On a humid afternoon this past November, I pulled off Interstate 75 into a stretch of Florida pine forest tangled with runaway vines. My GPS was homing in on the house of a man I thought might hold the master key to one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades: a 1,300-year-old scrap of papyrus that bore the phrase â??Jesus said to them, My wife.â? The fragment, written in the ancient language of Coptic, had set off shock waves when an eminent Harvard historian of early Christianity, Karen L. King, presented it in September 2012 at a conference in Rome.
Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesusâ??s being married. The papyrusâ??s lines were incomplete, but they seemed to describe a dialogue between Jesus and the apostles over whether his â??wifeâ?â??possibly Mary Magdaleneâ??was â??worthyâ? of discipleship. Its main point, King argued, was that â??women who are wives and mothers can be Jesusâ??s disciples.â? She thought the passage likely figured into ancient debates over whether â??marriage or celibacy [was] the ideal mode of Christian lifeâ? and, ultimately, whether a person could be both sexual and holy.
Read Full Article »