Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Jesus said to them, 'My wife ...'

The following excerpt and photograph are from an article that appeared in The New York Times. This and much else will be covered in Michael Haag's forthcoming book, The Quest for Mary Magdalene.


'Jesus said to them, "My wife ..."'


September 18, 2012

A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ Wife

By Laurie Goodstein

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 was made public in Rome on Tuesday at the International Congress of Coptic Studies by Karen L. King, a historian 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.