That Coptic papyrus fragment tells us nothing about Jesus

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 19, 2012

A Harvard Divinity School professor has unearthed an ancient Coptic papyrus fragment that reportedly refers to a wife of Jesus. What does this prove?

Absolutely nothing.

When Karen King submitted an article about her discovery to the Harvard Theological Review, two of the three scholars who reviewed it concluded that the papyrus was probably a forgery. Other scholars with strong credentials believe it is genuine. Let’s put that question in the “don’t know” category, and move on.

If it is real, and if King is reading it correctly, does the papyrus fragment show that Jesus had a wife? No. It shows that someone in the 3rd or 4th century said that Jesus had a wife. The person who allegedly wrote this fragment of a sentence would not have been an eyewitness to the life of Jesus, nor would he have met any eyewitnesses. The eyewitnesses—the Lord’s disciples—testified unanimously that Jesus did not have a wife. It’s difficult to see why this mysterious Coptic correspondent, arriving on the scene a few centuries after the fact, should be taken more seriously.

The BBC report on Professor King’s discovery suggests that if Jesus did have a wife, it might have been Mary Magdalene. Why mention Mary Magdalene specifically, among the thousands of women living in Palestine at the time of Christ? Because the hypothesis that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene has been a favorite of imaginative authors for years.

Professor King isn’t foolish enough to jeopardize her own academic credentials by claiming that her discovery validates the Mary-Magdalene hypothesis. She lets credulous reporters draw their own inferences. Her own claim about the importance of her discovery are actually quite modest:

“This fragment suggests that some early Christians had a tradition that Jesus was married.”

Fair enough. Some Christians in the early 21st century have a “tradition” that Jesus was married, too, and they’ll trot out any evidence, however thin, to advance that theory. As one Coptic scholar told the BBC, there are "thousands of scraps of papyrus where you find crazy things.” Professor King’s papyrus might be much older than a Dan Brown novel (although we can’t be too certain of that), but it’s not much more credible.