by A. J. PHILIP
LAST WEEK, the “New York Times” carried a detailed report about the discovery of a scrap of papyrus, which suggests that Jesus had a wife. It was smaller than a business card and the language used was Coptic. It probably belonged to the fourth century after Christ. A scholar of considerable repute and historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, Karen L. King, gave details of the discovery at an international meeting of Coptic scholars in Rome.
She deciphered the writing as, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife… she will be able to be my disciple”. She gave the international Press access to the fragment, encased in glass, at her office at Divinity School, where she holds America’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity. She explained that the fragment was not conclusive proof that Jesus had a wife.
Yet, she granted considerable importance to the discovery, for it was the first known statement from antiquity that referred to Jesus speaking of a wife. So what was King’s conclusion? All that she was ready to suggest was that the scrap referred to a tradition in early Christianity which held that Jesus was not celibate, but married.
Any student of the history of Christianity would know that there were many streams of thought and conflicting attempts to anchor the new religion to Coptic, Hellenic and Jewish traditions. When Paul held the first conference at Jerusalem in 49 AD, long after Jesus’s crucifixion, and Christianity was formed, his attempt was to liberate it from the Jewish religion, which did not accord respectability to the Gentiles.
Even for a great leader like Paul, it was almost impossible to unite all strands of thought that existed in early Christianity, particularly when many even denied the Godliness of Jesus. Theologians proliferated as the new religion began attracting followers in large numbers leading finally to the conversion of Emperor Constantine (272-337) and to Christianity becoming the state religion.
The Bible as we understand the book today was the result of rigorous selection and codification. Yet, there are many differences; the Roman Catholic Bible is different from the Protestant Bible, which does not have Apocrypha. The Jewish Bible is different from other Bibles as it does not have the New Testament.
In the process, many books were discarded. Some of them are known as the gnostic gospels. About six years ago, the “National Geographic” magazine caused a sensation when it published the Gospel According to Judas Iscariot, who had become a synonym for betrayal, for he had sold Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, the price of a slave those days.
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