Jesus Was Married. Get Over It
I usually leave the Episcopal stuff to my Stand Firm colleagues, but I can’t let this one go by. Seems an Episcopal priest by the name of Cynthia Bourgeault is really excited by the prospect that Jesus was married:
You know there’s a buzz out there when 100 emails come into your box all bearing identical links to the New York Times article responsible for the stir.
I clink [sic] on the link and voilà! There before me is a photo of a small papyrus fragment from the fourth century and distinguished Harvard scholar Karen King explaining how this recently recovered and certified authentic Coptic fragment unmistakably has Jesus referring to Mary Magdalene as “my wife.”
That’s funny, because when I read what King has published as the translation of lines 3-5 of the papyrus, I see this:
] deny. Mary is worthy of it [
]...Jesus said to them, “My wife…”[
]...she will be able to be my disciple…[
Not only do we have no idea what the portions signified by ellipses might say, but as I recall there were several Marys mentioned in the New Testament. Where is the “unmistakable” evidence that Jesus is talking about Mary Magdalene? Because Dan Brown said so?
Wow! That should send another shock wave reverberating through the Vatican!
Yes, that’s definitely why we should be enthused by this fraud find—it will goose the Pope.
Now it’s true that journalism is skewed toward the sensational while scholarship is more skewed toward the cumulative. Karen King is a careful scholar and has done her homework carefully. She knows—as all of us do that have worked in the field with any degree of due diligence—that the contentious issue of Jesus’s marital status is not going to rest decisively on one stray fragment of papyrus.
Of course not. It’s going to rest on the entire Dan Brown corpus.
But what this new discovery does do is to provide additional confirmation for a body of evidence already mounting from those other recently discovered early Christian sacred texts—specifically, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and the Gospel of Philip—that a group of very early Christians remember a version of their history quite different from what eventually became the officially sanctioned story.
Now, those who have examined the question “with any degree of due diligence” are aware that two of the three documents she mentions were written 100 years or more after the lifetime of Jesus, while the reference in the Gospel of Thomas (v. 114) is not to Mary as wife, but as disciple who will be “made male,” i.e., enabled to relate to God as men do. I’m sure that’s every feminist’s desire. And what difference does it make that some “Christians” wrote their own version of “history”? There are people who, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, still think that Neil Armstrong never set foot on the moon, and some of them have been willing to put that belief into documents they publish for the world to see. So why should we believe the Gnostics who thought that Jesus was married? I’m guessing it’s because we want to.
It’s also right there hidden in plain sight in the four canonical gospels once you start looking more closely.
When people say things like this they remind me of Charles Taze Russell (founder of Jehovah’s Witnesses) or Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science) or any of a hundred other modern cult leaders. We’ve had the four gospels for two millennia, they’ve been pored over by countless scholars, clergy, monks, nuns, and laity, and yet all along—hidden in plain sight!—was something that never occurred to anyone who ever read these four short documents until modern liberal Protestants finally saw it! It’s a miracle! The scales have dropped from our eyes, and it never would have happened without the sexual revolution and feminism!
Sooner or later, the evidence trickling in from all quarters is going to be too overwhelming for all but the most obdurate traditionalists to ignore.
Ah, the inevitable march of progress. I seem to remember Karl Marx and the advocates of eugenics saying something like that, too. Soviet advocates of Lysenkoism, as well.
You get the point.
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16 comments
Scholarship, they’re doing it wrong.
[1] Posted by Paula Loughlin on 9-24-2012 at 11:04 PM · [top]
This Episcopal priest is so deluded. Obviously, the Pope is keeping Jesus’s wife alive as a bargaining chip against the aliens. People, have we learned nothing from The X-Files ?
[2] Posted by The Plantagenets on 9-25-2012 at 02:07 AM · [top]
The wording is so . . . convenient. The whole thing smells like a forgery to me.
[3] Posted by Jim the Puritan on 9-25-2012 at 03:07 AM · [top]
#2…great comment.
[4] Posted by Matt Kennedy on 9-25-2012 at 04:55 AM · [top]
A pdf draft of the ‘scholarly paper’ submitted somewhere for publication can be found at this web page:
http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news-events/articles/2012/09/16/hds-scholar-announces-existence-of-new-early-christian-gospel-from-egypt
Read it for yourself, and decide whether this is ‘careful’ scholarship. The last part comes across to me as inappropriately speculative, to the point of fiction.
Calling the papyrus a ‘gospel’ comes across to me as hubris, if not heresy. Woe unto the journal that publishes the paper without extensive editing.
Jesus does have a wife, though. Her name is ‘The Church.’
[5] Posted by Ralph on 9-25-2012 at 07:52 AM · [top]
I am prepared to dismiss that idea as “a Protestant invention.”
However, if it does turn out that the Vatican has Mrs. Jesus locked away in a convent dungeon somewhere, just forget I said anything.
We all know what happened to Maria Monk.
[6] Posted by episcopalienated on 9-25-2012 at 08:11 AM · [top]
Given all the negative connotations of “obdurate,” we certainly know how she feels about “traditionalists.” Or maybe I am also just reading between the ellipses.
[7] Posted by Undergroundpewster on 9-25-2012 at 08:43 AM · [top]
We’re not even out of the first paragraph and already the errors are piling up. If “Jesus said “My wife and…” is unmistakeable, then I can unmistakeably claim to be the sister of Lazarus.
(1) My name is Martha.
(2) I am the elder sister of my family.
(3) I have often laboured in the kitchen and given out about my siblings not providing any assistance.
(4) I am pretty sure I have used the words “Lord”, “brother”, “sick”, “teacher”, “resurrection”, “last day” and “bad odour” at various times, sometimes even using several of them in the same sentence!
(5) Indeed, were you to write down an account of my attendance at Sunday Mass and a description of what I said during the recitation of the Creed, you use (with the judicious use of ellipses) arrive at a sentence not dissimilar to those in the “Jesus’ Wife (sic)” fragment: “And Martha said “... Lord…I believe…resurrection…” which is practically the same account as in the Gospel of John about the raising of Lazarus!
(6) Therefore, I am the same woman as lived in Bethany around two thousand years ago and you should all avidly look forward to my book, TV special documentary, DVD of same, appearances on TV chat shows and radio interviews, speaking engagements, lectures and forthcoming appointment to a chair of divinity and/or history in a prestigious university.
What more proof could you want? Never mind the nay-sayers who think this scrap is probably, at best, yet another version of the already known “Gospel of Thomas” and at worst, a deliberate forgery bodged together for exactly this purpose: gin up interest and excitement so the ‘collector’ can sell it to the highest bidding museum.
Oh, and don’t worry about any disturbance in the Vatican; the Pope is preparing his instructions to the Opus Dei albino assassins and Jesuit infiltration corps ninjas about how to deal with this latest development. Remember, he used to be the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the Office of the Holy Inquisition (as the newspapers never tire of reminding us), so you think he doesn’t have a contingency plan for the likes of this?
[8] Posted by Martha on 9-25-2012 at 09:29 AM · [top]
Well, I’m not sure if the Book of Revelation is one of the four Gospels (not being a seminary-trained clergyperson), but it’s right there in plain print, sure enough:
Revelation 21: 9-11
“9 Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues and spoke to me, saying, “Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, 11 having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.”
Revelation 22:17
“17 The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.”
And of course, speaking as an ignorant Papist, there are the legends of the Mystic Marriages of St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Catherine of Sienna with Christ, as well as the old reference to nuns as “brides of Christ”. So yep, married, definitely! Though maybe not quite in the fashion that the Reverend Bourgeault thinks?
[9] Posted by Martha on 9-25-2012 at 09:39 AM · [top]
I concede nothing, of course, but it seems that this bit of “scholarship” blows the allegedly gay Jesus out of the same-sex “marriage” debates. Clearly a heterosexually “married” Jesus is not, in the final analysis, an advocate of same-sex “marriages”!
On the other hand, the ellipses certainly give the option to fill in the blanks in a way that could be “interpreted” in favor of the same-sex married Jesus of myth and legend and “scholarship.”
Since SF is peer-reviewed, I submit the following scholastic mummery for review.
] deny. Mary is worthy of it [
]...Jesus said to them, “My wife…”[
]...she will be able to be my disciple…[
The ellipses clearly import: “[John I cannot] deny. Mary is worthy of it [i.e., marriageable]. [But] Jesus said to them, “My wife [I will not deny, to John I stay true since we have been in a long term relationship for nearly 3 years]. [Mary,] she will be able to be my disciple [once she recovers from the shock.]
Why, after all, should mere heterosexuals be able to claim this papyritic Gozpell for their own?
/sarcasm
[10] Posted by dwstroudmd+ on 9-25-2012 at 10:11 AM · [top]
dwstroudmd+:
Clearly what will soon be revealed are the additional words to give the full context. I have received a sneak preview:
Jesus told us “Mary (who we used to know as Mark) should have his gender reassigned. This you can’t
] deny. Mary is worthy of it [
don’t you think?”
Once Mark/Mary gets his operation, he will no longer be my husband but s/he will be”
]...Jesus said to them, “My wife…”[
And, just so you know, once the operation is done
]...she will be able to be my disciple…[
and I fear that that nasty Republican Paul fellow will soon hijack our pot-smoking, hippie, 99%, pro-gay, pro-abortion religion and turn it into something completely alien to what I want it to be, and that it will only be some especially enlightened white Western liberals in the 21st century who will return Christianity to what it once was.
[11] Posted by jamesw on 9-25-2012 at 12:37 PM · [top]
#10,#11, please don’t give Ms. King any ideas. Liberal critics are imaginative enough as it is.
[12] Posted by SpongJohn SquarePantheist on 9-25-2012 at 01:22 PM · [top]
jamesw, I was merely trifling. I have a document I produced for a Tolkien blog that proves that Rose (nee’ Cotton) Gamgee was Pope. It is a superlative effort in that it is based entirely on the absence of evidence which is, of course, not evidence of absence. I should PM it to you if you would like. I don’t want to bother (as SpngJohnSquarePantheist so wisely has suggested) Ms. King’s fevered brow any further. Exploding heads are a bit messy.
[13] Posted by dwstroudmd+ on 9-25-2012 at 06:13 PM · [top]
“The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife”: How a fake gospel fragment was composed. by Francis Watson.
http://markgoodacre.org/Watson.pdf
[14] Posted by Paula Loughlin on 9-25-2012 at 10:09 PM · [top]
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzz…
Nothing to see here. Move along. Back you your lives citizens. Heads exploding…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MhgnMX73Pw
[15] Posted by B. Hunter on 9-27-2012 at 01:07 PM · [top]
As a product of the Great State of Arkansas and a Razorback,
I have a favorite sampler hanging on my wall which says;
“Never teach a pig to sing;
it wastes your time
and annoys the pig”
As I was reading this article it occurred to me that this also applies in this case.
“Never try to argue with a ________________
It wastes your time and irritates the ________”
You can insert whatever you like in the blanks.
My first choice is liberal.
[16] Posted by Sheep75002 on 9-28-2012 at 10:33 AM · [top]
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