UNROLLING HISTORY THE GOSPEL OF JESUS’ WIFE
On September 18, 2012, Harvard scholar Karen King announced the existence of a remarkable shred of papyrus. The text was written in Coptic, the language of the Egyptian Christians, and mentioned a Jesus referring to someone as “my wife”. King went on to say that she would publish the snippet in the Harvard Theological Review and hyped her discovery up by referring to it as the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, although there was no evidence that it was a gospel. The fragment did not contain enough words to establish a literary genre.
King also said that the , as it ought to have been called, was presumably too young to constitute evidence of Jesus’ marital status, but that nuance was immediately lost. I remember a Dutch newspaper headline claiming there was a “new indication that Jesus was indeed married”. This paper, De Volkskrant, added
