Matt Hadro:
On Thursday evening, both ABC and CBS relayed news that a manuscript claiming Jesus had a wife was found to be an “ancient” document and “not a modern forgery.” They ignored skeptics of the document, however.
“We have the results of scientific testing on a controversial scrap of papyrus that some call the ‘gospel of Jesus’ wife’,” touted CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley. He added that “scholars say that doesn’t prove that Jesus had a wife but that early Christians debated whether he did.”
ABC’s Diane Sawyer called the find “intriguing” and “provocative” and said that experts “caution it doesn’t prove Jesus had a wife. But for now, it’s an intriguing clue.”
The document has its detractors, though. As the Boston Globe reported, “many” of the “academic peers” of Harvard professor Karen L. King, who claimed the manuscript was authentic, “dismissed it as a fake” when she presented her case a year and a half ago.
And the Globe quoted Egyptologist Leo Depuydt who called the writing a “forgery”:
“‘Nothing is going to change my mind,’ he said in an interview this week. ‘As a forgery, it is bad to the point of being farcical or fobbish. . . . I don’t buy the argument that this is sophisticated. I think it could be done in an afternoon by an undergraduate student’.”
Yet Depuydt’s challenge was nowhere to be found on CBS or ABC. Back in 2012 when King’s claim was first made in public, the media lapped it up.
Even if it was true, would it matter? I’ll bet she wasn’t nine years old at marriage. 😉
The Bride of Christ is not a secret.
She is a composite in heaven of all his congregants from earth.
He spoke of his love for his followers while he was on earth but even more so through the Revelation to John.
Sounds like Gnostic if ancient. They were the first writers of historic fiction.
The Left wants Christianity gone. They will tell any lie to undermine it. For them the government is god.
OK, this takes a bit of thinking.
But this document turns out to be a fake.
The fragment shared the same line breaks as a 1924 publication. Also, the fragment contained a peculiar dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before the sixth century.
But two radiometric test concluded that the papyrus plants used for this fragment had been harvested in the seventh to ninth centuries.
Finally the fragment had been sloppily reworked from a 2002 online PDF of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas and even repeated a typographical error.
In other words, the fragment that came from the same material as the “Jesus’ wife” fragment was written in a dialect that didn’t exist when the papyrus it appears on was made.
Some OLD piece of papyrus was found and used that didn’t match the age of the papyrus to the language on it and even the typo from 2002 was kept.
So….forgery.
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2014/04/29/new-evidence-casts-doubt-on-gospel-of-jesus-wife/?hpt=hp_t3
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=9226260&jid=HTR&volumeId=107&issueId=02&aid=9226259&bodyId=&membershipNumber=&societyETOCSession=&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S0017816014000194
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304178104579535540828090438?mg=reno64-wsj&tesla=y
BTW, the ancients never BOLDED parts of their copies.
But guess what?
The MY from the line saying ”my wife” is bolded!