Wife trouble

The recently analysed 4^th Century Coptic Script that Harvard Professor Karen King believes says that Jesus Christ was married and to Mary is hardly definitive proof that he was.  Those words, written in a language used by ancient Egyptian Christians, translate to “Jesus said to them, my wife,” King said.  Ms King pontificated further that, in the dialogue, the disciples discuss whether Mary is worthy and Jesus says “she can be my disciple.”

Given that it a fragment rather than a complete tome, one has to take with a pinch of salt that this means Mary, presumably Magdalene, was Jesus’ wife.  He could be alluding to a metaphorical wife – when He talked of seed and sheep, He wasn’t being literal!  Moreover, could this ‘Mary’ be unrelated to the wife exegesis and indeed refer to his mother, with whom He was very firm at the wedding at Cana, to which His mother apparently had no problems – a very willing disciple of her son.

This is similar to the far less contentious (outside Roman Catholic circles) issue of whether Jesus had biological brothers or whether His camaraderie with His disciples meant that the ‘brothers’ mentioned were The Twelve.  Indeed, it is raised in non-RC churches merely as an interesting intellectual diversion.

Even if the connections made by modern scholars are representative of the words, it could be that this was a group of Christians who had their own ideas about theology and who could not conceive of Jesus not marrying.  That doesn’t make it so.  400 years after The Passion, the earliest known portrait of Jesus has Him as blond and clean-shaven, though this is highly unlikely of a person who grew up in that part of the world.  This fragment dates from the same era.  Many interpretations of the life of Jesus have abounded throughout history, Mormonism being the most popular of the recent divergences from the mainstream.

I don’t doubt the authenticity of the scrawl, but there are so many questions about it that it is far from being conclusive on anything.  It is bait for conspiracy theorists and dusty antiquarians and few others.