Did Jesus Hide A Wife?

In September 2012 the world learned of a newly-rediscovered “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” papyrus fragment, which preserved evidence of an early Christian movement that celebrated a married Jesus.  Press releases had been prepared by dedicated public relations experts from Harvard University.  Several media outlets had signed exclusive deals and had prepared articles and videos in advance.  The Smithsonian hoped to scoop the discovery with a documentary, which was well-underway at the time of the announcement at an academic convention in Rome … just outside the Vatican.  This new evidence offered support to what Dan Brown’s Da Vince Code cited as “the greatest cover-up in human history”:

“Not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father. My dear, Mary Magdalene was the Holy Vessel. She was the chalice that bore the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ. She was the womb that bore the lineage, and the vine from which the sacred fruit sprang forth!” (Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, 249.)

According to some, the Roman Catholic Church would need to reconsider priestly celibacy.  The new gospel seemed to support a twentieth-century hypothesis that one version of Christianity suppressed its rivals under the emperor Constantine in the fourth century, effectively rewriting the history books to support their own claims and excluding dozens of other early scriptures from the canon.  Harvard. Princeton. The New York Times. The Boston Globe.  The Smithsonian.  This thing was real and presented Jesus describing his wife:
… My mother she gave to me l[ife]…
… The disciples said to Jesus…
…denies.  Mary is [not] worthy of it…
…Jesus said to them, “My wife”…
…she will not be able to be a disciple to me and…
…Let a man the which bad dasdf dslkf…
…I myself am with her concerning …
…an image… (Gospel of Jesus’s Wife papyrus, recto)

Well, maybe not that real.  The specialists in papyrus and parchment manuscripts of Coptic at the conference expressed immediate concerns about the ink, the writing instrument, and the handwriting, which all had the experience of a childish forgery.  Within about a month, internet sleuths proved that the fragment’s text had been borrowed from an online PDF of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. Not willing to let facts impede a fabulous story, team Harvard endured conscripting a small team of scientists with no prior experience with papyri to authenticate the fragment.

Just weeks before Easter, a Harvard Divinity School webpage in conjunction with a dedicated volume of the Harvard Theological Review authenticated the manuscript.  In conjunction with Christianity’s most sacred holiday, the Smithsonian Channel announced the airing of the documentary.  Although the papyrus had already been proven a forgery beyond any shadow of a doubt, a photo from the scientific evidence presented another forgery from the collection.  The same forgery had copied this text from another online PDF of the Lycopolitan Coptic Gospel of John using the same writing instrument and ink.

One struggles to determine when the story officially became absurd.  The owner of the fragment was a professional pornographer.  The editor of the Harvard journal ignored specialist scholars from the beginning who specifically described the telltale signs of forgery.  In an academic world where friendships mean jobs, few had explicitly stated their concerns.  Liberal Christians and non-Christians ironically enacted their own stereotype of conservative Christianity, subverting evidence to their ideological agenda.

Although Christians should always entertain reasonable arguments, the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife saga demonstrates the bias of the media and even professional academics as they publicly discuss Christianity.  Time and again, critics have ridiculed the orthodox faith as indefensible or somehow out of the cultural vogue, yet faithful believers across the centuries have found the biblical accounts intellectually defensible and spiritually powerful.