Left, the business-card size papyrus fragment presented as 'The Gospel of Jesus's wife'; right, Harvard Prof. Karen King, who presented the 'finding' without trying to authenticate it first.
One must suspect a motivation for instant fame - or notoriety - in a Harvard professor's decision to announce to the world the 'discovery' of a papyrus fragment purported to quote Jesus referring to 'my wife', etc., before she even tried to get the fragment authenticated. And it sure has made for quite a nine-day media meme, a piece of faux-info that self-generates itself virally over the Internet. Even if she says now that all she wanted was to throw it out there for discussion. Which is mighty irresponsible for a scholar. You don't throw out something for discussion until you have first established reasonably that your 'source' can stand up to scrutiny. Hers does not seem to be... Moreover she herself insists she is not claiming the writing on the fragment is true, only that in the 4th century, the question of Jesus's marital status was already being raised. So what's new about that?.. .I'm using a HuffPost article because one would never suspect them of carrying any water for Christianity!
'Jesus wife' research raises suspicion
that the reputed source is a fake
by Jaweed Kaleem
Sept. 29, 2012
Scholars of Coptology and papyrology have loudly expressed doubt about the authenticity a Harvard professor's discovery of a 4th century papyrus fragment in which Jesus is quoted speaking of "my wife."
Facing mounting doubts over the legitimacy of a business card-sized Coptic papyrus fragment that appears to quote Jesus Christ discussing his wife, the Harvard professor who acquired the artifact said Wednesday that she stands behind her findings, but is "open to questions about authenticity."
Karen L. King, the Harvard Divinity School professor whose announcement at a Coptic studies conference in Rome last week about a 1½-by-3-inch fragment inspired "Jesus's Wife" headlines worldwide, said the badly damaged artifact has been sent for testing.
She said the tests should determine if it is from the fourth century as originally proposed, or if parts of it are a modern forgery, as an increasing number of scholars of Coptology and papyrology have suggested.
The fragment, which has eight mostly legible dark lines on the front side and six barely legible faded lines on the back, was never meant to prove Jesus was married, King said, since its writing dates back to hundreds of years after his death. It was intended to highlight that some early Christians may have believed he was married. That would be significant because debates over sexuality and marriage have dominated contemporary discussions about Christianity; the Catholic Church cites Jesus's celibacy as one reason its priests must not have sex or marry.
[I beg to disagree, but it would be significant only if the fragment appears to establish the putative 'fact' - and it clearly does not, as even King herself acknowledges. King's 'discovery' would be akin to someone discovering in the future, after a nuclear holocaust that wipes out most of civilization, a small scrap of paper on which is written "John Paul II had a lover...' without any other context for the scrap other than that it was written in the third millennium (most likely from Catholic hate literature!), it is meaningless as such! The Harvard Theological Review must equally be faulted for 'provisionally' accepting for publication any 'finding' whose source has not been authenticated! Scientific journals are traditionally rigorous about aourcing and authentication and would not even consider publishing any alleged historical finding whose source has not been authenticated in any way.]
The legible lines on the front of the artifact seem to be a conversation between Jesus and his disciples. The fourth line of the text says, "Jesus said to them, my wife." Line 5 says "... she will be able to be my disciple," while the line before the "wife" quote has Jesus saying "Mary is worthy of it" and line 7 says, “As for me, I dwell with her in order to ..."
King, who carefully guarded her discovery until the Rome conference, released photos of the fragment and a draft of a related paper, scheduled to be published in the
Harvard Theological Review. But after the conference, scholars quickly began to doubt the findings.
Some said the handwriting, grammar, shape of the papyrus, and the ink's color and quality make it suspect. Others said the ink and papyrus should have been chemically dated before being publicly announced. The fact that the fragment's owner is unknown also has attracted suspicion.
[All the reasons for which a responsible researcher ought to have sought some authentication of the fragment before going public with it! It turns out that apparently, she never tried to authenticate it until the flare-up of objections following her giga-hyped announcement!]
King said the owner acquired the piece in 1997 from a German owner and wants to remain anonymous.
[And she left it at that! Dealers in antiques generally require a provenance that goes back as far as can be established. A scolar-researcher should be even more demanding.]
On Wednesday, bloggers began circulating a rumor that the
Harvard Theological Review reneged on publishing King's 52-page paper titled, "Gospel of Jesus's Wife" because of doubts over whether the papyrus was genuine.
[Even the title she chose for the paper was super-presumptuous - to call 14 partial lines a 'gospel' of anything is a contemptible contemporary trick to inflate the importance of any document that appears to be remotely about Jesus and his time on earth.]
Helmut Koester, a professor emeritus of Harvard Divinity School and a former 25-year editor of the journal, said in an interview that he heard "they did not want to publish because of doubts from two respected scholars."
Koester, who specializes in early Christianity and early Christian archaeology, added that after seeing an evaluation of King's work from a colleague in the field, he was "absolutely convinced that this is a modern forgery."
A call to the
Harvard Theological Review was redirected to a Harvard spokesman, and Kevin Madigan, the journal's co-editor, did not reply to an email. But in an earlier Associated Press article, Madigan said King's paper had only been "provisionally" accepted for a January publication. He said that there would be ongoing studies about the "scientific dating and further reports from Coptic papyrologists and grammarians."
King, however, said on Wednesday that her work is on track to be published in January.
Craig Evans, a New Testament professor at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, is one of the scholars who still has questions. Evans blogged Wednesday on Near Emmaus, a biblical history website, that he thought "the papyrus itself is probably quite old, perhaps fourth or fifth century, but the oddly written letters are probably modern and probably reflect recent interest in Jesus and Mary Magdalene."
"It's usually the science that precedes the big announcements.
These things aren't usually left untested, especially where a papyrologist has not uncovered it in Egypt," said Evans in an interview.
King said Wednesday that she is "very anxious" to see what testing determines and that she is working on additions to her paper in response to criticisms.
[Now she says this! Well, she was flat out unscientific and intellectually dishonest in not bothering about authentication first, before raising such a ruckus!] She also plans to report on the ink and papyrus analysis. It's unclear when testing will be complete.
"The idea was precisely to put it in the hands of scholars so we can began the discussion, to get opinions about authenticity, what they see in the fragment and what they think it is, what the conversations are," King said. "That's what we are seeing ... This is the academic process." [Yeah, now she says - humbug after the fact!]
Here now is my translation of the article in OR, which is accompanied by a brief commentary by the editor...
Right panel: Considered typical Coptic scripture of the early Christian, the so-called 'Schoyen fragment' from an Oslo collection looks very different from the sloppy letterwork of King's fragment (top right on the OE page. The second fragment illustrated in the OR, not very clearly, is a page from a manuscript found in the German National Library.)
In any case, it is fake
by Giovanni Maria Vian
Translated from the 9/27/12 issue of
The story over the presumed 'wife' of Jesus, attributed to a very problematic and controversial papyrus fragment, is recounted with prudence and rigor by Coptologist Alberto Campiani, who teaches History of Christianity at Rome's La Sapienza University, and was among the organizers of the international Coptologists' congress in Rome which was the theater for the headline-grabbing 'news'.
It was an announcement carefully prepared, leaving nothing to chance: all the major American media had been forewarned and invited to a preemptive news conference by Prof. Karen King to unveil a global 'scoop'.
One however that was immediately questioned by many specialists in the field, who have presented consistent objections that would lead to the conclusion that the papyrus fragment is a poorly made counterfeit (like so many others that crop up now and them from the Near East) aimed for sale on the world market by some private entity to a prestigious institution of this fragment and other 'manuscripts.
All this, in the very implausible context of reading the tendentious and biased Gnostic phenomenon of the early Christian centuries in the light of contemporary ideology which has nothing to do with the historical facts about Christianity and the figure of Jesus.
In short, the papyrus fragment is a fake.
A papyrus adrift
Harvard scholar presents antique papyrus fragment
purporting to contain references to 'Jesus's wife'
by ALBERTO CAMPLANI
Translated from the 9/27/12 issue of
"The finding of a Harvard scholar would appear to show Jesus had a wife". This is how Fox News reported its version of the reports that had already appeared elsewhere in the media about a news conference held on Sept. 18 in Rome by Harvard Prof. Karen King, of the Harvard Schoo of Divinity, during the 10th international congress on Coptic studies, hosted by the Augustinianum Patristic Institute, located less than a hundred meters away from the Vatican.
News reporting in many European and Italian media in the days that followed King's announcement was in a similar vein, but with variations of tone and of critical awareness, as well as mostly irrelevant references to the book "The Da Vinci Code".
The facts can be stated quickly: During her news conference, King presented a papyrus fragment containing, in a Coptic translation, phrases from a presumed dialog by Jesus with his disciples about a female figure, Mary, whom he refers to as 'my wife' (in Coptic,
ta-hime, a rare form for
ta-ahime, which in Coptic means 'woman' generically or 'wife').
Nothing strange for a scientific congress. But in this case, the very immediate link between 'research' and journalism - which has little use for the long periods of time during which serious scientific debates must be pursued - was already apparent even before the congress, since the news published in American newspapers on the same day was based largely on an interview King had given before leaving for Rome.
And while the media, with more or less sensationalistic tones. concentrated on the overall outline of the 'discovery' (stirring up a sudden interest in the congress on Coptic studies), King and Harvard's website posted the multi-page draft of the article she wrote, with the collaboration of younger student colleagues, about this business-card sized papyrus fragment and its contents.
King's paper will not be part of the Congress acts (to be published by January 2015), but she had submitted it to the
Harvard Theological Review, which planned to publish it in January 2013, without undergoing mandatory peer review.
Thus the article was presented in Rome anointed with all the chrisms of 'scientificity and objectivity'. But that would have been expected of King, who is a renowned researcher of Gnosticism and related questions about early Christianity.
[No matter how 'momentous' the conclusion might be to any study - and this one was not, by King's own admission - it cannot be exempt from following minimal standards including authentication of the source material(s) and a review by the scholar's scientific peers who can spot problem areas and raise pertinent questions that must be addressed before the study can be published!]
Her fundamental conclusions are as follows:
1. The papyrus scrap is an ancient fragment dating back to the 4th century AD.
2. The Greek text that was the basis for the Coptic translation is even older, perhaps written around the second century.
3. It testifies to the existence of circles in which the marital status of Jesus was disputed.
"Affirmations about the marital status of Jesus were born for the first time a century after his death, in the context of intra-Christian controversies on sexuality, matrimony, and discipleship," King writes.
I must say beforehand that I have reservations about this point in King's arguments. More than that, I also think that her conjecture played into and fed the journalistic treatment of her 'finding', in that they transformed expressions of intimacy and spiritual consubstantiality that are habitual in Gostic writings when describing the relationship between the Lord and his disciples, into the affirmation that Jesus was presumably married.
This presumed marital status, according to King - even if on the basis of this fragment, she grants it cannot certainly be accepted as historical fact - was part of the Christian debate in the second century over Jesus and sexuality.
In the face of a question like this one, which, unlike most of the papers presented during the Coptic studies congress, was not a document discovered during an archeological dig but something that turned up in the antiquarian circuit, numerous precautions need to be taken to establish the reliability of the fragment to exclude any possibility of counterfeit.
First of all, it must be studied in its physicality. From what kind of manuscript could it be attributed by paleographic criteria?
Second, what kind of a text is it, and in what literary context should one consider the purported statement made by Jesus about 'my wife'? What significance would the statement have in the specific context of when and how it was said?
It must be pointed out that both levels of research (into the papyrus itself, and into the text it contains) present numeroud problems. King admits that some of her colleagues have questioned the authenticity of the papyrus fragment, even if some papyrologists tend to be more favorable.
Many of the Coptologists present in Rome for the congress expressed doubts about the authenticity of the fragment after examining online photographs of it. But they did not rule out making a more detailed judgment once tbey had the conditions to study the question and to learn more about the fragment,
They have expressed initial reservations about the character of the fragment, from which they do not have enough to reconstruct the kind of manuscript it came from [Was it a literary codex? Or perhaps an amulet?], nor the characteristics of the writing itself, which is far different from most of the famous models from the fourth century and a vast number of later models. Some have said that the Coptic characters in the fragment were actually an inept reproduction of printed Copt
[which would have been invented long after the 4th century].
If, on the one hand, no one has said outright that the peculiarities of the fragment necessarily prove it is counterfeit (often, new reference points can emerge even from well-known typologies), on the other hand, it then becomes the task of the scientific community to determine whether any 'original features' noted are of ancient or modern provenance.
]
In other words, one must note the specific nature of this fragment, which seems remote from known models, as for inatance, the Nag Hammadi codes. But the fragment also differs considerably from the codices indicated by King as terms of comparison.
This could channel further investigation into two different directions which will obviously influence the judgment one will make about the text. In other words, the fragment could be a modern counterfeit, in which case any further investigation would be meaningless.
Or the document it comes from could have been written by circles who did not intend to leave a literary text but were merely producing an internal document as various schools of 'magic' used to do in late antiquity. They could have used well-known texts, predominantly of a Gnostic character, to create new texts which they felt to be more effective, in the same way that some of their colleagues constructed new texts by re-assembling various Gospel texts. If that was the case, the meaning of the fragment itself would change drastically.
But let us consider the text, which is presented as a dialog between Jesus, his disciples and a woman. The context is known to those who are familiar with apocryphal literature or the so-called dialogs of Resurrection.
We can find the most pertinent parallelisms in the Pistis Sophia, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Phillip, as King herself points out.
Women are presented as the disciples who were mostready to recognize a spiritual kinship with the Savior, and one of them, Mary Magdalene, a favorite Gnostic figure, is called the 'consort' of Jesus. In the Gospel of Philip, the Greek word
koinonos and the Coptic word
hôtre are used, which cover the entire semantic spectrum from 'companion' to 'spouse'.]
This 'new' fragment appears to be in consonance with those texts - and would even seem to presuppose them when Jesus is quoted as saying [at least, in the partial lines that survive], "My wife...she will be capable of being my disciple".
But one must be clear about the broad significance of these expressions. King sees them not as proof that the historical Jesus was married, but as part of an attempt to establish a positive view of Christian/Gnostic marriage on the 'argument' of a marital link between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. And she claims that this fragment "allows us to see that, probably as early as the second century, some Christians already believed Jesus was married."
But that is not so. In both cases, the expressions are altogether metaphorical, symbolizing the spiritual consubstantiality between Jesus and his women disciples, which finds ample evidence in Biblical literature and in early Christian tradition.
The true problem, however, is that of verifying whether the celibacy of Jesus was ever in doubt or had ever been an object of debate in primitive Christian tradition, including the Gnostic.
The first eyewitness accounts of Jesus say nothing about his being married, even when they speak of Mary Magdalene. And even if in the second century, the pagan philosopher Celsus, in his radical critique of Christianity (as reported fragmentarily by Origen), records the infamous gossip about the mother of Jesus and her supposed extramarital relationships, nothing is even hinted about the supposed marital status of Jesus.
I believe that such a 'silence', within and outside Christian tradition, is much more significant than a literal interpretation of the phrases found in the fragment, which I think must be understood only in a totally symbolic way.
The most authoritative and persuasive - as well as scrupulously scholarly but easy to follow - rejection of King's 'fragment' that I have seen so far calls it a fake 'Gospel fragment' composed by a modern writer who is not a native speaker of Copt. The critique was written by Francis Watson, professor of New Testament exegesis at the University of Durham (UK)
markgoodacre.org/Watson.pdf
who first posted the rejoinder on Sept. 20 and updated it on Sept. 26. His main argument is that "The text has been constructed out of
small pieces – words or phrases – culled from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (GTh), especially Sayings 30, 45, 101 and 114, and set in new contexts. This is most probably the compositional procedure of a modern author who is not a native speaker of Coptic."
He then proceeds to "a line-by-line comparison of GJW [Gospel of Jesus's Wife] with GTh [Gospel of Thomas]" to prove his point. Fortunately, there are only 8 lines to compare, but his demonstration in 8 short pages is unequivocal.
In the end, he concludes:
The eight lines of GJW recto [front side of the fragment] are derived from the Coptic GTh, virtually in their entirety, making dependence certain – a highly unusual form of dependence on words more than sense. The compiler has used a “collage” or “patchwork” compositional technique, and this level of dependence on extant pieces of Coptic text is more plausibly attributed to a modern author, with limited facility in Coptic, than to an ancient one.
Indeed, the GJW fragment may be designedly incomplete, its lacunae built into it from the outset. It does not seem possible to fill these lacunae with GTh material contiguous to the fragments cited. The impression of modernity is reinforced by the case in line 1 of dependence on the line-division of the one surviving Coptic manuscript, easily accessible in modern printed editions.
Unless this impression of modernity is countered by further investigations and fresh considerations, it seems unlikely that GJW will establish itself as a “genuine” product of early gospel writing.
Even if GJW were to be accepted as a 4th century Coptic text, Dr King’s claim that it derives from a Greek original from the 2nd century would be impossible to sustain, along with her attempt to reconstruct an original historical context for it.
Where a text is so manifestly dependent on another text in translation, it makes no sense to postulate dependence on an earlier original. In my view, however, a 4th century Coptic origin is equally unlikely.
In a post-script, Watson compares the GJW with the 'Secret Gospel of Mark', on which he did an earlier study, definitively showing it was fabricated from pieces of apocryphal text by its alleged discoverer, who, interestingly, describes a Jesus cavorting with young men at night, in contrast to the heterosexual Jesus purported to be disclosed in King's GJW.[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/09/2012 10:42]