The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife

Two years ago, professor Karen L. King at Harvard Divinity School announced that they had found an ancient papyrus fragment where Jesus is saying that He has a wife. Needless to say, it caused a lot of controversy; apologets, academics, the Vatican and others said that the document was a modern fraud. One of the arguments for this was that the text seems to be based on the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, and includes a typo made in modern times in a PDF document (!).

However, just a few days ago Harvard announced that the document had been subject to radiocarbon analysis and spectroscopy, and it turned out that both the papyrus and ink indeed were ancient, being produced somewhere between 659-859 AD. Professor King guessed that the original text, from which this papyrus was copied, could have originated in the second to fourth centuries, but this is speculation and not something the radiocarbon analysis show.

Harvard’s press release states that “[t]he fragment does not in any way provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married, as Karen L. King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) has stressed since she announced the existence of the fragment in the fall of 2012.” King has said “don’t say this proves Dan Brown was right.” Rather, she sees this as an interesting contribution to our understanding of how Christians and pseudo-Christians viewed celibacy in the early church.
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