Now, I'm going to begin by telling you all simply: I dislike religious historians. I can’t for the life of me fathom how any of them are able to take their profession seriously considering they have so much invested in their beliefs. I mean, they're blatantly not going to be willing to question the historical accuracy of their own God. And even if they are, can we trust that their ridiculously subjective views wouldn't make it impossible for them to be objective?!
This papyrus is a clear example of what I’m talking about... So, Karen L. King claims to have found a 4th century note from Coptic (Egyptian) Christians that makes reference to Jesus having a wife. Just so we're all clear: there’s yet to be any actual testing on the piece of papyrus, which has led to some scepticism, but King et al. are convinced of its authenticity.
The reason it's been so controversial is because, if genuine, the papyrus highlights a discrepancy when it comes to the representation of Magdalene as a repentant whore, and shakes up the Christian ideal of sexual abstinence.
Professor Francis Watson of Durham University argues that a line-break in the middle of one word on the fragment shows that the copy has been lifted from modern editions of the Gospel. So, apparantly it is normal for words to be broken in ancient scripts, but Watson says that it's uncommon for the same line-break in the same work in different manuscripts.
He says: 'An obvious explanation is that the author has used a modern printed edition of the Coptic text, where the original line-divisions are preserved.'
You know The Da Vinci Code? Yeah, well, the papyrus supports a persistent doubt in Christian thought that Jesus and Magdalene were in fact a couple, as picked up by Dan Brown in the book. This is often disputed and argued because, as Prof King says, that concept casts doubt 'on the whole Catholic claim of a celibate priesthood based on Jesus’ celibacy.'
In regards to the papyrus, she says: 'What this shows is that there were early Christians for whom ... sexual union in marriage could be an imitation of God’s creativity and generativity and it could be spiritually proper and appropriate.'
She also asserts that this so-called 'Gospel of Jesus’s Wife' may have been disregarded 'because the ideas it contained flowed so strongly against the ascetic currents of the tides in which Christian practices and understandings of marriage and sexual intercourse were surging.'
But, really, even if the papyrus is real and Jesus did have a wife and sex and that, so what? It's all nonsense anyway.
I think the thing I'm finding most frustrating in all of this is that even the people sceptical of the papyrus completely fail to apply any scepticism to everything else. Here's a quote from Christian blogger Stephen Prothero:
"Jesus may be one of the best attested figures in the ancient world, but we still know hardly anything about him. And because he is the key figure in the largest religion in the world, we are keen to fill in the blanks…
The truth of the matter is that we don’t know what Jesus looked like. We don’t know where he was or what he was doing when he turned 18. And we don’t know if he was ever married or divorced."
What he looked like or if he had a wife is only the tip of this ignorance iceberg. When was this supposed messiah born? When did people start writing about him? Does it not seem suspicious to these folks that even many early Christians believed he was simply an allegory? Prothero admits there were plenty of religious frauds, all too happy to fabricate evidence. Why is it so difficult to think the same is true for Jesus' historicity?
How many more times do we have to read dubious articles about finding Jesus’ tomb or some supposed piece of his actual cross. You might as well claim you found Hercules’ resting place as far as I’m concerned.
I'm seriously bored of hearing about this as it's a complete waste of anyone's time to even think about it - it's all irrelevant now we have science. One would be forgiven for paying a second thought to David Icke's theory about the Illuminati creating media distractions when this kind of thing is getting so much news-time...(no, they wouldn't. I'm joking. No one cares for David Icke.)
L.
