Jesus' Wife (Not)

Karen King holds the papyrus in question
(Boston Globe/WSJ photo)

It wasn't great literature, but it was a provocative page-turner back in the oughts.

I read Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code in 2005, which (spoiler alert!) promulgated the theory that Jesus married and had children. Though fictional, the book sparked keen interest in the theory that Mary Magdalene was Jesus' wife. Fame and fortune would flow to the scholar who would find proof of this thesis.

In 2012 Harvard Divinity Professor Karen King unveiled the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife based on a papyrus fragment that purportedly said,

"“Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . .’ ”

According to journalist and book reviewer Alex Beam in the WSJ

A married Jesus would turn the Catholic Church on its head. The papyrus hinted at a wife named Mary, presumed to be Mary Magdalene, painted as a prostitute by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century. The New Testament, however, never mentions a marriage, other than in references to the Church or holy Jerusalem as Christ’s spiritual bride. Christ’s purported bachelorhood undergirds the Catholic doctrine of priestly celibacy. If the papyrus accurately described a wife of Christ, “this means that the whole Catholic claim of a celibate priesthood based on Jesus’s celibacy has no historical foundation,” noted Ms. King, a feminist scholar and expert on the apocryphal, second-century Gospel of Mary.

Journalist Ariel Sabar's latest book, Veritas, recounts the history of Professor King's blockbuster finding, the subsequent re-examination, textual and physical, of the papyrus, and its ultimate debunking. Not helping Professor King's credibility was the background of the person who produced the fragment, one Walter Fritz. Mr. Fritz was a Berlin Egyptology student who ended up in Florida making pornographic films.

Ariel Sabar accuses Karen King of desiring and driving toward a conclusion that the evidence does not support.

“[Ms. King’s] ideological commitments were choreographing her practice of history,” Mr. Sabar writes. “The story came first; the dates managed after. The narrative before the evidence; the news conference before the scientific analysis.”

Ideological objectives have subverted premier education and news institutions that once held the search for truth (veritas) to be their highest calling.

Now their mission is combatting some -isms and elevating others. The truth takes a back seat to the narrative.

And if you want to take down the 2,000-year-old Christian narrative, you're gonna need a bigger piece of paper.