This was a kind of silly incident. Scientists examining a fragment of papyrus mentioning Jesus's wife said that it was indeed "ancient." Possibly dating from the seventh century. Well that is interesting, because that is some 600 years after the time of Jesus (if there was such a person). The word ancient is very misleading, because it implies a historical proximity that simply is not supported. What did the Coptic Christians in Egypt a half a millennium later know about the historical Jesus? That's the same time span between us and the early 16th century!
I'm not arguing he didn't have a wife, or that he did. On that I'm agnostic. Of course there are interests on both sides in arguing about the authenticity of the fragment, but none of that has any bearing on anything real.
1 comment:
I see you got deeper into this than I did. The breathless blurbs I saw seemed to presume a completely ahistorical attitude to the bible -- expecting a reader that had never imagined that the NT had to be, at a minimum, collated, by people.
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