Testing on ‘Jesus’ wife’ papyrus indicates fragment not forgery

Tests show that a controversial piece of papyrus with the words "Jesus said to them, my wife," is likely an ancient document and not a fake, according to a paper published Thursday in The Harvard Theological Review. 

But the tiny scrap of honey-colored papyrus "does not in any way provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married," Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King wrote in the paper.

It could be that the tiny piece of text "contains a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples" that "concerns an early Christian debate over whether women who are wives and mothers can be disciples of Jesus," King wrote.

Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was unmarried, and the Bible makes no mention of him having a wife.

King received the roughly 1.5-by-3-inch papyrus fragment at the end of 2011 from the owner, who chose to remain anonymous and sought the professor's help in trying to translate the Coptic text on it. When she presented it at a Coptic scholars' conference in Rome in 2012, the Vatican rejected it as a fake, even as The New York Times reported that some New Testament scholars said the text alluded to the bride of Christ — a concept the Bible uses to describe the church.   

The papyrus has undergone a series of radiocarbon testing over the past two years at Harvard University, dating it to anywhere from 659 to 859 C.E., according to a news release on Harvard's website. Further tests at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University found the carbon character of the ink matched other papyrus samples dating from the first to eighth centuries. 

But in a telephone conference with reporters Thursday, King said she believes that the dating is closer to the second, third or fourth century, because that is when topics addressed in the text arose among Christians — namely questions of "whether or not they should marry or be celibate, whether it was OK to have a family or whether one should remain virginal."

Whatever the fragment's exact age, the paper said tests indicated it was from an authentically ancient written document and not a hoax.

"The scientific testing completed thus far consistently provides positive evidence of the antiquity of the papyrus and ink, including radiocarbon, spectroscopic and oxidation characteristics, with no evidence of modern fabrication," King wrote in the paper. 

But not everyone agrees. 

The Harvard Theological Review, in the same edition as King's paper, also published a very skeptical take, by Leo Depuydt, a professor of Egyptology and ancient western Asian studies at Brown University. Depuydt wrote that the papyrus is "not an independent literary composition at all" but "a patchwork of words and phrases from the published and well-known Coptic Gospel of Thomas."

The Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in Egypt in 1945 alongside other texts, is a collection of sayings that it attributes to Jesus. Some of the sayings are similar to those found in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the New Testament. Others are vastly different in character and are difficult to understand. 

"I believe that there can only be one explanation for the complete dependence of the Text on the Gospel of Thomas: forgery," Depuydt wrote.

When the papyrus was presented in 2012, some scholars also criticized it as grammatically sloppy. Depuydt called one of the errors "incompetent blundering that makes it very improbable that the forger is ancient." 

"A modern forger could presumably easily produce the text with only a very poor knowledge of Coptic because all sorts of tools are available such as transcriptions and translations, including interlinear translations," Depuydt wrote. 

But King, responding to Depuydt's article, said Thursday that her research has shown there are other examples of some ancient Coptic literature containing all the grammatical oddities found in the so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife papyrus fragment. 

"For me, the grammar does not necessarily indicate at all that it would have to have been produced by a modern person,” she said. "What he takes to be a forgery, I take to be within the scope of ancient work."  

Meanwhile, King indicated Thursday that the artifact's owner has no plans to reveal his identity and would let Harvard keep it on permanent loan so other scholars can study it.