the New Testament, much more so than most people realize, and with much more respect than other texts of the Hellenistic period. But I won’t bore you with the details of that discussion. The New Testament documents themselves stand in much closer proximity, both chronologically and geographically, to the historical Jesus. In fact, scholars—regardless of their religious convictions—agree many of those documents were composed within a generation of when Jesus was crucified. Take, for instance Paul’s first letter to the Cornthian Christians, written in the mid-50s. First Corinthians 15:1–8 transmits a tradition less than 25 years from the events it describes. And this letter was probably composed a few years before the Gospel of Mark, by consensus the earliest NT Gospel. But the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, as King dubbed this fragment in the news, is far less legible and—as a result—far less intelligible, than even many of the Gnostic texts found in Egypt, but what can be made out is similar to Thomas. But there's really not enough context to make a great deal of sense of what we actually can read. The two words that catch everyone's attention are “Mary” and “wife.” But if King's initial impression of this fragment is correct, this would be one of the only texts directly connecting Jesus with a wife. But it's still too early for other scholars to have fully studied the text. My colleague Darrell Bock said in an interview: “It’s a little bit like trying to analyze the game in the first quarter.” It's quite possible that “wife” may be a literary figure for “church,” as it is in Ephesians 5:25–27. Other literary figures employing family relationships appear in the Gospels, too, such as Matthew 12:46–48, where Jesus refers to his disciples as his “my mother and my brothers.” So we have to hesitate in identifying “wife” in this incomplete text. But, granting for discussion that this scrap of papyrus really does say Jesus had a wife, here’s where the fact this fragment would be the only example of a Jesus-wife connection is so important: the rest of the earliest Christian (in the broadest sense of the word) tradition is either silent about Jesus’ marital status or actively claims he was single. That this tradition is so early and so widespread geographically in ancient Christianity makes it all but certain that Jesus was, in fact, single. This solitary and late fragment becomes merely an historical curiosity for those who study ancient Egyptian Gnostic texts. Whatever else can be said, this text is too distant, both chronologically and geographically, to provide anything new about whether the historical Jesus himself was married. It only provides some insight into what some people who called themselves Christians might have said about Jesus' marital status. In King's words (from the first page of the pre-publication draft),
This is the only extant ancient text which explicitly portrays Jesus as referring to a wife. It does not, however, provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married, given the late date of the fragment and the probable date of original composition only in the second half of the second centuryThe Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is not a Gospel, and has far too little to offer to support the claim that “Jesus May Have Been Married”. Beware of spin in headlines.