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Jesus’ wife’ papyrus not a modern forgery, scientific tests say
Published time: April 10, 2014 20:57 Get short URL



Scientists now say that an antiquated piece of papyrus containing
an excerpt concerning the alleged wife of Jesus Christ
is not in fact a forgery.

According to the results of a carbon dating test just now
released, the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” unveiled at a
conference in Rome a year-and-a-half-ago could have originated
as far back as the 700s, shattering allegations that the
fragment of paper had been produced more recently by fraudsters.

Translated to English, the document is adorned with the words
“Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’” and “she will be able to be
my disciple” — two fragments of phrases that not only suggest
that the founder of Christianity may have been married, but that
role of women in the church may have been significantly
different over a thousand years ago.

Karen L. King, a professor at Harvard University who discovered
the text, originally thought that the papyrus was from the
fourth century. But while the latest rounds of testing date the
document to be several hundred years newer than previously
assumed, it also dismisses concerns surrounding the actual
authenticity of the evidence.

The Boston Globe reported on Thursday this week that King’s
document was originally dismissed as a fake by both academic
peers and the Vatican’s official newspaper, but carbon-dating
suggests the ink used on the papyrus is from eighth century
Egypt.

“I’m basically hoping that we can move past the issue of forgery
to questions about the significance of this fragment for the
history of Christianity, for thinking about questions like, ‘Why
does Jesus being married, or not, even matter? Why is it that
people had such an incredible reaction to this?’?” she said in an
interview with the paper.

“Now when I come back and read the fragment, it seems the major
issue being talked about was that Jesus was affirming that wives
and mothers can be his disciples,” King said.

But ahead of the results of this latest tests being revealed,
King too had her doubts. “I took very seriously the comments of
such a wide range of people that it might be a forgery,” she
added to the New York Times, who reported that King now says she
is very confident that the document is in fact genuine.

“When you have all the evidence pointing in one direction, it
doesn’t make it 100 percent, but history is not a place where
100 percent is a common thing,” Dr. King told the Times.

As for others, however, skeptics still have their doubts.

“Nothing is going to change my mind,” Brown University
Egyptologist Leo Depuydt told the Boston Globe 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.”

The document is full of “gross grammatical errors,” he added to
the Times, “seems ripe for a Monty Python sketch” and could have
been authored with a homemade ink substitute that “an
undergraduate student with one semester of Coptic” could have
accomplished. A rebuttal from Depuydt will run alongside Dr.
King’s peer-reviewed paper when it is published by the Harvard
Theological Review this week.

According to the Globe, two rounds of carbon-dating testing were
done on the document—first by the University of Arizona
Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory and then Noreen Tuross
of Harvard.

“I haven’t seen any argument that I find at all compelling that
would indicate that it’s not genuine, it’s not ancient,”Roger
Bagnall, director of New York University’s Institute for the
Study of the Ancient World, added to the Globe.

http://rt.com/usa/jesus-wife-king-papyrus-740/

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