The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus (The Smithsonian)

[struggle4progress]

According to a top religion scholar, this 1,600-year-old text fragment suggests that some early Christians believed Jesus was married—possibly to Mary Magdalene
By Ariel Sabar
Smithsonian.com, September 18, 2012

... The fragment was a shade smaller than an ATM card, honey-hued and densely inked on both sides with faded black script. The writing, King told me, was in the ancient Egyptian language of Coptic, into which many early Christian texts were translated in the third and fourth centuries, when Alexandria vied with Rome as an incubator of Christian thought ...

Whatever the truth of Jesus and Magdalene’s relationship, Pope Gregory the Great, in a series of homilies in 591, asserted that Magdalene was in fact both the unnamed sinful woman in Luke who anoints Jesus’ feet and an unnamed adulteress in John whose stoning Jesus forestalls. The conflation simultaneously diminished Magdalene and set the stage for 1,400 years of portrayals of her as a repentant whore, whose impurity stood in tidy contrast to the virginal Madonna ...

The collector knew nothing about the fragment’s discovery. It was part of a batch of Greek and Coptic papyri that he said he had purchased in the late 1990s from one H. U. Laukamp, of Berlin ...

For legal purposes, however, the 1982 date of the correspondence was crucial, though it — along with the fact that Laukamp, Fecht and Munro were all dead — may well strike critics as suspiciously convenient. The next year, Egypt would revise its antiquities law to declare that all discoveries after 1983 were the unequivocal property of the Egyptian government ...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Inside-Story-of-the-Controversial-New-Text-About-Jesus-170177076.html?c=y&page=4





http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Inside-Story-of-the-Controversial-New-Text-About-Jesus-170177076.html

[pinto]

1. from the NY Times -

A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus' Wife
Laurie Goodstein
September 18, 2012

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …'”

The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.”

The finding is being made public in Rome on Tuesday at an international meeting of Coptic scholars by the historian Karen L. King, who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity.

The provenance of the papyrus fragment is a mystery, and its owner has asked to remain anonymous. Until Tuesday, Dr. King had shown the fragment to only a small circle of experts in papyrology and Coptic linguistics, who concluded that it is most likely not a forgery. But she and her collaborators say they are eager for more scholars to weigh in and perhaps upend their conclusions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/historian-says-piece-of-papyrus-refers-to-jesus-wife.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www

[Angry Dragon]

2. It carries as much if not more weight than Paul's writings

The Church is based on Paul who never met Jesus

[nichomachus]

7. Depends on which Paul you're talking about

The authentic writings of the original Paul, who was a Gnostic or the later forgeries ascribed to Paul. They are quire different.

[Angry Dragon]

8. I am talking about the Paul of the Bible.

The one they also called Saul.

The one that the Catholic Church loves to quote.

[okasha]

12. There are at least two Pauls of the Bible.

N/T

[Angry Dragon]

14. Not aware of more than one

could you point them out??

[okasha]

19. Sure.

There's the real Paul, who actually wrote about five of the epistles attributed to "Paul," and there's whoever wrote the others and slapped Paul's name on them. The latter may in fact be more than one person, identity or identities yet unknown..

[Angry Dragon]

21. It is my understanding that none of the books have a title nor an author

Both were assigned by the Catholic Church
and the order was also determined by the church

[HockeyMom]

3. This is not the first Coptic text

if I remember correctly. Others said that Jesus had younger siblings, and that Jesus had a daughter (by Magdalene?) who was taken away by her mother to another country and grew up to have children of her own.

No surprise that Rome, and other Christian sects, would dismiss, and cover up, these findings.

[pinto]

5. fwiw, this group's meeting includes a Vatican Library event.

"The Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies will take place in Rome from Monday 17 to Saturday 22 September 2012. The Congress will be hosted at first at Sapienza University of Rome (Monday, opening session), then, from Tuesday to Thursday, in the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, and finally, on Friday, in the Vatican Library, near Saint Peter's Basilica."

http://www.copticcongress2012.uniroma1.it/

I'm not real familiar with Coptic history, but cover up seems a stretch in this instance.

[cleanhippie]

4. 1600 years old? Hundreds of years after the alleged existence of Jesus?

Just how accurate can something like that really be?

[okasha]

6. How accurate can Johansen's and Leakey's arguments for the evolution of H. sap. be

considering that they are being advanced millions of years after said evolution occurred?

Same answer in both cases--it's as accurate as evidence shows it to be. In this case, there is a strong Gnostic tradition that Jesus and Mary M. were more than just good friends, and this fragment is in keeping with them. Now, whether that tradition represents history, and certain passages in the gospels seem to hint in this direction, or whether it does not, depends as Dr. King herself says on further investigation.

[cleanhippie]

13. Gnostic tradition is in no way, shape, or form, equivalent to the empirical evidence that supports

Evolution. How can we have an honest conversation if we keep making these blatantly false equivalencies?

[okasha]

18. I didn't say it was. I was just pointing out the absurdity

of your basing accuracy on the nearness of an account to its occurrence. To take an example you'll love because it casts the LDS Church in a bad light, the real story of what happened at the Moutain Meadows massacre has only come to light in the last few decades. One of the archaeologists who worked the site is a personal friend and has first hand knowledge of the findings.

[cleanhippie]

20. While dubious, your example is premised on emprical evidence.

And as we already know, empirical evidence is not even remotely related to gnostic tradition.

[trotsky]

23. Do you know what DNA is?

Do you know what analyzing DNA can tell us about the evolution of a species?

[Angry Dragon]

9. The Bible is even older .............

[okasha]

11. In its Catholic form, not by much.

In its Protestant form, much younger.

[struggle4progress]

10. I'm not sure I understand your question. The people who study such artefacts

work, with whatever they actually have, to see what they might learn from what they have. It's too bad the provenance is lost: that collectors do damage by removing such materials from context just seems, unfortunately, to be one of the realities of research involving antiquities

[cleanhippie]

15. I'm not questioning it's age, just it's historical accuracy.

Meaning that there is little to no extra-scriptural evidence to support any of the assertions these texts make.

[struggle4progress]

16. "... King makes no claim for its usefulness as biography ..."

[cleanhippie]

17. That makes me feel better. And I was speaking toward a broader point.

Which still stands.

Good catch, thanks.

[moobu2]

22. When these ancient texts mention Jesus in relation to being married, like this one does,

Last edited Wed Sep 19, 2012, 04:25 PM - Edit history (1)

they aren't ever talking about marriage in a literal sense. If you know anything about Christianity you've heard the term "Bride Of Christ" right?, I heard the term all my life. In the Bible, Jesus is referred to as a bridegroom numerous times and there's a bride mentioned as well. When you read these Bible verses in context it's obvious that it was all symbolism and never literal. The bride mentioned in the Bible is usually thought of as being the church itself, though there are other interpretations that can be read about at the link I posted, but virtually no one say's that the Bible claims Jesus was literally married to another literal person.

I believe that the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is an astrological allegory drawn from the fact that one of the fishes in the constellation Pisces touches the constellation Andromeda (the chained woman). Mary Magdalene is the personification of Andromeda here. The idea that they were married comes from the fact that they are forever linked together.

Here's a diagram showing the fish (Jesus) in Pisces touching the side of andromeda (Mary Magdalene). These weren't even real people much less were they really married.