News

'Gospel of Jesus's Wife' is authentic, studies find

Scientific tests have revealed that the fragment of writing known as the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife was written between the 6th and 9th century AD, ruling out the possibility that it is a modern-day forgery. Its contents may originally have been composed as early as the second to fourth centuries.

gospel jesus wife

The Coptic fragment was first revealed in 2012 by Karen King of the Harvard Divinity School. It made international headlines because of its content, which includes the line “Jesus said to them, my wife”, which indicates that some early Christians believed that Jesus may have been married. Many experts and even the Catholic Church claimed that fragment was a hoax.

Scientists from Columbia University, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all worked on the fragment. Radio carbon tests show that the small piece of papyrus dates from 659 to 859 CE, while a micro-Raman spectroscopy determined that the carbon character of the ink matched samples of other papyri that date from the first to eighth centuries CE. Furthermore, handwriting analysis found that it bears a strong resemblance to other texts from that era.

Karen King concludes the fragment is almost certainly a product of early Christians, and probably was from Egypt because it is written in Coptic, the form of the Egyptian language used by Christians there starting in the Roman imperial period.

“The main topic of the fragment is to affirm that women who are mothers and wives can be disciples of Jesus—a topic that was hotly debated in early Christianity as celibate virginity increasingly became highly valued,” King explained.



Since nothing else of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife has been found, little can be determined about who wrote this document or why. King adds, “This gospel fragment provides a reason to reconsider what we thought we knew by asking what the role claims of Jesus’s marital status played historically in early Christian controversies over marriage, celibacy, and family.”

Click here to read Karen King’s article “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . .’”: A New Coptic Papyrus Fragment

However, not all academics are convinced that the fragment is genuine. In a rebuttal published in the Harvard Theological Review, Leo Depuydt of Brown University writes:

As a student of Coptic convinced that the fragment is a modern creation, I am unable to escape the impression that there is something almost hilarious about the use of bold letters. How could this not have been designed to some extent to convey a certain comic effect? The effect is something like: “ My wife. Get it? MY wife. You heard that right.” The papyrus fragment seems ripe for a Monty Python sketch. I do not want to make light of the situation but rather venture to construct a truly plausible guess as to the actual nature of part of the forger’s real intent. If the forger had used italics in addition, one might be in danger of losing one’s composure.

Click here to read his full article The Alleged Gospel of Jesus’s Wife: Assessment and Evaluation of Authenticity

Sponsored Content