If you recall, there was a bit of a dust up 18 months ago when Harvard Professor Karen L. King released the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” that detailed the contents of the text of an ancient Egyptian papyrus referring to Jesus being married. A Vatican newspaper and other experts denounced it as a forgery but a new article in the respected Harvard Theological Review says that there is no evidence of a forgery after the application of various tests. King believes it was part of a debate over the role of women among early Christians.
One critic even suggested that the fragment contained a typo found in an online source — suggesting a poor effort at a forgery.
The original carbon-dating test by the University of Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory put the date at 400 to 200 years before the birth of Jesus. A second carbon-dating test by Noreen Tuross of Harvard and put a mean date of 741 A.D.
Columbia University researchers used a technique called micro-Raman spectroscopy to investigate the ink’s chemical composition and compared to the ink in many of the ancient papyri in Columbia’s collection.
However, carbon dating puts the papyrus around the eighth century in Egypt, which is 400 years later than King originally thought. A break down of the ink is consistent with those used by the ancient Egyptians. Since the papyrus is the size of a business card, conventional testing would have destroyed much of the historical piece. However, a new technique at Columbia allowed for a new dating.
King does not argue that this is proof that Jesus was married. Indeed, it is dated long after the gospels were written.
King has never argued that the fragment is evidence that Jesus was actually married. It would have been composed much later than the gospels of the New Testament, which are regarded as the earliest and most reliable sources on the historical Jesus and which are silent on that question.
Even with this test, Leo Depuydt, an Egyptologist at Brown University, insists that it is still a forgery and a modern-day cut-and-paste job with several glaring grammatical that no native speaker of Coptic would have written. He is quoted as saying “Nothing is going to change my mind, . . . “it is bad to the point of being farcical or fobbish.”
King believes the document may have been copied from earlier Greek text. King insists that the grammatical issues Depuydt raises are either errors of his own analysis or that similar grammatical constructions, including the same mistake as the apparent typo in the online Gospel of Thomas, exist in other Coptic texts.
In order for this to be a forgery, the creator had to find ink from the period and avoid telltale signs of modern creation on a microscopic level. Of course, none of this means that Jesus was married or that this fragment holds any determinative weight.
Of course, if Jesus were married, it would add to the call for priests to be able to marry in the Church. That will take however a bit more than a credit card sized piece of parchment.
Source: Boston Globe
rcampbell – there are two ways to look at this from my view.
1) Jesus was a good Jewish boy who even at 37 should have been married and was, but the Gospels selected deal mostly with his Passion and ministry, not his early life.
2) Jesus knows he is God and is going to be crucified and therefore does not want to leave a widow and fatherless children, so does not marry.
Wayne – after your long study of climate change aka global warming, what caused the Medieval Warming Period, in which temperatures were higher than they are now? And what caused The Little Ice Age, that we have just come out of? And what caused the droughts that caused the destruction of the Hohokam, Anasazis, Salados, etc in the Southwest USA? Surely your climate change aka global warming model can tell us. Enquiring minds want to know.
Paul,
First thanks for my daily dose of sarcasm, it goes so well with a morning cup of coffee. Ok, where was I, oh yes…..
I’ll make it simple for you: In 2012 another scientist, James Powell, got disgusted with climate change deniers and took it upon himself to do a literature search of all peer reviewed anthropogenic climate change studies for the preceding 21 years. This would be a world wide review of all studies for earth’s current climate change since 1900, not just a select few. Why 21 years? I have no idea, the next time I see him I’ll ask.
He found 13,950 such papers….let me repeat 13,950. That’s a lot. Of that 13,950 he found a total of 24 papers (that’s not a lot) disputing that man was the primary cause of global warming beginning around 1900.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/14/climate_change_another_study_shows_they_don_t_publish_actual_papers.html
So yes, the only model that can explain the rapidity of climate change witnessed since 1900 is the emission of greenhouse gases. There are no other models, and the questions you posed are simply strawman arguments. You are unable to explain the rapid climate change occurring over the past 100 years so you resort to the time honored practice of changing the subject….
Please address and/or explain the rapid climate change, global warming, since 1900. If you can find a reason to discount man’s activities then perhaps you can write a paper and raise the above figure of 24 by one.
You’re welcome,
Wayne
I cannot explain the rapid change of temperature during the Medieval Warming Period and I am unable to explain the rapid decline in temperatures during The Little Ice Age.
We know, thanks to the emails of Michael Mann that global warming advocates cut off access to peer reviewed journals for scholar/scientists who did not agree with them. Why Michael Mann kept his job is beyond me.
Some reading for you from someone who knows more than I
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/10748667/The-game-is-up-for-climate-change-believers.html
A Brief History of Celibacy in the
Catholic Church
First Century
Peter, the first pope, and the apostles that Jesus chose were, for the most part, married men. The New Testament implies that women presided at eucharistic meals in the early church.
Second and Third Century
Age of Gnosticism: light and spirit are good, darkness and material things are evil. A person cannot be married and be perfect. However, most priests were married.
Fourth Century
306-Council of Elvira, Spain, decree #43: a priest who sleeps with his wife the night before Mass will lose his job.
325-Council of Nicea: decreed that after ordination a priest could not marry. Proclaimed the Nicene Creed.
352-Council of Laodicea: women are not to be ordained. This suggests that before this time there was ordination of women.
385-Pope Siricius left his wife in order to become pope. Decreed that priests may no longer sleep with their wives.
Fifth Century
401-St. Augustine wrote, Nothing is so powerful in drawing the spirit of a man downwards as the caresses of a woman.
Sixth Century
567-2nd Council of Tours: any cleric found in bed with his wife would be excommunicated for a year and reduced to the lay state.
580-Pope Pelagius II: his policy was not to bother married priests as long as they did not hand over church property to wives or children.
590-604-Pope Gregory the Great said that all sexual desire is sinful in itself (meaning that sexual desire is intrinsically evil?).
Seventh Century
France: documents show that the majority of priest were married.
Eighth Century
St. Boniface reported to the pope that in Germany almost no bishop or priest was celibate.
Ninth Century
836-Council of Aix-la-Chapelle openly admitted that abortions and infanticide took place in convents and monasteries to cover up activities of uncelibate clerics.
St. Ulrich, a holy bishop, argued from scripture and common sense that the only way to purify the church from the worst excesses of celibacy was to permit priests to marry.
Eleventh Century
1045-
Benedict IX dispensed himself from celibacy and resigned in order to marry.
1074-Pope Gregory VII said anyone to be ordained must first pledge celibacy: priests [must] first escape from the clutches of their wives.
1095-Pope Urban II had priests wives sold into slavery, children were abandoned.
Twelfth Century
1123-Pope Calistus II: First Lateran Council decreed that clerical marriages were invalid.
1139-Pope Innocent II: Second Lateran Council confirmed the previous councils decree.
Fourteenth Century
Bishop Pelagio complains that women are still ordained and hearing confessions
Looks the Catholic Church was for it before they were against it?
And the comedy that is religion goes on………………..
“….Unbelievers will try till the end of time to dispel all that is in the Bible so go for it….”
The fact is, believers will try ’til the end of time to use the Bible to justify the Bible and non-believers will continue to get a chuckle from these feeble attempts to try to create reality out of a fantasy. Believers don’t have to look very hard in the Bible to find the inconsistencies, ambiguities, out-right hatred and downright craziness, but they refuse to do so. But I will agree with this statement: “So who cares whether Jesus was married or not?”
Wasn’t this the plot line in The Da Vinci Code?
Paulette – yes and we know The Da Vinci Code was fiction. 🙂
Can’t we find anything with more teeth to speculate a bout? So who cares whether Jesus was married or not? The Bible is about what his purpose was in this life rather than what his home life was. I am sure if he were married most of you would be bored as it probably would be too tame for you. By the way, it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And Noah took only one wife on board as I understand it. Also, those who want to prove the Bible wrong will always find something to drag up and try to dispute it. Oh yes, some of the apostles were married: Matthew 8: 14………. Mark 1: 29-39………….. 1st cor. 7: 5 ……… 1st Cor 9:5 ……………… 1st Peter 3. Read it for yourselves. If it was okay for the Apostles why wouldn’t it be okay for Jesus, he was fully man.
I would hope that the Priests knew when they joined the priesthood that they were to remain celibate as it is the doctrine of the church they chose, and much of the doctrine is decided by the leaders of the Church. Many of the christian churches, Baptist, Methodist, and others have pastors that are married and we use the same Bible. Unbelievers will try till the end of time to dispel all that is in the Bible so go for it. Truth will win out and most cannot accept the truth. Jesus (married or not) is the Son of God.
Jeff Metz: Thanks, I totally agree with you.
That booming sound you hear are heads exploading all over the bible belt. And the next sound will be the preachers counting the money coming in.
Having read all of what are now called The Lost Gospels, if this is authentic (time wise) it would fall into that category. It is probably (if authentic) part of Gnostic writings written several hundred years after the death of Jesus.
There was a time in the history of the Roman Catholic Church when it was not uncommon for a priest to be married. There was also a time when the head of some nunneries was known as an Abbess and had the same powers as an Abbot, including the power to ordain priests. The history of the Roman Catholic Church is fascinating.
As a sidenote it was the University of Arizona that first dated the Shroud of Turin and then backed away from the original dating. It is only fair to expose that i am a graduate of Arizona State University and hold great animus against the UofA.
Very interesting post Jonathan. I always kinda discount such “findings” even though they add needed debate and analysis of the Christian faith. As a Christian, I pretty much subscribe to the belief that the final contents of the Holy Bible was delivered in divine fashion by the Creator. This is not to say that Jesus was or wasn’t married and in my mind it really doesn’t matter. Thanks for the post. Jeff Metz, http://www.thepoliticalspectator.org
“History is written by the victors,” a quote that is often attributed to Churchill, in this case the victors are the church fathers several centuries after the presumed birth of Christ. As that age was just as misogynist as our own in many respects, all material regarding women’s history in the Church was and is still under attack today. Women in the first century after Christ experienced the patriarchal constraints as well as the freedoms of early Christian women and there is evidence of a movement toward greater social freedom for women throughout the Roman empire in the first century (http://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/199641.pdf). Much needed revisionist history has been written by female and male biblical scholars in recent decades. No, there is still no proof that he was married, that is true, but rabbis–and Jesus was and is considered a rabbi by most scholars–were always married. In any event, we now know that a wide range of issues were contested by early Christian writers and the role of women was one of them. Well-known and respected female scholars, besides K.L. King and E. Pagels, include, among others: E. Schussler Fiorenza, R. Weems, P. Trible, J.A. Foote, Kwok Pui Lan, and C. Kirk Duggan.
Carbon dating is like climate science, pretty much a guess by scientists.
Nick,
It’s a little more than a guess when done properly—perhaps an educated idea. Scientific instruments need calibration with Carbon-14 dating subject to many variables that need to be addressed. As an example: atmospheric testing of Nuclear Weapons during the 60s can lead to serious errors in Carbon Dating; however, this is a manageable situation with experienced scientists. There are also several other radioactive isotopic ratios that can be used in dating artifacts.
Now don’t get me started on Climate Change 😉 << Notice the smile. I have studied this for a couple of decades and unfortunately it is real. The only model that fits the data, which includes the rapidity of the change, is the emission of green-house gases.
What is most interesting is how two carbon dating efforts resulted in dates that differed by more than a thousand years.
As a retired scientist I agree with you….
I suspect the sample size given to the labs might play a role in the discrepancy, but a thousand year discrepancy is something that should be investigated by both labs.
Sign of the last days with blood moons?
2Ti 3:1 This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.
2Ti 3:2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
2Ti 3:3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
2Ti 3:4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
2Ti 3:5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
2Ti 3:6 For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts,
2Ti 3:7 Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Interesting.
just remember it was jesus and eve, not jesus and steve.
or was it, maybe that’s what they’ve been hiding all these years.
Thank Dog that Jesus was married and now we can celebrate the notion that marriage is between a man and a woman and not a man and some crucifix. Religion is in the eye of the beholder. And those that behold are dumb schmucks who believe in fairy tales and pastors who fleece them daily.
I’ve heard the same insinuation regarding our 15th President.
Priests remaining celibate means their wealth goes to the Church and not their heirs. (The business of religion.)
Just imagine the fascinating philosophical discussions if Jesus was married and had children.
Sounds to me that the jury is still out on this one. And please tell me why it bothers people so much that priests are to remain celebate?
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