geomancer
09-19-2012, 10:24 PM
<tbody>
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120918163643.htm
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Jesus's Wife? Scholar Announces Existence of a New Early Christian Gospel from Egypt
https://images.sciencedaily.com/2012/09/120918163643.jpg
Papyrus fragment: front. (Credit: © Karen L. King 2012)
ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2012) — Four words on a previously unknown papyrus fragment provide the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus had been married, Harvard Professor Karen King told the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies today.
ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2012) — Four words on a previously unknown papyrus fragment provide the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus had been married, Harvard Professor Karen King told the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies today.
King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, announced the existence of the ancient text at the Congress's meeting, held every four years and hosted this year by the Vatican's Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome. The four words that appear on the fragment translate to, "Jesus said to them, my wife." The words, written in Coptic, a language of ancient Egyptian Christians, are on a papyrus fragment of about one and a half inches by three inches.
"Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim," King said. "This new gospel doesn't prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus's death before they began appealing to Jesus's marital status to support their positions."
Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York, believes the fragment to be authentic based on examination of the papyrus and the handwriting, and Ariel Shisha-Halevy, a Coptic expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, considers it likely to be authentic on the basis of language and grammar, King said. Final judgment on the fragment, King said, depends on further examination by colleagues and further testing, especially of the chemical composition of the ink.
One side of the fragment contains eight incomplete lines of handwriting, while the other side is badly damaged and the ink so faded that only three words and a few individual letters are still visible, even with infrared photography and computer photo enhancement. Despite its tiny size and poor condition, King said, the fragment provides tantalizing glimpses into issues about family, discipleship, and marriage that concerned ancient Christians.
King and colleague AnneMarie Luijendijk, an associate professor of religion at Princeton University, believe that the fragment is part of a newly discovered gospel. Their analysis of the fragment is scheduled for publication in the January 2013 issue of Harvard Theological Review, a peer-reviewed journal.
King has posted a draft of the paper, an extensive question-and-answer on the fragment and its meaning, and images of it, on a page on the Divinity School website.
The brownish-yellow, tattered fragment belongs to an anonymous private collector who contacted King to help translate and analyze it. The collector provided King with a letter from the early 1980s indicating that Professor Gerhard Fecht from the faculty of Egyptology at the Free University in Berlin believed it to be evidence for a possible marriage of Jesus.
King said that when the owner first contacted her about the papyrus, in 2010, "I didn't believe it was authentic and told him I wasn't interested." But the owner was persistent, so in December 2011, King invited him to bring it to her at Harvard. After examining it, in March 2012 King carried the fragment to New York and, together with Luijendijk, took it to Bagnall to be authenticated. When Bagnall's examination of the handwriting, ways that the ink had penetrated and interacted with the papyrus, and other factors, confirmed its likely authenticity, work on the analysis and interpretation of the fragment began in earnest, King said.
Little is known about the discovery of the fragment, but it is believed to have come from Egypt because it is written in Coptic, the form of the Egyptian language used by Christians there during the Roman imperial period. Luijendijk suggested that "a fragment this damaged probably came from an ancient garbage heap like all of the earliest scraps of the New Testament." Since there is writing on both sides of the fragment, it clearly belongs to an ancient book, or codex, not a scroll, she said.
The gospel of which the fragment is but a small part, which King and Luijendijk have named the Gospel of Jesus's Wife for reference purposes, was probably originally written in Greek, the two professors said, and only later translated into Coptic for use among congregations of Coptic-speaking Christians. King dated the time it was written to the second half of the second century because it shows close connections to other newly discovered gospels written at that time, especially the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip.
Like those gospels, it was probably ascribed to one or more of Jesus's closest followers, but the actual author would have remained unknown even if more of it had survived. As it stands, the remaining piece is too small to tell us anything more about who may have composed, read, or circulated the new gospel, King said.
The main topic of the dialogue between Jesus and his disciples is one that deeply concerned early Christians, who were asked to put loyalty to Jesus before their natal families, as the New Testament gospels show. Christians were talking about themselves as a family, with God the father, his son Jesus, and members as brothers and sisters. Twice in the tiny fragment, Jesus speaks of his mother and once of his wife -- one of whom is identified as "Mary." The disciples discuss whether Mary is worthy, and Jesus states that "she can be my disciple." Although less clear, it may be that by portraying Jesus as married, the Gospel of Jesus's Wife conveys a positive theological message about marriage and sexuality, perhaps similar to the Gospel of Philip's view that pure marriage can be an image of divine unity and creativity.
From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether they should marry or be celibate. But, King notes, it was not until around 200 that there is the earliest extant claim that Jesus did not marry, recorded by Clement of Alexandria. He wrote of Christians who claimed that marriage is fornication instituted by the devil, and says people should emulate Jesus in not marrying, King said. A decade or two later, she said, Tertullian of Carthage in North Africa declared that Jesus was "entirely unmarried," and Christians should aim for a similar condition. Yet Tertullian did not condemn sexual relations altogether, allowing for one marriage, although he denounced not only divorce, but even remarriage for widows and widowers as overindulgence. Nearly a century earlier, the New Testament letter of 1 Timothy had warned that people who forbid marriage are following the "doctrines of demons," although it didn't claim Jesus was married to support that point.
In the end, the view that dominated would claim celibacy as the highest form of Christian sexual virtue, while conceding marriage for the sake of reproduction alone. The Gospel of Jesus's Wife, if it was originally written in the late second century, suggests that the whole question of Jesus's marital status only came up over a century after Jesus died as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage, King said. King noted that contemporary debates over celibate clergy, the roles of women, sexuality, and marriage demonstrate that the issues are far from resolved.
"The discovery of this new gospel," King said, "offers an occasion to rethink what we thought we knew by asking what role claims about Jesus's marital status played historically in early Christian controversies over marriage, celibacy, and family. Christian tradition preserved only those voices that claimed Jesus never married. The Gospel of Jesus's Wife now shows that some Christians thought otherwise."
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials (https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news-events/articles/2012/09/16/hds-scholar-announces-existence-of-new-early-christian-gospel-from-egypt) provided by Harvard Divinity School (https://www.hds.harvard.edu). The original article was written by B. D. Colen, Harvard News Office.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
<form action="#" method="post" style="border-top-width: 1px; border-right-width: 1px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 1px; border-top-style: dotted; border-right-style: dotted; border-bottom-style: dotted; border-left-style: dotted; border-top-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); border-right-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); border-bottom-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); border-left-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); padding-top: 2px; padding-right: 2px; padding-bottom: 2px; padding-left: 2px; ">Harvard Divinity School (2012, September 18). Jesus's wife? Scholar announces existence of a new early Christian gospel from Egypt. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 19, 2012, from https://www.sciencedaily.com* /releases/2012/09/120918163643.htm
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Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
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Jesus and Mary Magdalene: A New Gospel Fragment Discovered
By Jonathan Sheen
The Liverpool Observer
19 April 2005
In what may eventually prove to be a serious challenge to traditional Christian ideas of the life of Jesus, scholars at Oxford University announced Tuesday the discovery of a previously unknown Gospel fragment among a collection of ancient Egyptian papyri. The single papyrus sheet was found among the collection known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a horde of ancient texts uncovered in Egypt in the last century. The fragment contains dialogue between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and the words spoken suggest something that can only come as a shock to mainstream Christians: that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife.
"A revelation of this kind, at this time, is beyond ironic," said Lisa Heist, project director at the Oxford Paleographic Center. "It is uncanny."
Heist pointed to the great irony in the discovery's timing.
"There's recently been so much discussion in the popular culture of the possibility of Jesus having been married," she said. "Of course it's because of The Da Vinci Code. And now suddenly this text shows up. It's really an amazing coincidence."
Heist refers to the international bestselling novel by Dan Brown in which part of the plot depends on the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were actually married. In the novel the characters discover a millennia-old conspiracy by the Catholic Church to cover-up the marriage. The Vatican has denied the novel's claims as absurd and has even appointed a cardinal to address the book's many purported inaccuracies.
Now this already heated argument between the Vatican and fans of The Da Vinci Code finds new kindling in the work of classical scholars. At issue are the contents of a single sheet of ancient papyrus.
"Of course as scholars of the ancient world our interests in the papyri are mainly academic," Heist said. "Even so, it will be interesting to see how this particular find plays out in the religious and public domains."
The Gospel fragment in question has been in the Oxford papyrus collection for decades. Until last month, however, it remained illegible. The breakthrough which first allowed the text to be read came thanks to the innovative use of an infrared technology developed for satellite imaging. Starting in 2004, specialists at Oxford have applied this new photographic technique to the task of illuminating texts on the ancient and often badly faded Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The results, according to scholars, are nothing less than astounding. In the case of many of the papyri found in Egypt, although the sheet itself survives, the traces of writing on it are no longer visible to the naked eye. Under infrared light, however, things change dramatically.
"It's like finding the Holy Grail," said Alex Pelling of the new technology. Pelling, Regius Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, predicts great strides forward in our understanding of the ancient world.
"Because of this infrared technology, we will be able to increase our library of ancient literature by ten or twenty percent," he says. "We've already discovered previously unknown texts by Archilochos, Sophocles and Lucian. And now we've uncovered a new Gospel fragment."
Scholars describe how under the photographic technique lines of text almost "jump out" at them from what were previously blackened, tattered sheets.
"It's like shining a special light on invisible ink," Pelling says. "One minute you see nothing. The next minute you can actually read it aloud."
The Gospel fragment, known officially as Oxyrhynchus papyrus 3814, appears to record a discussion between Jesus and his onetime disciple Mary Magdalene, now become his wife.
Mary Magdalene is known from the biblical Gospels as a woman follower of Jesus and as the first person to see him resurrected from the dead. Traditionally she was also said to be a former prostitute from whom Jesus drove out seven devils. Modern scholarship has shown, however, that the tradition of Mary having been a prostitute is based on later church legends and not on any biblical text.
Michael Rorty, professor of New Testament Studies at the Bristol Theological Seminary, has a facsimile of the newly discovered Gospel fragment, and he is in no doubt as to its importance.
"It is unprecedented," he said. "On the one hand it's indisputably ancient, on the other it's unlike anything else we've seen."
According to Rorty, the text presents what appears to be a record of part of the honeymoon taken by Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
"They are traveling by ship from island to island in the Aegean Sea," he said. "The trip seems to be something like the ancient equivalent of our pleasure cruises. Few details are given, but at each stop Mary is recorded as complaining about the food. To her complaints, Jesus each time replies with the same words: 'Hold your peace, woman. The time has not yet come.' Finally the tension comes to a head when they reach Paros."
Rorty provides a tentative translation of this section of the text:
"I expected more from you," she said. "This is not worthy of me. It is not worthy of us."
"Worthy of you?" he replied, stepping over to the balustrade and looking out over the moonlight dancing on the Aegean. "If it weren't for me..." But he didn't finish the sentence."It's true you saved me," she said. "But still. These places we stay in. And this food. This was to be our honeymoon."
"I suppose you think I'm not good enough for you then," he answered, turning back to her.
There was a bitterness in his tone she'd never heard before. She saw the anger flash in his dark eyes as it did when he spoke of the Pharisees.
"Just a carpenter's son from Galilee," he went on. "Not quite worthy of Mary of Magdala. I suppose you'd rather be with those seven devils I drove from you."
"Yes, sometimes," she said, taking up the challenge. "Sometimes I miss the devils. At least they had a sense of humor. At least they wouldn't mix their honeymoon with business. At least with the devils I'd--"
"You can go straight back to them!" he said, cutting her short. "I have come to do my Father's work, and those who are not willing...." [here the text breaks]
"This kind of narrative," Rorty says, "is unprecedented in ancient literature. Here we have an almost modern style brought to bear on this dialogue, one that shows a psychological depth in the characters we are not used to in ancient writing. We can see the struggle between Jesus and his divine mission, on the one hand, and Mary Magdalene and her expectations from a young husband on the other."
Melanie Dowell, professor of Biblical Studies at Kent Theological Seminary, sees in the text an affirmation of Jesus' humanity.
"The Church has always insisted that Jesus was both God and man," she said. "He was in fact all God and all man. This newly discovered Gospel fragment only demonstrates this in a new way. Part of Jesus' complete humanity was his relationship with this woman, Mary."
The argument in Paros is not all the document contains.
"The next legible section of the text is fragmentary," Rorty says. "It shows Mary and Jesus in an unidentifiable location, together on a boat with a fisherman. Mary says something about Gaul, to which Jesus' reply is illegible. Jesus then instructs the fisherman to toss the net into the sea, and the net is pulled up full of fish. Each of the fish has a gold coin in its mouth. Mary says that if it's so easy for Jesus to produce gold, then a honeymoon in Gaul should not have been beyond their means. The next section of text is illegible, but finally it is recorded that Jesus gave 'the only remaining coin' to the fisherman."
Rorty continues: "The question of course arises as to what happened to the other gold coins from all the other fish. Given the estimated length of the text that is illegible, it is my theory that Jesus threw them back into the sea, gold and all. Of course we can't be sure here, but this may have been done as a form of protest against Mary's repeated talk about how a honeymoon in Gaul would have been better. It seems Mary didn't like their honeymoon in the Aegean."
Professor Heist of the Oxford Paleographic Center says that a scholarly version of the original text of this new Gospel fragment, along with an English translation, will be made available to scholars and the general public as soon as possible. Professor Dowell agrees that the text is certain to lead to much debate and discussion.
"We have only begun to apply this new technology to reading the papyri," Professor Pelling says. "Who knows what else remains to be read?"
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Jesus's Wife? Scholar Announces Existence of a New Early Christian Gospel from Egypt
https://images.sciencedaily.com/2012/09/120918163643.jpg
Papyrus fragment: front. (Credit: © Karen L. King 2012)
ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2012) — Four words on a previously unknown papyrus fragment provide the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus had been married, Harvard Professor Karen King told the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies today.
ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2012) — Four words on a previously unknown papyrus fragment provide the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus had been married, Harvard Professor Karen King told the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies today.
King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, announced the existence of the ancient text at the Congress's meeting, held every four years and hosted this year by the Vatican's Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome. The four words that appear on the fragment translate to, "Jesus said to them, my wife." The words, written in Coptic, a language of ancient Egyptian Christians, are on a papyrus fragment of about one and a half inches by three inches.
"Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim," King said. "This new gospel doesn't prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus's death before they began appealing to Jesus's marital status to support their positions."
Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York, believes the fragment to be authentic based on examination of the papyrus and the handwriting, and Ariel Shisha-Halevy, a Coptic expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, considers it likely to be authentic on the basis of language and grammar, King said. Final judgment on the fragment, King said, depends on further examination by colleagues and further testing, especially of the chemical composition of the ink.
One side of the fragment contains eight incomplete lines of handwriting, while the other side is badly damaged and the ink so faded that only three words and a few individual letters are still visible, even with infrared photography and computer photo enhancement. Despite its tiny size and poor condition, King said, the fragment provides tantalizing glimpses into issues about family, discipleship, and marriage that concerned ancient Christians.
King and colleague AnneMarie Luijendijk, an associate professor of religion at Princeton University, believe that the fragment is part of a newly discovered gospel. Their analysis of the fragment is scheduled for publication in the January 2013 issue of Harvard Theological Review, a peer-reviewed journal.
King has posted a draft of the paper, an extensive question-and-answer on the fragment and its meaning, and images of it, on a page on the Divinity School website.
The brownish-yellow, tattered fragment belongs to an anonymous private collector who contacted King to help translate and analyze it. The collector provided King with a letter from the early 1980s indicating that Professor Gerhard Fecht from the faculty of Egyptology at the Free University in Berlin believed it to be evidence for a possible marriage of Jesus.
King said that when the owner first contacted her about the papyrus, in 2010, "I didn't believe it was authentic and told him I wasn't interested." But the owner was persistent, so in December 2011, King invited him to bring it to her at Harvard. After examining it, in March 2012 King carried the fragment to New York and, together with Luijendijk, took it to Bagnall to be authenticated. When Bagnall's examination of the handwriting, ways that the ink had penetrated and interacted with the papyrus, and other factors, confirmed its likely authenticity, work on the analysis and interpretation of the fragment began in earnest, King said.
Little is known about the discovery of the fragment, but it is believed to have come from Egypt because it is written in Coptic, the form of the Egyptian language used by Christians there during the Roman imperial period. Luijendijk suggested that "a fragment this damaged probably came from an ancient garbage heap like all of the earliest scraps of the New Testament." Since there is writing on both sides of the fragment, it clearly belongs to an ancient book, or codex, not a scroll, she said.
The gospel of which the fragment is but a small part, which King and Luijendijk have named the Gospel of Jesus's Wife for reference purposes, was probably originally written in Greek, the two professors said, and only later translated into Coptic for use among congregations of Coptic-speaking Christians. King dated the time it was written to the second half of the second century because it shows close connections to other newly discovered gospels written at that time, especially the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip.
Like those gospels, it was probably ascribed to one or more of Jesus's closest followers, but the actual author would have remained unknown even if more of it had survived. As it stands, the remaining piece is too small to tell us anything more about who may have composed, read, or circulated the new gospel, King said.
The main topic of the dialogue between Jesus and his disciples is one that deeply concerned early Christians, who were asked to put loyalty to Jesus before their natal families, as the New Testament gospels show. Christians were talking about themselves as a family, with God the father, his son Jesus, and members as brothers and sisters. Twice in the tiny fragment, Jesus speaks of his mother and once of his wife -- one of whom is identified as "Mary." The disciples discuss whether Mary is worthy, and Jesus states that "she can be my disciple." Although less clear, it may be that by portraying Jesus as married, the Gospel of Jesus's Wife conveys a positive theological message about marriage and sexuality, perhaps similar to the Gospel of Philip's view that pure marriage can be an image of divine unity and creativity.
From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether they should marry or be celibate. But, King notes, it was not until around 200 that there is the earliest extant claim that Jesus did not marry, recorded by Clement of Alexandria. He wrote of Christians who claimed that marriage is fornication instituted by the devil, and says people should emulate Jesus in not marrying, King said. A decade or two later, she said, Tertullian of Carthage in North Africa declared that Jesus was "entirely unmarried," and Christians should aim for a similar condition. Yet Tertullian did not condemn sexual relations altogether, allowing for one marriage, although he denounced not only divorce, but even remarriage for widows and widowers as overindulgence. Nearly a century earlier, the New Testament letter of 1 Timothy had warned that people who forbid marriage are following the "doctrines of demons," although it didn't claim Jesus was married to support that point.
In the end, the view that dominated would claim celibacy as the highest form of Christian sexual virtue, while conceding marriage for the sake of reproduction alone. The Gospel of Jesus's Wife, if it was originally written in the late second century, suggests that the whole question of Jesus's marital status only came up over a century after Jesus died as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage, King said. King noted that contemporary debates over celibate clergy, the roles of women, sexuality, and marriage demonstrate that the issues are far from resolved.
"The discovery of this new gospel," King said, "offers an occasion to rethink what we thought we knew by asking what role claims about Jesus's marital status played historically in early Christian controversies over marriage, celibacy, and family. Christian tradition preserved only those voices that claimed Jesus never married. The Gospel of Jesus's Wife now shows that some Christians thought otherwise."
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials (https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news-events/articles/2012/09/16/hds-scholar-announces-existence-of-new-early-christian-gospel-from-egypt) provided by Harvard Divinity School (https://www.hds.harvard.edu). The original article was written by B. D. Colen, Harvard News Office.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
<form action="#" method="post" style="border-top-width: 1px; border-right-width: 1px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 1px; border-top-style: dotted; border-right-style: dotted; border-bottom-style: dotted; border-left-style: dotted; border-top-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); border-right-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); border-bottom-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); border-left-color: rgb(255, 0, 0); padding-top: 2px; padding-right: 2px; padding-bottom: 2px; padding-left: 2px; ">Harvard Divinity School (2012, September 18). Jesus's wife? Scholar announces existence of a new early Christian gospel from Egypt. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 19, 2012, from https://www.sciencedaily.com* /releases/2012/09/120918163643.htm
</form>
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jesus and Mary Magdalene: A New Gospel Fragment Discovered
By Jonathan Sheen
The Liverpool Observer
19 April 2005
In what may eventually prove to be a serious challenge to traditional Christian ideas of the life of Jesus, scholars at Oxford University announced Tuesday the discovery of a previously unknown Gospel fragment among a collection of ancient Egyptian papyri. The single papyrus sheet was found among the collection known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a horde of ancient texts uncovered in Egypt in the last century. The fragment contains dialogue between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and the words spoken suggest something that can only come as a shock to mainstream Christians: that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife.
"A revelation of this kind, at this time, is beyond ironic," said Lisa Heist, project director at the Oxford Paleographic Center. "It is uncanny."
Heist pointed to the great irony in the discovery's timing.
"There's recently been so much discussion in the popular culture of the possibility of Jesus having been married," she said. "Of course it's because of The Da Vinci Code. And now suddenly this text shows up. It's really an amazing coincidence."
Heist refers to the international bestselling novel by Dan Brown in which part of the plot depends on the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were actually married. In the novel the characters discover a millennia-old conspiracy by the Catholic Church to cover-up the marriage. The Vatican has denied the novel's claims as absurd and has even appointed a cardinal to address the book's many purported inaccuracies.
Now this already heated argument between the Vatican and fans of The Da Vinci Code finds new kindling in the work of classical scholars. At issue are the contents of a single sheet of ancient papyrus.
"Of course as scholars of the ancient world our interests in the papyri are mainly academic," Heist said. "Even so, it will be interesting to see how this particular find plays out in the religious and public domains."
The Gospel fragment in question has been in the Oxford papyrus collection for decades. Until last month, however, it remained illegible. The breakthrough which first allowed the text to be read came thanks to the innovative use of an infrared technology developed for satellite imaging. Starting in 2004, specialists at Oxford have applied this new photographic technique to the task of illuminating texts on the ancient and often badly faded Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The results, according to scholars, are nothing less than astounding. In the case of many of the papyri found in Egypt, although the sheet itself survives, the traces of writing on it are no longer visible to the naked eye. Under infrared light, however, things change dramatically.
"It's like finding the Holy Grail," said Alex Pelling of the new technology. Pelling, Regius Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, predicts great strides forward in our understanding of the ancient world.
"Because of this infrared technology, we will be able to increase our library of ancient literature by ten or twenty percent," he says. "We've already discovered previously unknown texts by Archilochos, Sophocles and Lucian. And now we've uncovered a new Gospel fragment."
Scholars describe how under the photographic technique lines of text almost "jump out" at them from what were previously blackened, tattered sheets.
"It's like shining a special light on invisible ink," Pelling says. "One minute you see nothing. The next minute you can actually read it aloud."
The Gospel fragment, known officially as Oxyrhynchus papyrus 3814, appears to record a discussion between Jesus and his onetime disciple Mary Magdalene, now become his wife.
Mary Magdalene is known from the biblical Gospels as a woman follower of Jesus and as the first person to see him resurrected from the dead. Traditionally she was also said to be a former prostitute from whom Jesus drove out seven devils. Modern scholarship has shown, however, that the tradition of Mary having been a prostitute is based on later church legends and not on any biblical text.
Michael Rorty, professor of New Testament Studies at the Bristol Theological Seminary, has a facsimile of the newly discovered Gospel fragment, and he is in no doubt as to its importance.
"It is unprecedented," he said. "On the one hand it's indisputably ancient, on the other it's unlike anything else we've seen."
According to Rorty, the text presents what appears to be a record of part of the honeymoon taken by Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
"They are traveling by ship from island to island in the Aegean Sea," he said. "The trip seems to be something like the ancient equivalent of our pleasure cruises. Few details are given, but at each stop Mary is recorded as complaining about the food. To her complaints, Jesus each time replies with the same words: 'Hold your peace, woman. The time has not yet come.' Finally the tension comes to a head when they reach Paros."
Rorty provides a tentative translation of this section of the text:
"I expected more from you," she said. "This is not worthy of me. It is not worthy of us."
"Worthy of you?" he replied, stepping over to the balustrade and looking out over the moonlight dancing on the Aegean. "If it weren't for me..." But he didn't finish the sentence."It's true you saved me," she said. "But still. These places we stay in. And this food. This was to be our honeymoon."
"I suppose you think I'm not good enough for you then," he answered, turning back to her.
There was a bitterness in his tone she'd never heard before. She saw the anger flash in his dark eyes as it did when he spoke of the Pharisees.
"Just a carpenter's son from Galilee," he went on. "Not quite worthy of Mary of Magdala. I suppose you'd rather be with those seven devils I drove from you."
"Yes, sometimes," she said, taking up the challenge. "Sometimes I miss the devils. At least they had a sense of humor. At least they wouldn't mix their honeymoon with business. At least with the devils I'd--"
"You can go straight back to them!" he said, cutting her short. "I have come to do my Father's work, and those who are not willing...." [here the text breaks]
"This kind of narrative," Rorty says, "is unprecedented in ancient literature. Here we have an almost modern style brought to bear on this dialogue, one that shows a psychological depth in the characters we are not used to in ancient writing. We can see the struggle between Jesus and his divine mission, on the one hand, and Mary Magdalene and her expectations from a young husband on the other."
Melanie Dowell, professor of Biblical Studies at Kent Theological Seminary, sees in the text an affirmation of Jesus' humanity.
"The Church has always insisted that Jesus was both God and man," she said. "He was in fact all God and all man. This newly discovered Gospel fragment only demonstrates this in a new way. Part of Jesus' complete humanity was his relationship with this woman, Mary."
The argument in Paros is not all the document contains.
"The next legible section of the text is fragmentary," Rorty says. "It shows Mary and Jesus in an unidentifiable location, together on a boat with a fisherman. Mary says something about Gaul, to which Jesus' reply is illegible. Jesus then instructs the fisherman to toss the net into the sea, and the net is pulled up full of fish. Each of the fish has a gold coin in its mouth. Mary says that if it's so easy for Jesus to produce gold, then a honeymoon in Gaul should not have been beyond their means. The next section of text is illegible, but finally it is recorded that Jesus gave 'the only remaining coin' to the fisherman."
Rorty continues: "The question of course arises as to what happened to the other gold coins from all the other fish. Given the estimated length of the text that is illegible, it is my theory that Jesus threw them back into the sea, gold and all. Of course we can't be sure here, but this may have been done as a form of protest against Mary's repeated talk about how a honeymoon in Gaul would have been better. It seems Mary didn't like their honeymoon in the Aegean."
Professor Heist of the Oxford Paleographic Center says that a scholarly version of the original text of this new Gospel fragment, along with an English translation, will be made available to scholars and the general public as soon as possible. Professor Dowell agrees that the text is certain to lead to much debate and discussion.
"We have only begun to apply this new technology to reading the papyri," Professor Pelling says. "Who knows what else remains to be read?"
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