Is the Gospel of Jesus' Wife a Forgery?

in September 2012 Harvard professor of early Christianity dr. Karen King presented a paper at the International Congress of Coptic studies in Rome the title of her paper was a new Coptic gospel fragment what was special about this fragment though is that it mentioned Jesus's wife the Coptic scholars in the room were extremely skeptical but nevertheless the media exploded well I hate to be that ancient historian killjoy but these things are never quite as exciting as they see don't get me wrong a new papyrus fragment is always exciting and this story is very interesting just not for the reasons that you would expect you see a few years later scholars overwhelmingly view this fragment as a forgery as historians and scientists started studying it in depth more and more questions started to pop up making it less and less likely that this thing was real so why discuss a fake scrap of gospel well I have two reasons one there are too many YouTube videos and blog posts out there continuing to perpetuate misinformation about this fragment I want to set the record straight relying on actual scholars in the field secondly I see this whole situation that took place between 2012 when the gospel first came to light and 2014 when scholars overwhelmingly decided that there was no chance for this to be authentic I see the situation as a perfectly contained episode to see how the scholarship actually works in archaeology ancient history and biblical studies maybe by looking at the actual research we can learn to get our information from people who know what they're talking about rather than sensationalist blogs or journalists so with that let's get into it this fragment is a scrap of papyrus about the size of a credit card as you can see there are eight lines of text written in Coptic a language that was spoken in Egypt under the Roman and Byzantine empires line for has a sensational statement that gave the fragment its name my wife before conveniently cutting off radiocarbon dating has dated the actual papyrus fragment to the seventh or eighth centuries a time when the Muslims were starting to move into Egypt however this doesn't mean that the fragment is actually authentic blank pieces of papyri are relatively he defined for forgers considering that there are tens of thousands of fragments and storerooms all over the world however it wasn't the material that tips collars off it was the actual writing the writing style that we see on this fragment is highly unusual it is thick and blunt as if it was made by a brush however Roman authors in late antiquity generally used read pen when writing on papyrus you can see here what Coptic script usually looks like even messier handwriting like what we see on this Coptic magical spell look different than what we see on the Gospel of Jesus is Wife between this poor handwriting and some grammatical errors Coptic scholars started to seriously doubt that a native speaker could have possibly authored this but even this isn't enough to prove that it is a forgery what if the writer just had poor handwriting and was using a brush instead of the usual repent soon after Karen King published the gospel of Jesus Wife another scholar noticed that almost every single Coptic word in the fragment is also found in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas a much more famous Coptic gospel that anyone could easily have found online the best way to see the dependence between the gospel of Jesus's wife and the Coptic Gospel of Thomas is to go line by line to see the similarities the first line reads not to me my mother gave me life this line appears almost exactly the same in Thomas Thomas verse 101 to me for my mother but my true mother gave to me life if the Jesus's wife fragment is a forgery it is easy to see how the forger might have lifted these words from the Gospel of Thomas line two reads the disciples said to Jesus this appears in Gospel of Thomas vs. 12 18 and 20 and this may not sound like a very major point but this precise phrase does not occur in the canonical Gospels line three deny Mary is not worthy of it this is very similar to Thomas verse 114 Mary is curiously close to the term not worthy of both in Thomas and in the gospel of Jesus's wife also line four jesus said to them my wife curiously though the most sensational words my wife don't appear in the Gospel of Thomas rather than proving its authenticity some scholars see this as even more suspicious for the sake of time I'll just assure you that the last three lines also borrow Coptic words from the Gospel of Thomas from the evidence the scholar concluded that the eight lines of the Gospel of Jesus his wife are derived from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas virtually in their entirety making dependent certain a highly unusual form of dependence on words more than sense so words instead of phrases much like how someone would cut out letters from a magazine to piece together a ransom note it is easy to imagine that if someone didn't know Coptic they would go to the most famous Coptic gospel to lift Coptic words and like I said even more suspiciously one of the few words that doesn't appear in the Gospel of Thomas is the phrase my wife showing that someone probably would have added it just to make it more sensational I hope you're already convinced the dependence between the gospel of jesus's wife and the gospel of thomas is quite obvious but even this isn't the final straw the deathblow the discovery that convinced me that this text was completely forged came from a sister text that Karen King obtained along with the gospel of Jesus his wife this fragment has the same weird blunt handwriting showing that whoever wrote it was probably the same one using the same brush on the gospel of Jesus's wife this is a fragment of the Gospel of John but unlike the gospel of Jesus's Wife this one is much more obviously a fake you see there's evidence that this fragment was copied line by line from a well-known Coptic publication of the Gospel of John Herbert Thompson's 1924 publication that anyone could reasonably find as a PDF file through a quick google search this here is an image from mark good acres blog a well-known New Testament scholar at Duke University on the left you see a cropped image from Herbert Thompson's publication on the right you see the sister texts of the Jesus's Wife fragment this fragment suspiciously follows every line even the line breaks that you see in Herbert Thompson's publication slavishly jumping every other line to give the appearance that the text continues where the papyrus breaks off however I hope it's clear that the Herbert Thomson text the text here on the left comes from a completely different artifact a Coptic codex that was discovered about a century ago the chances of this Coptic codex and another fragment bearing the exact same line breaks it's it's statistically impossible finally the papyri dates to the seventh or eighth century much like the gospel of Jesus's Wife however the coptic dialect dates to the fourth or fifth century which makes a lot of sense if the forger was using 7th to 8th century papyri while copying a 4th to 5th century text but that's something no forger could possibly have known without having a lab to conduct radiocarbon dating so I'm reasonably convinced along with early Christian scholars everywhere that the gospel of Jesus's wipe is a modern forgery it was possibly even made within the past decade since there's evidence that they were using PDF files to make these copies however this doesn't mean that the conspiracy theory that the forger was trying to raise isn't interesting the question of Jesus's marital status was a huge concern for late antique Christians although all evidence points to Jesus being celibate some late antique Christians envisioned him as having some sort of relationship with Mary Magdalene the apocryphal gospel of Philip is probably the most provocative it describes Mary Magdalene as being Jesus's favorite disciple and possibly even romantically involved with him the companion of the Savior is Mary Magdalene the Savior loved her more than all the disciples and he kissed her often on the mouth so here we have an extremely provocative text a much more provocative text in the gospel of Jesus his wife since Jesus is actually kissing Mary Magdalene however this text is all news the Gospel of Philip was discovered with the NAG Hammadi library back in the 1940s it's not exactly front-page news of course the Gospel of Philip doesn't tell us anything about the historical Jesus since it's the 2nd or 3rd century text it better tells us what Christians were talking about in the 2nd or 3rd centuries rather than the actual historical figure so even though the Gospel of Jesus's wife is a fake the topic that it raises is not new people both then and now love a conspiracy theory and what better conspiracy theory then Jesus had a romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene so what does the take away for this discussion first of all I hope it is that biblical scholarship is a real thing there are real scholars debating real issues all over the world so when news headlines start trumpeting some new crazy discovery check the source is it a reputable scholar our other reputable scholars agreeing or disagreeing with the claims Karen King is indeed a reputable scholar in fact she did everything right by bringing the fragment before all of the Coptic scholars in Rome because of this scholars from all over the world were able to study the text in depth and eventually come to a broad consensus so this whole situation surrounding the gospel of Jesus's wife is probably the best and easiest way for a non scholar to see how the scholarly process works not behind closed doors but in national conferences often open to the public and published in reputable journals but I also hope that this episode shows the allure of conspiracy theories if we were ever to discover irrefutable proof that Jesus was indeed married I think that would complicate Christian theology I don't think it would turn Christianity on its head but you would have theologians scrambling everywhere to see how this discovery fits into Christian sexual ethics or Christian idea of marriage not to mention the personhood of Jesus Christ himself but all of our evidence points to Jesus being celibate not a completely weird idea for a first century rabbi so even though conspiracy theories may be fun and tantalizing by their very nature they're extremely unlikely sound historical analysis sometimes just results in a more cut-and-dry answer as always thanks for watching and please subscribe you

Channel: ReligionForBreakfast

Views: 123,794

Rating: 4.8581562 out of 5

Keywords: Gospel Of Jesus' Wife, Jesus Christ (Deity), Religious Studies (Field Of Study), Religious Text (Literary Genre), Archaeology (Interest), Ancient Greek (Human Language), Coptic Language (Human Language), Christianity (Religion)

Id: hKHabhHpt3E

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/pjx1]

Great Video with alot of knowledge and thought.

[u/TheAlchemist1]

Cool video.. The entire bible and related text is all just a forgery depending on how you look at it. It's all just made up shit