What If Jesus Had A Wife?

The mail box at the g-mail account has been filled with questions this past week about my thoughts on the recently revealed papyrus claiming that Jesus had a wife. Even more queries peppered my Thursday evening Introduction to the New Testament course where I have a large group of former church goers and a few members of some very conservative congregations in the area. What should we make of such a discovery? Does it throw the whole Christian faith into chaos? Does the text prove that Jesus was married? What do other texts from the time say about Jesus being married? Will this change contemporary Christianity? What if the papyrus is a forgery? What do you think the Vatican response will be?

Whoa! Everybody take a deep breath.

Harvard Magazine

First, what we have before us is an amazing archeological find thanks to a remarkable scholar: Dr. Karen King of Harvard University. Last week, Harvard Magazine featured the professor and the fragment in question: “Written on a piece of papyrus now reduced to just four centimeters high and eight wide, the fragment addresses issues of family and discipleship. ‘This is the only extant ancient text which explicitly portrays Jesus as referring to a wife,’ King writes in her scholarly paper on the ‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,’ which she presented at the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies. The session took place across the street from the Vatican at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, a research center within the faculty of theology at the Pontifical Lateran University (known as the Pope’s University).”

Harvard Magazine

The article went on to say, “King emphasized that this new discovery does not prove that the historical Jesus was married. This gospel, like others dated to the second century which make opposing claims—that Jesus was celibate, for example—are too late, historically speaking, to provide any evidence as to whether the historical Jesus was married or not, she says. But the fragment does suggest that 150 years or so after Jesus’s birth, Christians were already taking positions on such questions. Significantly, this new text pushes the date at which some Christians were asserting that Jesus was married back to a time contemporaneous with the earliest assertions that he was celibate.”  (http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/09)

Okay…. did you carefully read that first sentence from the last paragraph? Again, “King emphasized that this new discovery does not prove that the historical Jesus was married.” What it proves is what we already knew about Christians who lived in the second through fourth centuries. They were quite serious in asking questions about Jesus: Who was he? Where did he come from? Did he have a family? Was Jesus human? Was Jesus divine? So is it too far out of the realm of possibility to believe that some early Christians believed Jesus had a wife? Certainly not.

This tiny piece of papyrus is a fabulous, awesome, and stunning archeological find, that if proven to be authentic will force scholars, theologians, and regular folks like you and me to think again about who this Jesus of Nazareth really was. That process is not a bad thing to engage in from time to time for as I look over the course of my fifty-one years, the Jesus I knew as a child was very different from the Jesus I worshipped during my college days to the Jesus whom I love and follow as Lord today.

Second, in the end, who really cares if Jesus was married? Probably the “boys” at the Vatican have the most to lose in such a debate. But in the end, even that does not matter. Here is what matters most when it comes to Jesus of Nazareth….

Death and Resurrection.

That is what matters most about Jesus – his death and resurrection. In the end, my faith is not going to be rocked if Jesus was married or not, if he had a child or not, if he and his wife had a large family or not. I follow my Lord because of his extraordinary teachings on love and compassion; his witness to express those values not only in words but more importantly in deeds to folks who lived primarily on the margins of society; and most importantly the resurrection from the dead which gives meaning to this life and promise for the life which is to come. That is what really matters to me.

If Jesus had a wife, I hope her name was Rachel. A nice Jewish girl from Sepphoris. I have always loved that name…..

Love One Another - Brian