The Gospel of Jesus' Brother-in-Law

So, in the last few days the whole "Jesus Wife Fragment"/"Gospel of Jesus' Wife" episode has taken another twist. Christian Askeland's article title this time is a bit too not nice to use but I had to come up with something. Anyway, here's the story: the mainstream press articles haven't said much about the context of the JWF, but those who have followed the story more closely know that it arrived with several other fragmentary texts supposedly from the same collector. Well, one of those has been now shown to the world, and it is a bit of the Coptic Gospel of John, in what looks like the same hand as the JWF, and on papyrus of comparable age.

And according to some scholars, it looks to be forged, in the same manner that the JWF is thought to be forged.

The problem is this: the text matches that of the Qau Codex. But not only does it match, it even follows the set of line breaks of a specific modern edition in an eccentric manner, to the point of having a glitch at a page break, and this edition is (like the Gospel of Thomas edition thought to have been used to compose the JWF) available on-line. This, however, presents another problem: the Qau Codex is in a dialect of Coptic which, by the date this appears to have been written, had died out.

So why should a churchman care? Well, on one level, all of this fuss ought to be immaterial. Whether the JWF represents a modern forgery or an ancient gnostic text, it stands well outside the orthodox canon; in a sense, the question is whether it is a modern or ancient forgery. It's all about the world-changing hype. King, whose baby this is, has connections to the Elaine Pagels/Jesus Seminar/"we can learn about early Christianity through the gnostic material" people. But this fragment has now been cut loose from this because of its late date, to the point where its importance in that wise would be indicating a significant survival into a time around Charlemagne's reign. The mainstream media is looking, for whatever reason, for another Coluphidist "well, that just about wraps it up for Christendom" wildly overstated story, and Harvard and Company played off this desire and got an endorsement of King's claims that was emphatically undeserved.

If you want a non-hyperventilating mainstream story reviewing the whole thing you can try this one from the Weekly Standard. And if you want a larger perspective on the novelty of these claims, you can see this column by David Jenkins that came out after the first round of JWF stories. But you can just as well ignore the whole thing, and dismiss anyone who tells you that this or that find challenges orthodox doctrine. Sure, you'll get called a traditionalist (as if that were a bad thing) and accused of burying your head in the sand, but you'll save yourself a lot of grief sorting through the nonsense.

Jesus's Wife Resurrected from Dead

In honor of the subject I'm stealing Christian Askeland's title and one of the net's favorite memes. As everyone who hasn't stuck their fingers in their ears on the matter is aware, Harvard Theological Review, just in time for Holy Week, has published an issue dedicated to the authenticity of the so-called "Gospel of Jesus' Wife", a parchment fragment purporting to be from a gnostic text from antiquity. The first time around on this, after the first few breathless days in the major media, the scholarly community issued forth with a great deal of skepticism and indeed confidence that this scrap was a modern forgery. After that, a great silence ensued.

But now the issue is back, courtesy of radiocarbon testing and who knows what else. Laurie Goldstein at the New York Times at least was circumspect enough this time to couch her article so as to reveal the continuing doubt in the scholarly community and to give the facts baldly enough to where someone who remembers the original claims can judge what has changed. Others were not not careful, leading to many articles giving the impression that these tests vindicated believers in authenticity against skeptics.

The reader of these articles, however, needs to be aware of those old claims. Most important is that the original claim was for a fourth century parchment. This has been undermined by the tests, which gave dates ranging over nearly a millennium and a half. This is important because, of course, the historical context is utterly different in the two periods: the late date puts it as a testament to gnosticism under the caliphate or late in byzantine history, not a glimpse into early Nicene Christendom or perhaps earlier, and the earliest dates would imply that an ancient author must have used a papyrus several centuries old.

But the big issue continues to be that the initial doubts did not rely upon the authenticity of the medium upon which the text is written. Leo Depuydt's response, which has been reprinted with some additions in HTR, states that "I find nothing in these documents that could change in any way the fact that I am personally 100% certain that the Wife of Jesus Fragment is a forgery. I have otherwise never deemed ink or papyrus tests necessary or relevant in light of the evidence set forth below." Francis Watson's initial response to the test reports states that "It has never been doubted that the Jesus’ Wife fragment may well have been written on a piece of genuinely ancient papyrus, using ink whose composition followed ancient practice."

The basic problem beyond a general suspicion of so convenient a document is that the text itself shows signs of being a composite of phrases from the Gospel of Thomas, excepting the few words which have attracted all the media attention, assembled by someone with an imperfect knowledge of Coptic grammar and syntax. Indeed, one error in particular has suggested to some scholars that the forgery is dependent upon a particular scholarly edition of Thomas. Doubts have also been raised about the possibility of fitting the fragment into a larger text written on a page. Indeed, a number of scholars object to referring to any "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" given a complete lack of any evidence of any such larger work.

But even ignoring all these problems with the authenticity of the text, the big offense in all of this is the hype. Even with the seemingly carefully hedged statements from Dr. King it's really hard to avoid the conclusion that this affair has been managed by both her and her university to attract maximum publicity from media outlets who are credulous and sensationalist. Goldstein's headline, given enough page space, could more accurately have read "Unimportant Gnostic Text Apparently Written On Old Parchment; Textual Problems Unresolved". Even if the text is genuine (and I'm going with those who think it's forged, for now) it has no implication for orthodox Christianity. It's just another oddball Gnostic text. The takeaway, no matter how the authenticity debates wind up, is in what this tells you about the biases of the major media outlets who are culpable of promoting this.

Shreds and Noise

You may or may not have heard the publicity noise over a supposed gospel fragment which may or may not suggest that Jesus had a wife. Well, the upshot is this:

• Karen King of the Harvard Divinity School announced that she had examined a papyrus fragment from a private collector, and had determined it to be genuine. The recto side of the papyrus was translated from the Coptic to read "Jesus said to them, 'my wife'..." at one point. The fragment, which she dubbed the "Gospel of Jesus’s Wife", was dated to the 4th century, and claimed to translate some lost 2nd century Greek version.
• Not surprisingly, the MSM jumped on this, and not at all surprisingly, Laurie Goldstein of the New York Times was first in line. Others followed, all with the usual breathless "will this change everyone's understand of early Christianity" pseudoquestion.
• Surprisingly, though, there was a major pushback the next day, which also appeared in the some mainstream publications. The most prominent story was this AP wire story, in which there seemed to be almost a line of other early text types queued up to cast doubt upon the text. It seems that the lack of provenance of the fragment is a problem in itself, but many of the scholars quoted were dubious about its authenticity.
• Also making a "day after" appearance was this NBC news blog post, which stepped up to deal with some of the historical and theological context familiar to those of us with at least a passing knowledge of the field.

It's clear that, if it be genuine, we're looking at a gnostic text: that it is in Coptic is a warning bell to begin with, and one of the phrases in the text parallels a portion of the Gospel of Thomas, perhaps the best known gnostic text. And as such it fits the type pretty well: these texts say a lot of odd things about sexuality and Jesus, and it isn't clear that any of them are to be taken literally. These texts are all, as a rule, pretty late (typically 4th century), so their relationship to ante-Nicene patristic Christian is controversial. For a long time the picture of gnosticism we had was largely formed out of patristic condemnations; it wasn't until the Nag Hammadi discoveries in 1945 that we could really begin to pull together a solid picture of gnostic writings.

And this is the point at which the plot thickens, because Dr. King does not come into this with clean hands. She is part of a group who doubt gnosticism as a category, which is not entirely bad. Far more problematic is her willingness to sit as part of the Jesus Seminar, which is anathema to real scholarship as far as I am concerned. And there is a far more damning problem, beyond the doubts about the paleography. Here is Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica:

[T]his fragment is exactly, exactly, what the Zeitgeist of 2012 would want us to find in an ancient gospel. To my mind that weighs heavily against its authenticity. Of course I hope I'm wrong and that it is genuine, and that is certainly a possibility, but this is equivalent to winning big in the lottery and that should make us nervous. It is too perfect. As Larry Schiffman put it, "The most exciting things are the things most likely to be forged."

It is far too reminiscent of letter to Harry Potter's mother that he finds in the last book, which has been truncated at a point which allows a reading wildly divergent from the text read as a whole: how convenient that we get this tantalizing phrase, cut free (literally) from any context, which fits so nicely into the restorationist tropes of mainline liberalism with their vision of a purer faith captured by those, well, patriarchs and then enslaved by the Constantinian state.

If I were a betting man, I could put my money on this coming to nothing. Orthodox theologians are not going to be disturbed that the corpus of gnostic writings has gotten one text larger anyway, but I would lean towards counting it as a fake. What is more significant is the will to believe it, and possibly to create it. If you want a snarky read of this, you'll prefer Thomas McDonald's analysis, but I would also recommend this longer and more dispassionate take from Smithsonian magazine. But one should also consider, on one's own, the rush toward any text which stands outside the particularity of orthodox Christian faith. Where is the need to have faith in these scraps coming from?