New Evidence of Married Jesus?

eastcoast_bsc said:

Funny thing, the left wing media in Boston keeps calling it a new Gospel.

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Not just the left wing media:
Harvard scholar's discovery suggests Jesus had a wife | Fox News

Stop the presses! Jesus was married! Oh no...
Let's be clear: I don't have a problem with a news story about this fourth-century scrap of gnostic text that has little or nothing to do with the historical Jesus described in the four Gospels and testified to by first-century Christian witnesses. I do have a problem with how the story is presented, as it is simply misleading. First, the headline: "...

Yeah...I'm always struck by how Gnostic gospels are handled whenever they're found. Sensationalism kills the cat. This probably won't even be of tremendous scholarly interest. It's an extremely small fragment that we can't even technically say is Gnostic for certain (the Church as the bride of Christ is referenced often enough in the Bible for it to potentially have been an orthodox Christian homily, if there's nothing militating against it in the text).

I would chalk it up to the lingering fascination with The Da Vinci Code. People need to be better informed about things like this, and we need to make sure that it's not commercialized sensationalism that "informs" them.

Genersis said:

Not just the left wing media:
Harvard scholar's discovery suggests Jesus had a wife | Fox News

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I live in Boston, Harvard divinity school is as far left as they come. I am not indicting them, but they are hard left. The divinity portion s almost non-existent.

eastcoast_bsc said:

I live in Boston, Harvard divinity school is as far left as they come. I am not indicting them, but they are hard left. The divinity portion s almost non-existent.

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I think that she was referring to the fact that it was on Fox News, rather than its coming originally from Harvard Divinity School.

The story sounds like some sort of promotion for the next Dan Brown book.

We talked about it briefly in a class I had today.
The conclusion was that it proves nothing other than that, at the end of the 2nd century and into the 4th century, there were debates about whether or not Jesus was married (thus why many theologians of the time insisted that Jesus was NOT married...the losing side had most of their works destroyed).

Jesus wasn't married.

When you think about it, Jesus' celibacy is actually one of the least vexing things about Christianity.

People pushing all this "Jesus was married" stuff frustrate me. Find a new hobby horse. Or at least find some evidence that's not some collector has a very small fragment with only a few words on it that people claim is from 400 years after Jesus, that no one can say where it was found, and that has yet to be carbon-14 dated. This just isn't a very credible bit of evidence. There are all kinds of question marks surrounding it. And even if it's exactly what it appears to be, it proves, what? That some Gnostics in the 5th century thought Jesus was married (And, by the way, Gnostics weren't big on sex or the physical world, so, even for them, marriage might not be marriage as we know it.)? That's not exactly breaking news.

Look, if it's so important for people to have a Messiah who was married, they can become Jews and wait for the next guy claiming to be a Messiah to come along. Maybe he'll be married. Or, heck, invent your own religion and write a gospel about a guy named Todd with a girlfriend and a mistress. I don't care. Just stop screwing with history and established religious tradition because you can't handle it being the way it is, unless you can prove it's inaccurate, which you can't.

dotCommonweal » Blog Archive » “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’”
The ^ blog seems to be pretty insightful on the issue. The author herself doesn't think that it proves Jesus was married, just another voice from the debate.

MoreCoffee said:

The story sounds like some sort of promotion for the next Dan Brown book.

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I have been really busy this week and I am behind on most news.

The reports I have heard have stated this as a very small fragment of a larger document. The portion pointing everyone into the speculation is not even a whole sentence.

I admit it is intriguing, but there is no real reason to get too excited about this. There is no proof here.

Expert: "Wife of Jesus” fragment looks like a modern forgery...
It may not be a smoking gun, but it’s Col. Mustard in the Conservatory. The awesome Dale Price turned up this story in the Guardian, which is based on this report by Francis Watson of Durham University, first shared by Mark Goodacre. What’s the proof? The fragment appears to have been composed from pieces of other texts...