12 ms·

The contested papyrus “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”

109 points by panic 10y ago

justifier 10y ago
> Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesus’s being married. yeah, because the church tried to suppress the gospels: thomas, mary, judas, and 30+ others; that contained contrarian views to their goals one goal being the subordinate status of women the gospel of mary sits blatantly in the face christian doctrine: Chapter 9(o) 1) When Mary had said this, she fell silent, since it was to this point that the Savior had spoken with her. 2) But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, Say what you wish to say about what she has said. I at least do not believe that the Savior said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas. 3) Peter answered and spoke concerning these same things. 4) He questioned them about the Savior: Did He really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did He prefer her to us? 5) Then Mary wept and said to Peter, My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I have thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am lying about the Savior? 6) Levi answered and said to Peter, Peter you have always been hot tempered. 7) Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. 8) But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. 9) That is why He loved her more than us. Rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect Man, and separate as He commanded us and preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Savior said. 10) And when they heard this they began to go forth to proclaim and to preach. (o) http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelmary.html http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelmary.html
- hyperpape 10y ago
  > Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesus’s being married. yeah, because the church tried to smother the gospels: thomas, mary, judas, and 30+ others; that contained contrarian views to their goals That's not really relevant here. There are a tremendous number of records of beliefs/gospels which the modern church considers heretical, including ones which pertain to the status of women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Paul_and_Thecla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Paul_and_Thecla The claim is not "this isn't church doctrine", it's "there's no other historical record of people telling this story". It would be surprising, though not strictly impossible, for this to have been a major gospel in ancient history without some record of it being found by now.
  - justifier 10y ago
    > it's "there's no other historical record of people telling this story". right, that is the suppression theory that i am saying i agree with > The claim is not "this isn't church doctrine" i am making this claim.. how could you keep women from having seats of power in your religion if the guy you claim the whole thing is based on believed 'the other sex' to be 'worthy' of both hearing the truth and speaking it?
    - hyperpape 10y ago
      The point is that the church said many things were heretical and tried to suppress those beliefs. And we know about it, because we have records of: 1) the church saying "that guy over there is a heretic" 2) the writings of the heretic So what you're saying is that in this one case, the Church was able to completely stamp out a widespread belief to the point that we have no reference to people believing it, even though it wasn't able to do so in other cases that it also deemed heretical? That seems implausible. P.S. "> Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesus’s being married." That is what I referred to as "the claim".
  - carterehsmith 10y ago
    Your post is super confusing and contradicts itself. 1) "There are a tremendous number of records of beliefs/gospels which the modern church considers heretical, including ones which pertain to the status of women" 2) "there's no other historical record of people telling this story" So which one is it? Is there a "tremendous number" of them, or is there "no other historical record"? You can't have both. Either there is, or there is not.
    - hyperpape 10y ago
      "This story" meant the story that Jesus was married. Other apocryphal gospels say things about women that sometimes contradict the orthodox opinion, but they do not say that Jesus was married. To reiterate what I am saying: there are plenty of historical records of the church attacking heresies in the ancient world, supported by both the writings of the church fathers and the writings of the heretics themselves. What this article points out is that we do not have any other ancient writings that allude to anyone believing that Jesus was married. It is, as far as we can tell, not something that was ever in dispute.
- droithomme 10y ago
  Gospel of Philip (63:33-36) and Gospel of Mary (17:10-18:21) both, though not canonical, are ancient manuscripts that are supposed by some to suggest an intimate relationship.
adwf 10y ago
If you think about it logically for the era, it's incredibly unlikely that Jesus was actually unmarried. The typical age for marriage all the way up until the 20th century was somewhere between puberty and 20. Jesus didn't start his ministry until he was 30. It's really very possible that he was married, maybe even a widower. The fact that no gospel mentions it, could be the exact same reason women get ignored throughout the rest of history.
- forkandwait 10y ago
  I agree that Jesus was probably married... .. But your statement about the age at marriage is wrong, at least for Western Europe since about 1400, which has had late marriage and uniquely high proportions never married. If you haven't fact checked your demography assumptions, you are probably wrong. The story that Jesus was unmarried was probably promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church, with it's uniquely weird attachment to celibacy. Which, of course, has affected Western European demography in many complicated ways.
  - adwf 10y ago
    Good thing Jesus wasn't in Western Europe ;) Good point though, upvote nonetheless.
  - michaelsbradley 10y ago
    Matthew 19:12 is not a particularly disputed verse when comparing ancient manuscripts and fragments. "For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it." This teaching of Jesus forms the basis of what later Christian writers would expound upon as the "evangelical counsel of chastity", and it is unlikely the master would have counseled the disciple to the embrace of something he himself did not embrace. Would it have been counter-cultural to the Jewish audience hearing Jesus preach those words? Most definitely.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > The story that Jesus was unmarried was probably promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church, with it's uniquely weird attachment to celibacy. The discipline of clerical celibacy in the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church (at least one non-Latin Rite Church in union with Rome existed at the time, and there are more now) was a explicitly a adopted in response to repeated scandal, not theological necessity (which is why it is a discipline of the Latin Rite and not a universal law of the Church.) The widespread Christian acceptance of the belief that Jesus was never married long predates this.
gnaritas 10y ago
Religion isn't a search for truth, it's a search for answers, even bad ones. If they wanted truth, there wouldn't be any religion.
- dang 10y ago
  Litigating the truth-or-falsehood-of-all-religion is a classic (the classic) religious flamewar topic, and as you know that is not allowed here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11918569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11918569 and marked it off-topic.
sireat 10y ago
This was a great piece of investigative reporting. If you register an appropriate domain 3 weeks before the news go public, that is very suspicious indeed.
- vintermann 10y ago
  Yeah, never mind the theology, this story gives a scary view of how an experienced scammer/conman can work. The part at the end, where he implicitly admits that he's been found out, but tries to tempt the journalist with getting in on the scam -- wow.
AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
King has been particularly interested in noncanonical, or Gnostic, texts that assign Mary Magdalene a prominent role as Jesus’s confidante and disciple. Blargh. Not every apocryphal text is Gnostic. Gnosticism was just one of many "flavors" that developed in Christianity's infancy.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
  I think that was just sloppy reporting, not King's quote.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    It looks like sloppy editing. The following have four slightly different meanings: > interested in noncanonical Gnostic texts > interested in noncanonical, Gnostic texts > interested in noncanonical or Gnostic texts > interested in noncanonical, or Gnostic, texts
    - drewbug 10y ago
      What's the difference between the first two?
      - chimeracoder 10y ago
        It's pretty pedantic, and this is not true in all dialects and forms of English[0] - as evidenced by the fact that you have at least three other comments replying with different, conflicting answers to this question! In any case, the comma basically indicates that the two words serve the 'same function', and that either one could be removed (along with the comma) while leaving the parsed structure of the sentence intact. That doesn't exactly mean that the meaning would be intact (you're removing a word, after all), but the way that you'd parse the rest of the sentence must remain identical. At a practical level, this means that 'noncanonical Gnostic texts' translates to 'Gnostic texts which are also noncanonical'. 'noncanonical, Gnostic texts' means more or less the same thing, but also implies that there is a connection between the fact that they are noncanonical and the fact that they are Gnostic. This may be because the two are outright synonyms, or simply because they are often connected. For example: > heavy, red rocks > heavy red rocks It'd be weird to say 'heavy, red rocks', unless in context you had some reason to connect those two (such as those being identical sets, if all red rocks are heavy)[1]. Instead, you'd say that the red rocks are heavy - in other words, "the (heavy (red rocks))". Also, note what I did with the opening paragraph of this response. 'different, conflicting answers' (because the answers are different, and they are conflicting, and the way I am using the word 'different' is connected to the fact that they are (partly) 'conflicting')[2]. [0] ie, this is strictly limited to the stylistic rules of journals of record, such as the New York Times, and not necessarily applicable to the way those same writers/editors would write an email. Curiously, I believe this is true both in American English and in formal British English. [1] 'The machine picks up all the heavy, red rocks and leaves behind the light, blue rocks' vs. 'The machine picks up all the heavy red rocks and leaves behind all the light red rocks and the blue rocks (whether they are heavy or light)'. [2] Though the response which directly contradicted mine has since been deleted, but, uh, ignore that fact.
ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
It's fascinating, but dates from hundreds of years after Christ and falls nicely in the genre of Apocryphal Gospels, of which some indeed strike modern fancies as bizarre.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Also, as the article points out towards the end the whole story seems extremely fishy.
- nzealand 10y ago
  Where do you draw the line? The canonical gospel fragments also date from hundreds of years after Christ, and some of the later fragments seem also increasingly bizarre.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    I think your data is out of date. I quick glance at Wikipedia says that there are at least two copies from the 2nd century, and 38 from the 3rd or earlier. It also says, "The New Testament books appear to have been completed within the 1st century." This is on the basis of comparing manuscripts and tracking changes (textual criticism).
    - nzealand 10y ago
      I was deliberately vague, because it has been a while since I read about this, and because nothing is entirely certain. The earliest fragments are tiny e.g. P52 and they don't have a precise date. There is also heated debate about when the gospels were written, the order in which they were written in, and if they were added to at a later date.
      - lotharbot 10y ago
        Generally speaking, the debate among scholars isn't "heated", and they're not very far apart in their conclusions. For example, the Gospel of John is usually dated to within 90-110 AD for authorship. That's not a wide range. Luke is usually dated to 80-90 AD but a few scholars argue a date as late as 110 AD. That's about as extreme as the disagreement gets among serious scholars discussing canonical writings. There also aren't substantial scholarly disagreements about the gospels being added to or modified -- there are passages that are widely agreed upon as additions, which will be marked in basically any Bible from the last 5 decades or so. It's a common lay theory that there were major rewrites in the 4th century (Constantine), but I'm not aware of any serious scholars of textual criticism who believe it, because the manuscript evidence we have is actually strong in establishing tight authorship dates and clear indications as to what has and hasn't been edited. The actual disputes are over subtleties, like Matthew 5:22 talking about being angry with a brother [without cause]. The phrase in brackets is in most manuscripts but missing from many of the oldest well-preserved manuscripts, and there is disagreement over whether it was added as a helpful clarification or accidentally skipped because it starts with the same letter as the next word (in textual criticism, skipping a word in this way is called "homoioarcton". This is a well-established field with its own technical vocabulary.) My comments in other subthreads detail why I don't treat the gospels of Judas or Mary as significant -- based on their later authorship dates, clear non-Jewishness in style and substance, and even their lack of names of people and places pointing toward them being written by non-eyewitnesses.
tbrooks 10y ago
This belongs on HN why?
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  Hey, if you don't love watching hardcore LARPers arguing over cannon vs fanfic, that's your biz, but the rest of us nerds live for this stuff.
- brudgers 10y ago
  Probably some people find it intellectually interesting or a story unlikely to show up in major media. None of which means it's a going to appeal to everyone before gravity pulls it to oblivion.
- dang 10y ago
  Anything intellectually interesting belongs on HN. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - erichocean 10y ago
    At best, that standard is applied VERY selectively. Yesterday, an article by an Ars Technica founder about a technology that few people on HN have any experience with described an "open-source, modular weapons platform"—the AR-15 rifle—in a way that techies can understand.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11912665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11912665 Guess what? It was [flagged]. This was my response to that article being flagged (on that thread): > This article is absolutely appropriate for HN, had an active, engaged, and non-hostile comment section, and SHOULD NOT have been banned/flagged as inappropriate. We are all worse off because it was. > I strongly suspect that those hitting the "flag" button did so on ideological grounds, in order to shut down discussion they did not approve of.
    - dang 10y ago
      There's a long tradition on HN of users flagging stories on highly politicized topics, because such discussions typically become ideological and uncivil, two qualities that we seek to avoid in discussion here. That's what happened to that AR-15 story: [flagged] means users flagged it. We've learned that such flags are an important community signal and it's a bad idea to override them unless there's a clear reason to. I didn't see a clear reason, because (a) the article was deliberately provocative, (b) its timing was particularly provocative, to the point of trolling, and (c) the discussion (though not as bad as it could have been) was close to flames, and likely would have become a full-out war if we had intervened to turn off the flags. Flags are a pressure valve for the functioning of the site. On HN, a situation like that is complicated and involves multiple factors other than intellectual curiosity, which indeed are stronger than intellectual curiosity and tend to drown it out. In your description of the article above you highlight only the intellectual aspect (clear description of a little-understood technology) and omit the problematic ones, but the latter nearly always overpower the former. By contrast, stories about contested 8th century papyri are clearly on-topic and not particularly likely to violate the values of the site (marginal religious skirmishes aside). If you were particularly interested in the AR-15 story, I can understand the frustration of seeing others flag it. Most HN users have the same frustration, but we all have it about different things. Other people complained yesterday that the AR-15 story was (in their opinion) being featured on HN while the latest post about Jacob Appelbaum was (in their opinion) being suppressed. In fact it was the same factor—user flags—working the same way in both cases, and the application of HN's standards wasn't selective. It just seemed like it was, because we notice it more in any case we dislike.
tumbas 10y ago
it is fake!!! free masons might spread this crap because they are scared of my blog medium.com/@CyberBuyan
maranatha84 10y ago
@trbooks"This belongs on HN why?" Exactly! It is a bit arduous to comprehend why HN is so eager to distribute such news which are a bit irritating for believer members like me. It is sad that it is always one sided.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  Did you read the article, because the author is pretty much calling the whole thing a forgery.
- virmundi 10y ago
  I have no idea why it's here except for an interesting topic with research involved. As to it being irritating to believers, I don't understand why. Jesus was a rabbi. In this story he married a believer. Rabbis traditionally married devout women. But what do I know? I'm just a believer that is also a de-aproned freemasons currently researching the rosicrucians.
  - lotharbot 10y ago
    > "As to it being irritating to believers, I don't understand why." Two key ideas: 1) Jesus is "married to" the church, as a whole, in traditional Christian doctrine. Being married to a woman would slightly complicate that theory. 2) Theories about Jesus marrying some particular woman are usually not only about that, but come with other baggage attached -- like accusations of suppression of knowledge, or suggested massive rewrites of Christian ideas. And they're typically based on a lot of speculation tied to things written centuries after the fact, not based on careful historical study.
- ksenzee 10y ago
  If you actually read the article, instead of assuming you know what's in it, you'll probably find you agree with its conclusions. When you're afraid to read things you think will assault your beliefs, you miss out on a lot of truth.
openasocket 10y ago
The article said the papyrus is from the 8th century, which is rather recent compared to other apocryphal texts, I think. I thought the various Churches had consolidated around the canonical bible centuries before then? If this isn't some kind of hoax (very big if), I'd be curious to know who was writing/copying what would have been considered very heretical at the time.
- jemfinch 10y ago
  The canon of the new testament was effectively decided for the western church (at least) at the regional councils of Rome, Hippo, and Carthage in the late fourth century. I don't know anything about this particular text, but the canon had been established for centuries by this point. (Yes, I know it wasn't officially decided in an ecumenical council until Trent in 1545, but those three councils effectively settled the question, given the importance of the regions involved.)
  - wtbob 10y ago
    > Yes, I know it wasn't officially decided in an ecumenical council until Trent in 1545 Trent was hardly ecumenical, given that the Eastern half of the œkumene wasn't present:-)
    - jemfinch 10y ago
      Ok, ecumenicalish :-P
- lotharbot 10y ago
  > "I thought the various Churches had consolidated around the canonical bible centuries before then?" The Bible canon was at least semi-established in around the 2nd century, and by the end of the 4th century the canon was very stable. There were still ongoing disagreements between branches of the church, but never over whether a "new" writing should be included, always over writings from the first or possibly early second centuries, or older Jewish writings. An 8th century writing would not have warranted much attention. IMO the non-canonical "gospels" from after ~150 AD are uninteresting. The interesting stuff, outside of the canon, are the really old writings ( http://earlychristianwritings.com/ http://earlychristianwritings.com/ ) and the commentary/teachings of early church leaders (http://www.ccel.org/fathers.html http://www.ccel.org/fathers.html ).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
33degrees 10y ago
Worth noting that, after reading the article, the researcher now thinks the papyrus is probably a fake: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/karen-king-responds-to-the-unbelievable-tale-of-jesus-wife/487484/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/karen-ki...
- cpncrunch 10y ago
  More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Jesus%27_Wife https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Jesus%27_Wife It certainly sounds like it's a fake.
honua 10y ago
Who cares about his wife if we still can't get what he looked like right. He wasn't European.. let's stop drawing him that way.
- honua 10y ago
  White racists, the down vote button is right there for your clicking.
  - dang 10y ago
    This comment breaks the HN guidelines by calling names and by baiting others into downvoting. Please (re)-read and follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- lotharbot 10y ago
  The failure of mostly renaissance-era artists to properly represent Jesus' ethnicity in no way reflects on the validity of this particular "contested" manuscript. It is kind of goofy and likely contributes to the conflation of American nationalism and Christianity, but this isn't really the thread for it.
  - honua 10y ago
    Right, but the cover image of the manuscript uses of those style of images. Kind of goofy is a strange way to say racist.
akkartik 10y ago
The repeated mentions of Da Vinci Code notwithstanding, the book this most reminded me of was a trashy novel from an earlier generation: https://www.amazon.com/Word-Novel-Irving-Wallace/dp/0671211536 https://www.amazon.com/Word-Novel-Irving-Wallace/dp/06712115...
riffraff 10y ago
> Jesus’s bachelorhood helps form the basis for priestly celibacy, and his all-male cast of apostles has long been cited to justify limits on women’s religious leadership is the second part (male apostles -> no female priests) an actual tenet of christian churches? AFAIR in the roman catholic tradition the reason for male-only priesthood had to do with some "fatherly" attributes that a priest must have, which is also why gay priests are not allowed. And I know that some protestant churches allow women priests so I am curious about _who_ cites the male apostles thingy.
- michaelsbradley 10y ago
  Quick and authoritative summary of the Catholic position: Ordinatio sacerdotalis, 22 May 1994, Pope John Paull II https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_19940522_ordinatio-sacerdotalis.html https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/...
  - riffraff 10y ago
    thanks!
- toolslive 10y ago
  Why not "follow the money" ? Celibate priests have no heirs, so the legacy goes to the Catholic Church. Imagine more than a millenium of accumulated wealth. This also nicely aligns with the tradition that important/rich families were encouraged to let 1 member of the family take up a position in the Church.
aruggirello 10y ago
> On August 26, 2012—more than three weeks before King announced her discovery to the world, when only her inner circle knew of the papyrus and her name for it—Walter Fritz registered the domain name www.gospelofjesuswife.com. This. He should've registered www.howtoforge.com too, just in case :-)
teekert 10y ago
If you are interested in this kind of thing, you will like this book: http://www.asecretoftheuniverse.com/ http://www.asecretoftheuniverse.com/ It goes into the existence of Jesus but through the story of a pilot with an interest in philosophy. The author released the entire audio book as a podcast but is was only available for a limited time. I listened to it as it came out. Very nice, the book, although it is fiction contains real existing characters and a lot of foot notes to build arguments. I will not spoil the end, but the theory it builds is quite interesting.
huxley 10y ago
Reminded me quite a bit of the stories in Orson Welles' "F is for Fake" (1973)

109 points by panic 10y ago

> Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesus’s being married. yeah, because the church tried to suppress the gospels: thomas, mary, judas, and 30+ others; that contained contrarian views to their goals one goal being the subordinate status of women the gospel of mary sits blatantly in the face christian doctrine: Chapter 9(o) 1) When Mary had said this, she fell silent, since it was to this point that the Savior had spoken with her. 2) But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, Say what you wish to say about what she has said. I at least do not believe that the Savior said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas. 3) Peter answered and spoke concerning these same things. 4) He questioned them about the Savior: Did He really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did He prefer her to us? 5) Then Mary wept and said to Peter, My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I have thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am lying about the Savior? 6) Levi answered and said to Peter, Peter you have always been hot tempered. 7) Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. 8) But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. 9) That is why He loved her more than us. Rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect Man, and separate as He commanded us and preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Savior said. 10) And when they heard this they began to go forth to proclaim and to preach. (o) http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelmary.html http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelmary.html

hyperpape 10y ago
> Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesus’s being married. yeah, because the church tried to smother the gospels: thomas, mary, judas, and 30+ others; that contained contrarian views to their goals That's not really relevant here. There are a tremendous number of records of beliefs/gospels which the modern church considers heretical, including ones which pertain to the status of women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Paul_and_Thecla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Paul_and_Thecla The claim is not "this isn't church doctrine", it's "there's no other historical record of people telling this story". It would be surprising, though not strictly impossible, for this to have been a major gospel in ancient history without some record of it being found by now.
- justifier 10y ago
  > it's "there's no other historical record of people telling this story". right, that is the suppression theory that i am saying i agree with > The claim is not "this isn't church doctrine" i am making this claim.. how could you keep women from having seats of power in your religion if the guy you claim the whole thing is based on believed 'the other sex' to be 'worthy' of both hearing the truth and speaking it?
  - hyperpape 10y ago
    The point is that the church said many things were heretical and tried to suppress those beliefs. And we know about it, because we have records of: 1) the church saying "that guy over there is a heretic" 2) the writings of the heretic So what you're saying is that in this one case, the Church was able to completely stamp out a widespread belief to the point that we have no reference to people believing it, even though it wasn't able to do so in other cases that it also deemed heretical? That seems implausible. P.S. "> Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesus’s being married." That is what I referred to as "the claim".
- carterehsmith 10y ago
  Your post is super confusing and contradicts itself. 1) "There are a tremendous number of records of beliefs/gospels which the modern church considers heretical, including ones which pertain to the status of women" 2) "there's no other historical record of people telling this story" So which one is it? Is there a "tremendous number" of them, or is there "no other historical record"? You can't have both. Either there is, or there is not.
  - hyperpape 10y ago
    "This story" meant the story that Jesus was married. Other apocryphal gospels say things about women that sometimes contradict the orthodox opinion, but they do not say that Jesus was married. To reiterate what I am saying: there are plenty of historical records of the church attacking heresies in the ancient world, supported by both the writings of the church fathers and the writings of the heretics themselves. What this article points out is that we do not have any other ancient writings that allude to anyone believing that Jesus was married. It is, as far as we can tell, not something that was ever in dispute.
droithomme 10y ago
Gospel of Philip (63:33-36) and Gospel of Mary (17:10-18:21) both, though not canonical, are ancient manuscripts that are supposed by some to suggest an intimate relationship.

adwf 10y ago

If you think about it logically for the era, it's incredibly unlikely that Jesus was actually unmarried. The typical age for marriage all the way up until the 20th century was somewhere between puberty and 20. Jesus didn't start his ministry until he was 30. It's really very possible that he was married, maybe even a widower. The fact that no gospel mentions it, could be the exact same reason women get ignored throughout the rest of history.

forkandwait 10y ago
I agree that Jesus was probably married... .. But your statement about the age at marriage is wrong, at least for Western Europe since about 1400, which has had late marriage and uniquely high proportions never married. If you haven't fact checked your demography assumptions, you are probably wrong. The story that Jesus was unmarried was probably promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church, with it's uniquely weird attachment to celibacy. Which, of course, has affected Western European demography in many complicated ways.
- adwf 10y ago
  Good thing Jesus wasn't in Western Europe ;) Good point though, upvote nonetheless.
- michaelsbradley 10y ago
  Matthew 19:12 is not a particularly disputed verse when comparing ancient manuscripts and fragments. "For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it." This teaching of Jesus forms the basis of what later Christian writers would expound upon as the "evangelical counsel of chastity", and it is unlikely the master would have counseled the disciple to the embrace of something he himself did not embrace. Would it have been counter-cultural to the Jewish audience hearing Jesus preach those words? Most definitely.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > The story that Jesus was unmarried was probably promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church, with it's uniquely weird attachment to celibacy. The discipline of clerical celibacy in the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church (at least one non-Latin Rite Church in union with Rome existed at the time, and there are more now) was a explicitly a adopted in response to repeated scandal, not theological necessity (which is why it is a discipline of the Latin Rite and not a universal law of the Church.) The widespread Christian acceptance of the belief that Jesus was never married long predates this.

gnaritas 10y ago

Religion isn't a search for truth, it's a search for answers, even bad ones. If they wanted truth, there wouldn't be any religion.

dang 10y ago
Litigating the truth-or-falsehood-of-all-religion is a classic (the classic) religious flamewar topic, and as you know that is not allowed here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11918569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11918569 and marked it off-topic.

sireat 10y ago

This was a great piece of investigative reporting. If you register an appropriate domain 3 weeks before the news go public, that is very suspicious indeed.

vintermann 10y ago
Yeah, never mind the theology, this story gives a scary view of how an experienced scammer/conman can work. The part at the end, where he implicitly admits that he's been found out, but tries to tempt the journalist with getting in on the scam -- wow.

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago

King has been particularly interested in noncanonical, or Gnostic, texts that assign Mary Magdalene a prominent role as Jesus’s confidante and disciple. Blargh. Not every apocryphal text is Gnostic. Gnosticism was just one of many "flavors" that developed in Christianity's infancy.

ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
I think that was just sloppy reporting, not King's quote.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  It looks like sloppy editing. The following have four slightly different meanings: > interested in noncanonical Gnostic texts > interested in noncanonical, Gnostic texts > interested in noncanonical or Gnostic texts > interested in noncanonical, or Gnostic, texts
  - drewbug 10y ago
    What's the difference between the first two?
    - chimeracoder 10y ago
      It's pretty pedantic, and this is not true in all dialects and forms of English[0] - as evidenced by the fact that you have at least three other comments replying with different, conflicting answers to this question! In any case, the comma basically indicates that the two words serve the 'same function', and that either one could be removed (along with the comma) while leaving the parsed structure of the sentence intact. That doesn't exactly mean that the meaning would be intact (you're removing a word, after all), but the way that you'd parse the rest of the sentence must remain identical. At a practical level, this means that 'noncanonical Gnostic texts' translates to 'Gnostic texts which are also noncanonical'. 'noncanonical, Gnostic texts' means more or less the same thing, but also implies that there is a connection between the fact that they are noncanonical and the fact that they are Gnostic. This may be because the two are outright synonyms, or simply because they are often connected. For example: > heavy, red rocks > heavy red rocks It'd be weird to say 'heavy, red rocks', unless in context you had some reason to connect those two (such as those being identical sets, if all red rocks are heavy)[1]. Instead, you'd say that the red rocks are heavy - in other words, "the (heavy (red rocks))". Also, note what I did with the opening paragraph of this response. 'different, conflicting answers' (because the answers are different, and they are conflicting, and the way I am using the word 'different' is connected to the fact that they are (partly) 'conflicting')[2]. [0] ie, this is strictly limited to the stylistic rules of journals of record, such as the New York Times, and not necessarily applicable to the way those same writers/editors would write an email. Curiously, I believe this is true both in American English and in formal British English. [1] 'The machine picks up all the heavy, red rocks and leaves behind the light, blue rocks' vs. 'The machine picks up all the heavy red rocks and leaves behind all the light red rocks and the blue rocks (whether they are heavy or light)'. [2] Though the response which directly contradicted mine has since been deleted, but, uh, ignore that fact.

ZanyProgrammer 10y ago

It's fascinating, but dates from hundreds of years after Christ and falls nicely in the genre of Apocryphal Gospels, of which some indeed strike modern fancies as bizarre.

reitanqild 10y ago
Also, as the article points out towards the end the whole story seems extremely fishy.
nzealand 10y ago
Where do you draw the line? The canonical gospel fragments also date from hundreds of years after Christ, and some of the later fragments seem also increasingly bizarre.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  I think your data is out of date. I quick glance at Wikipedia says that there are at least two copies from the 2nd century, and 38 from the 3rd or earlier. It also says, "The New Testament books appear to have been completed within the 1st century." This is on the basis of comparing manuscripts and tracking changes (textual criticism).
  - nzealand 10y ago
    I was deliberately vague, because it has been a while since I read about this, and because nothing is entirely certain. The earliest fragments are tiny e.g. P52 and they don't have a precise date. There is also heated debate about when the gospels were written, the order in which they were written in, and if they were added to at a later date.
    - lotharbot 10y ago
      Generally speaking, the debate among scholars isn't "heated", and they're not very far apart in their conclusions. For example, the Gospel of John is usually dated to within 90-110 AD for authorship. That's not a wide range. Luke is usually dated to 80-90 AD but a few scholars argue a date as late as 110 AD. That's about as extreme as the disagreement gets among serious scholars discussing canonical writings. There also aren't substantial scholarly disagreements about the gospels being added to or modified -- there are passages that are widely agreed upon as additions, which will be marked in basically any Bible from the last 5 decades or so. It's a common lay theory that there were major rewrites in the 4th century (Constantine), but I'm not aware of any serious scholars of textual criticism who believe it, because the manuscript evidence we have is actually strong in establishing tight authorship dates and clear indications as to what has and hasn't been edited. The actual disputes are over subtleties, like Matthew 5:22 talking about being angry with a brother [without cause]. The phrase in brackets is in most manuscripts but missing from many of the oldest well-preserved manuscripts, and there is disagreement over whether it was added as a helpful clarification or accidentally skipped because it starts with the same letter as the next word (in textual criticism, skipping a word in this way is called "homoioarcton". This is a well-established field with its own technical vocabulary.) My comments in other subthreads detail why I don't treat the gospels of Judas or Mary as significant -- based on their later authorship dates, clear non-Jewishness in style and substance, and even their lack of names of people and places pointing toward them being written by non-eyewitnesses.

tbrooks 10y ago

This belongs on HN why?

jasonkostempski 10y ago
Hey, if you don't love watching hardcore LARPers arguing over cannon vs fanfic, that's your biz, but the rest of us nerds live for this stuff.
brudgers 10y ago
Probably some people find it intellectually interesting or a story unlikely to show up in major media. None of which means it's a going to appeal to everyone before gravity pulls it to oblivion.
dang 10y ago
Anything intellectually interesting belongs on HN. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- erichocean 10y ago
  At best, that standard is applied VERY selectively. Yesterday, an article by an Ars Technica founder about a technology that few people on HN have any experience with described an "open-source, modular weapons platform"—the AR-15 rifle—in a way that techies can understand.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11912665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11912665 Guess what? It was [flagged]. This was my response to that article being flagged (on that thread): > This article is absolutely appropriate for HN, had an active, engaged, and non-hostile comment section, and SHOULD NOT have been banned/flagged as inappropriate. We are all worse off because it was. > I strongly suspect that those hitting the "flag" button did so on ideological grounds, in order to shut down discussion they did not approve of.
  - dang 10y ago
    There's a long tradition on HN of users flagging stories on highly politicized topics, because such discussions typically become ideological and uncivil, two qualities that we seek to avoid in discussion here. That's what happened to that AR-15 story: [flagged] means users flagged it. We've learned that such flags are an important community signal and it's a bad idea to override them unless there's a clear reason to. I didn't see a clear reason, because (a) the article was deliberately provocative, (b) its timing was particularly provocative, to the point of trolling, and (c) the discussion (though not as bad as it could have been) was close to flames, and likely would have become a full-out war if we had intervened to turn off the flags. Flags are a pressure valve for the functioning of the site. On HN, a situation like that is complicated and involves multiple factors other than intellectual curiosity, which indeed are stronger than intellectual curiosity and tend to drown it out. In your description of the article above you highlight only the intellectual aspect (clear description of a little-understood technology) and omit the problematic ones, but the latter nearly always overpower the former. By contrast, stories about contested 8th century papyri are clearly on-topic and not particularly likely to violate the values of the site (marginal religious skirmishes aside). If you were particularly interested in the AR-15 story, I can understand the frustration of seeing others flag it. Most HN users have the same frustration, but we all have it about different things. Other people complained yesterday that the AR-15 story was (in their opinion) being featured on HN while the latest post about Jacob Appelbaum was (in their opinion) being suppressed. In fact it was the same factor—user flags—working the same way in both cases, and the application of HN's standards wasn't selective. It just seemed like it was, because we notice it more in any case we dislike.

tumbas 10y ago

it is fake!!! free masons might spread this crap because they are scared of my blog medium.com/@CyberBuyan

maranatha84 10y ago

@trbooks"This belongs on HN why?" Exactly! It is a bit arduous to comprehend why HN is so eager to distribute such news which are a bit irritating for believer members like me. It is sad that it is always one sided.

quantumhobbit 10y ago
Did you read the article, because the author is pretty much calling the whole thing a forgery.
virmundi 10y ago
I have no idea why it's here except for an interesting topic with research involved. As to it being irritating to believers, I don't understand why. Jesus was a rabbi. In this story he married a believer. Rabbis traditionally married devout women. But what do I know? I'm just a believer that is also a de-aproned freemasons currently researching the rosicrucians.
- lotharbot 10y ago
  > "As to it being irritating to believers, I don't understand why." Two key ideas: 1) Jesus is "married to" the church, as a whole, in traditional Christian doctrine. Being married to a woman would slightly complicate that theory. 2) Theories about Jesus marrying some particular woman are usually not only about that, but come with other baggage attached -- like accusations of suppression of knowledge, or suggested massive rewrites of Christian ideas. And they're typically based on a lot of speculation tied to things written centuries after the fact, not based on careful historical study.
ksenzee 10y ago
If you actually read the article, instead of assuming you know what's in it, you'll probably find you agree with its conclusions. When you're afraid to read things you think will assault your beliefs, you miss out on a lot of truth.

openasocket 10y ago

The article said the papyrus is from the 8th century, which is rather recent compared to other apocryphal texts, I think. I thought the various Churches had consolidated around the canonical bible centuries before then? If this isn't some kind of hoax (very big if), I'd be curious to know who was writing/copying what would have been considered very heretical at the time.

jemfinch 10y ago
The canon of the new testament was effectively decided for the western church (at least) at the regional councils of Rome, Hippo, and Carthage in the late fourth century. I don't know anything about this particular text, but the canon had been established for centuries by this point. (Yes, I know it wasn't officially decided in an ecumenical council until Trent in 1545, but those three councils effectively settled the question, given the importance of the regions involved.)
- wtbob 10y ago
  > Yes, I know it wasn't officially decided in an ecumenical council until Trent in 1545 Trent was hardly ecumenical, given that the Eastern half of the œkumene wasn't present:-)
  - jemfinch 10y ago
    Ok, ecumenicalish :-P
lotharbot 10y ago
> "I thought the various Churches had consolidated around the canonical bible centuries before then?" The Bible canon was at least semi-established in around the 2nd century, and by the end of the 4th century the canon was very stable. There were still ongoing disagreements between branches of the church, but never over whether a "new" writing should be included, always over writings from the first or possibly early second centuries, or older Jewish writings. An 8th century writing would not have warranted much attention. IMO the non-canonical "gospels" from after ~150 AD are uninteresting. The interesting stuff, outside of the canon, are the really old writings ( http://earlychristianwritings.com/ http://earlychristianwritings.com/ ) and the commentary/teachings of early church leaders (http://www.ccel.org/fathers.html http://www.ccel.org/fathers.html ).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

33degrees 10y ago

Worth noting that, after reading the article, the researcher now thinks the papyrus is probably a fake: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/karen-king-responds-to-the-unbelievable-tale-of-jesus-wife/487484/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/karen-ki...

cpncrunch 10y ago
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Jesus%27_Wife https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Jesus%27_Wife It certainly sounds like it's a fake.

honua 10y ago

Who cares about his wife if we still can't get what he looked like right. He wasn't European.. let's stop drawing him that way.

honua 10y ago
White racists, the down vote button is right there for your clicking.
- dang 10y ago
  This comment breaks the HN guidelines by calling names and by baiting others into downvoting. Please (re)-read and follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
lotharbot 10y ago
The failure of mostly renaissance-era artists to properly represent Jesus' ethnicity in no way reflects on the validity of this particular "contested" manuscript. It is kind of goofy and likely contributes to the conflation of American nationalism and Christianity, but this isn't really the thread for it.
- honua 10y ago
  Right, but the cover image of the manuscript uses of those style of images. Kind of goofy is a strange way to say racist.

akkartik 10y ago

The repeated mentions of Da Vinci Code notwithstanding, the book this most reminded me of was a trashy novel from an earlier generation: https://www.amazon.com/Word-Novel-Irving-Wallace/dp/0671211536 https://www.amazon.com/Word-Novel-Irving-Wallace/dp/06712115...

riffraff 10y ago

> Jesus’s bachelorhood helps form the basis for priestly celibacy, and his all-male cast of apostles has long been cited to justify limits on women’s religious leadership is the second part (male apostles -> no female priests) an actual tenet of christian churches? AFAIR in the roman catholic tradition the reason for male-only priesthood had to do with some "fatherly" attributes that a priest must have, which is also why gay priests are not allowed. And I know that some protestant churches allow women priests so I am curious about _who_ cites the male apostles thingy.

michaelsbradley 10y ago
Quick and authoritative summary of the Catholic position: Ordinatio sacerdotalis, 22 May 1994, Pope John Paull II https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_19940522_ordinatio-sacerdotalis.html https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/...
- riffraff 10y ago
  thanks!
toolslive 10y ago
Why not "follow the money" ? Celibate priests have no heirs, so the legacy goes to the Catholic Church. Imagine more than a millenium of accumulated wealth. This also nicely aligns with the tradition that important/rich families were encouraged to let 1 member of the family take up a position in the Church.

aruggirello 10y ago

> On August 26, 2012—more than three weeks before King announced her discovery to the world, when only her inner circle knew of the papyrus and her name for it—Walter Fritz registered the domain name www.gospelofjesuswife.com. This. He should've registered www.howtoforge.com too, just in case :-)

teekert 10y ago

If you are interested in this kind of thing, you will like this book: http://www.asecretoftheuniverse.com/ http://www.asecretoftheuniverse.com/ It goes into the existence of Jesus but through the story of a pilot with an interest in philosophy. The author released the entire audio book as a podcast but is was only available for a limited time. I listened to it as it came out. Very nice, the book, although it is fiction contains real existing characters and a lot of foot notes to build arguments. I will not spoil the end, but the theory it builds is quite interesting.

huxley 10y ago

Reminded me quite a bit of the stories in Orson Welles' "F is for Fake" (1973)