The Vatican has raised doubts about a recently released fragment of a Coptic text in which Jesus alludes to having a wife, describing it as “problematic and controversial,” and most likely a fake, reports said on September 28. A sharply worded editorial published in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano on September 28, said that ample evidence existed to dismiss the papyrus as an “inept forgery,” implausibly interpreted through a modern reading of the figure of Christ. “In any case, a fake,” wrote the newspaper’s editor, Gian Maria Vian.
Scholarly discussion over the papyrus – which contains the phrase “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’ ” –has been intense since a Harvard scholar, Karen L. King, presented it as a fragment of a fourth-century gospel at an international conference of Coptic scholars this month in Rome. In her paper, Dr. King did not imply that Jesus was married, but she suggested that the question of his celibacy and marital status was a matter of debate among early Christians. Now scholars are debating issues like the authenticity of the papyrus and Dr. King’s interpretation of the text.
Dr. King has arranged to have the chemical composition of the ink tested by the Straus Centre for Conservation and Technical Studies at Harvard in mid-October. The testing could provide an approximate date for the ink used on the fragment. Dr. King said in an interview this month that the centre had been unable to schedule the testing before she presented her paper.
Suspicions that the papyrus was forged grew last week after Francis Watson, a New Testament scholar at Durham University in England, posted a paper online arguing that the text was cobbled together from phrases in the Gospel of Thomas. That text was discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 among a cache of ancient manuscripts thought to have been written by early Christians known as Gnostics.
Alongside its editorial, the Vatican newspaper published a less vitriolic but still cautious analysis by a Coptic scholar, Alberto Camplani, one of the organisers of the conference, which raised some issues with the papyrus and with Dr. King’s reading of the text. Other ancient sources make no mention of Jesus’ conjugal situation, he wrote.
Dr. Camplani said he was also suspicious because the papyrus had been found on the antiquarian market and not through a dig. “Such an object demands that numerous precautions be taken to establish its reliability and exclude the possibility of forgery,” he wrote.
He was also critical of the news media frenzy precipitated by the “quick to shock” assertion that Jesus may have been married. And he suggested that the sensationalistic headlines could have been avoided had Dr. King waited to share her findings at the conference, rather than presenting them to the news media ahead of time.