Gospel of Jesus’s Wife papyrus
If there is one attribute you are likely to acquire once you’ve been studying criminal investigative analysis for a while as I have, it’s skepticism. You learn never to take anything at face value and look to the evidence before forming any theory of the case.
This skepticism tends to permeate every aspect of your life. So when news reports surfaced that scholars and scientific experts from Harvard, MIT and Columbia had examined a small fragment of a document written on papyrus that purported to be “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” and declared it genuine, I was intrigued . . . but skeptical.
First, let us state firmly that in pronouncing the fragment authentic, the academics were not claiming it proved Jesus’s marital status one way or another. Professor Karen L. King, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, who announced the discovery of the papyrus in 2012 and gave it its informal name, was quick to point out that the document “should not be taken as proof that Jesus, the historical person, was actually married.” All the experts were saying was that it appeared to be scientifically and contextually of the time period that was claimed for it – that is, a fourth century Egyptian Coptic translation of a Greek document probably written in the second half of the second century in which Jesus refers to “my wife.”
But here’s where the healthy dose of skepticism comes in. I’m no biblical scholar by any means, but John Douglas has been my personal tutor for 20 years, so I do know how to evaluate evidence. And the first thing you look for is anything that seems radically out of place. Even if all of the other evidence adds up, if you find a particular anomaly, you need to go back and reevaluate before solidifying your position or theory of the case.
And when I examined the so-called Gospel of Jesus’s wife, I noted something that definitely felt anomalous to me. If you look at the third full line from the bottom, the first legible written letters you see are “CNN.” To me, this calls the credibility of the entire document into question.
Again, I don’t claim to be a scholar of antiquities, but I once did a film project with Ted Turner, and I know for a fact that CNN was not around in the time of historical Jesus. If it had been, you can imagine what their coverage of the Resurrection would have been like.
Now, I have to tell you that my longtime friend BD Colen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who now works at Harvard, yesterday called my observation to the attention of the mega-expert, Professor King herself. In response to my observation, she claims that the second “N” is actually a Greek alpha.
And this brings up another important point. Some scholars feel that the reference to “my wife” actually prefigures the establishment of the Christian Church, to which Jesus and his followers consider him married.
Our regular readers know our stand on “confirmation bias” – the tendency to see things in a way that confirms your already existing theories, beliefs or world view.
So just as scholars may disagree on the literal or figurative meaning of “my wife,” experts and total know-nothings like me may disagree on why the letters themselves spell out.
Professor King, you may see an alpha, but I see CNN. That’s the story I’m sticking to.
And so you’ll forgive me if I’m still skeptical.
Is John looking into the case in Pittsburgh to whose links I posted? Or would he be interested in looking into it?
lol…I envy your apprenticeship to Mr. Douglas. Good way to go through life, unsettling, sometimes on the outside, but in the end, better.
The other aspect of academic research is the money. Make a name for yourself early, and it doesn’t matter much if your preliminary research doesn’t stand the test of time.
If there was a Mrs. Christ, she’d have been just as famous as Jesus. Best I can tell, Jesus had a lot of man friends, though. And frenemies. No way to block someone on papyrus, I guess.