by Doug Kutilek
There was a recent “sensation” in the world of religion when it was announced by a Harvard professor that an allegedly ancient scrap of papyrus (tentatively dated to the 3rd to 5th centuries), written in Coptic, the ancient language of Egypt, had been discovered and deciphered, which contained words ascribed to Jesus in only partially preserved sentences which mentioned his wife, who was further identified as one of his disciples. Jesus with a wife? And a wife who was further described as a disciple? The impression intended to be left by those who announced this “find” was that here, in this document, was a picture of “real Christianity,” with truths about Jesus suppressed and concealed by his later “orthodox” followers, to avoid scandal.
A swirl of controversy arose immediately. First, it was “unprovenanced,” that is, its time and place of discovery — its historical context — as well as the name of the discoverer were unstated and presumably unknown. This is always a red flag. It doesn’t necessarily mean the find is bogus, but it screams, “proceed with caution.” Second, the scrap of papyrus, smaller than a standard business card, had remarkably neat edges. Fragmentary papyrus documents from antiquity all but invariably have jagged edges, at least on two or three, and usually on all four edges. Red flag number two. And then when the Coptic writing was examined it turns out the shape of the letters was decidedly non-standard Coptic, and the language, vocabulary, and sentence structure were definitely not those of someone who used Coptic on a regular basis. Red flag — I might say, strike three. A later critique noted that a line of the text had been copied from the text of the pseudepigraphal Coptic “Gospel of Thomas” as posted on a website, complete with a modern copying error! As quickly as the sensational find was announced, it was dismissed and discredited as a forgery, and not a very good one at that.
Central to this whole sensation — and clearly the intent of the modern forger, whoever he or she may be — was the implication that the early disciples must have known that Jesus was married, and that he, as a good modern feminist (!) had at least one female apostle, and that the chauvinistic men who dominated early Christianity suppressed these truths, concealing the real Jesus.
Allowing for the sake of argument their basic premises — that Jesus, a first-century Jewish rabbi-philosopher (an entirely human one they would insist), had a wife — I want to explore the gratuitous assumption that Christians would have had motive to suppress this “truth.” Though Jesus was not formally trained in the schools of Jerusalem as a teacher or scholar in the Gospels, he is reported to have been commonly called “rabbi“ (in the sense of “teacher”) by His disciples (Mark 9:5; 11:21; John 1:38, 49), by Judas (Matthew 26:25, 49), by the crowds at Capernaum (John 6:25), and even by Nicodemus, the learned Sanhedrin member and Pharisee.
Among the Jews of that era (and later as well) there was no “scandal” in a religious teacher being married, indeed marriage was generally considered a sacred duty, with religious teachers expected to set a worthy example. So, had Jesus been married, as many other Jewish religious teachers of that day, He would have been entirely within the “norm” of social custom and practice; there would be no motive for the Christians in the first two centuries to conceal that fact.
Furthermore, Jesus expressly endorsed marriage as an honorable, divinely ordained and ordered institution (Matthew 19:1-10). Not only so, but He graced the marriage at Cana of Galilee with His attendance and that of His early followers (John 2:1-11). By no means was he “anti-marriage.”
But the coup de grâce in this discussion comes from the apostle Paul. He wrote 1 Corinthians about 25 years after the death of Jesus, while there were still thousands of living witnesses to the life and teaching of Jesus (compare 1 Corinthians 15:6), who would have known from direct personal knowledge whether Jesus was married or not. In chapter nine, Paul is building a case defending the right of Bible teachers to receive financial compensation sufficient to support them without their having to secure secular employment as well, and support not only sufficient for themselves, but also to support any immediate family they may have, including a wife.
To prove his own right to financial support from the churches, not only for himself but also for a wife if he had one, Paul appeals to the example of the other apostles in chapter nine, verses three through five, and the Lord’s brothers — that would include at least James and Jude (in Galatians 1:19, Paul clearly refers to James as an “apostle” in some sense of the word), and naturally Cephas (Peter). Of course, to really clinch his case, the most obvious example to refer to would be Jesus Himself, if in fact He was married, as the forged Coptic document under consideration suggests. But Paul is strangely, remarkably silent about such — impossible to explain if the assumption were true. No, in an ideal situation where appeal to Jesus’ marital status would yield an unanswerable argument, Paul is completely, absolutely silent. The only viable explanation of his silence is that Jesus was in fact not ever married — as the New Testament unmistakably attests. There is but one explanation: Jesus was not ever married.