For two years now, we’ve covered the debate over the papyrus fragment, dubbed “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” that was unveiled by historian Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School. Joel Baden and Candida Moss update us on the emerging scholarly consensus – that it’s probably a forgery, even if the materials used to construct it are ancient – and try to explain why it’s garnered such attention:
A great deal rides on this question of Jesus’s marital status. Over the centuries, and up to the present, how people have answered this question has served as a cipher in discussions about clerical celibacy. If Jesus spurned marriage, the argument goes, so too should all priests. And if Jesus chose only men as his apostles, so too should the Church. Iconoclastically minded commentators, however, insist that the idea of a celibate Jesus is a later Catholic conspiracy—the product of a male-led Church and a succession of dry, turgid councils—that’s long been used to keep the laity, and women in particular, in check. Dan Brown made a fortune peddling this very idea in The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003.
What has become clear today, thanks to the scholarship of Karen King and others, is that in the messy early Church—ripe with pretensions of order, brimming with disordered diversity—people actively debated the role of women as leaders.
People have been speculating about Jesus’s romantic life since at least the second century A.D., too. In a noncanonical text from that period known as the Gospel of Mary, for example, Peter says to Mary Magdalene, “Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than all other women.” The second- or third-century Gospel of Philip gets somewhat more explicit, calling Mary his “companion,” and describing Jesus as having “loved her more than all the disciples” and having “kissed her often on the mouth.”
The New Testament pays notable attention to women. The story of Jesus’s life begins with the Virgin Mary holding the newborn child, ends with both Marys stationed at the cross, and along the way suggests that women followed Jesus and helped finance his mission. A woman named Junia is described in Paul’s Letter to the Romans as “prominent among the apostles,” and another, named Phoebe, is called a “deacon.”
(Image: The Three Marys at the Tomb by Peter Paul Rubens, via Wikimedia Commons. Mary Magdalene is, notably, in red.)
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