A few words from the 2nd Century AD threatened to change the story of Christianity.
The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, says Ariel Sabar, is “a fragment of papyrus, the size and shape of a business card. On one side, it has eight lines in Coptic, the last phase of the Egyptian language. The bombshell line is smack in the middle. It contains the phrase, the partial phrase: ‘Jesus said to them, my wife.’”
That phrase launched a thousand readings, until the fragment hinting at alternative biographies of Jesus and Mary Magdalene was debunked by scholars, by science, and by dogged journalists like Sabar. Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife is the latest and, at pages, the longest dispatch of a story that Sabar began covering eight years ago.
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Sabar stayed on the case because “the mystery had not been fully unraveled. The more layers I peeled away, the more layers there were to peel away.” The story reached the public with the unveiling in of the purported 2nd century scriptural fragment by Karen E. King, a biblical scholar who held a named professorshi
The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife
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,year-old scrap of papyrus that bore the phrase “Jesus said to them, My wife.” 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 at a conference in Rome.
Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesus’s being married. The papyrus’s lines were incomplete, but they seemed to describe a dialogue between Jesus and the apostles over whether his “wife”—possibly Mary Magdalene—was “worthy” of discipleship. Its main point, King argued, was that “women who are wives and mothers can be Jesus’s disciples.” She thought the passage likely figured into ancient debates over whether “marriage or celibacy [was] the ideal mode of Christian life” and, ultimately, whether a person could be both sexual and holy.
King called the business-card-size pap
What Ever Happened to the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife?
Culture
A conversation with Ariel Sabar about the stranger-than-fiction story of a Harvard professor, a con artist, and a papyrus fragment that made front-page news
By Amy Weiss-Meyer
At a September academic conference in Rome, Karen King, a historian at Harvard Divinity School, made a major announcement. She had discovered a fragment of papyrus that bore a shocking phrase: “Jesus said to them, My wife.” If the scrap was authentic, it had the potential to upend centuries of Roman Catholic tradition.
The journalist Ariel Sabar covered King’s presentation for Smithsonian magazine, and revisited the mystery of the papyrus’s origins in a article for The Atlantic, “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife,” in which he tracked down the owner of the papyrus—a man whose identity King adamantly refused to share with the press. Could this man have forged the explosive text? Was King’s discovery too good to be true?
“King called the business-card-size papyrus ‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,’” Sabar wrote. “But even without that provocative title, it would have shaken the world of biblical scholarship. Centuries of Chris
Episode Ariel Sabar &#; Telling the Truth About Jesus&#; Wife
Pete: You’re listening to The Bible for Normal People. The only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns.
Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.
[Jaunty intro music]Jared: Welcome, everyone, to this episode of The Bible for Normal People. Before you do anything, right now, if you’re not driving, I would encourage you to just hit pause, go to wherever you get &#;
Pete: Or pull over!
Jared: Yeah, sure.
Pete: Pull over!
Jared: Pull over right this minute.
Pete: Now!
Jared: And if you wouldn’t mind, pretty please, cherry on top, go and pre-order the book Love Matters More: How Fighting to Be Right Keeps Us from Loving Like Jesus. My goal, I’ll tell you straight up, my goal is to sell enough copies that they let me write another one. That’s it! That’s the goal I have, so help.
Pete: [Laughter]
Jared: Help me.
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: Help me be able to write more books.
Pete: [Continued laughter]
Jared: But no, honestly, I think this book, for me, the message that love matters more couldn’t come at a better time, and as we get some feedback from people who have read the first chapter, which yo
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