Scholars on
Wednesday questioned the much-publicized discovery by a Harvard scholar that a
4th century fragment of papyrus provided the first evidence that some early
Christians believed Jesus was married.
And experts in the
illicit antiquities trade also wondered about the motive of the fragment's
anonymous owner, noting that the document's value has likely increased amid the
publicity of the still-unproven find.
Karen King, a
professor of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, announced the
finding Tuesday at an international congress on Coptic studies in Rome. The
text, written in Coptic and probably translated from a 2nd century Greek text,
contains a dialogue in which Jesus refers to "my wife" whom he
identifies as Mary.
King's paper, and
the front-page attention it received in some U.S. newspapers that got advance
word about it, was a hot topic of conversation Wednesday at the conference.
Christian tradition
has long held that Jesus was unmarried, although there is no reliable
historical evidence to support that, King said. Any evidence pointing to
whether Jesus was married or had a female disciple could have ripple effects in
current debates over the role of women in the church.
Stephen Emmel, a professor
of Coptology at the University of Muenster who was on the international
advisory panel that reviewed the 2006 discovery of the Gospel of Judas, said
the text accurately quotes Jesus as saying "my wife." But he
questioned whether the document was authentic.
"There's
something about this fragment in its appearance and also in the grammar of the
Coptic that strikes me as being not completely convincing somehow," he
said in an interview on the sidelines of the conference.
Another participant
at the congress, Alin Suciu, a papyrologist at the University of Hamburg, was
more blunt.
"I would say
it's a forgery. The script doesn't look authentic" when compared to other
samples of Coptic papyrus script dated to the 4th century, he said.
King acknowledged
Wednesday that questions remain about the fragment, and she welcomed the
feedback from her colleagues. She said she planned to subject the document to
ink tests to determine if the chemical components match those used in
antiquity.
"We still have
some work to do, testing the ink and so on and so forth, but what is exciting
about this fragment is that it's the first case we have of Christians claiming
that Jesus had a wife," she said.
She stressed that
the text, assuming it's authentic, doesn't provide any historical evidence that
Jesus was actually married, only that some two centuries after he died, some
early Christians believed he had a wife.
Wolf-Peter Funk, a
noted Coptic linguist, said there was no way to evaluate the significance of
the fragment because it has no context. It's a partial text and tiny, measuring
4 centimeters by 8 centimeters (1.5 inches by 3 inches), about the size of a
small cellphone.
"There are
thousands of scraps of papyrus where you find crazy things," said Funk,
co-director of a project editing the Nag Hammadi Coptic library at Laval
University in Quebec. "It can be anything."
He, too, doubted
the authenticity, saying the form of the fragment was "suspicious."
Ancient papyrus
fragments have been frequently cut up by unscrupulous antiquities dealers
seeking to make more money.
An anonymous
collector brought King the fragment in December 2011, seeking her help in
translating and understanding it. In March, she brought it to two papyrologists
who determined it was very likely authentic.
On Tuesday, Harvard
Divinity School announced the finding to great fanfare and said King's paper
would be published in January's Harvard Theological Review. Harvard said the
fragment most likely came from Egypt, and that its earliest documentation is
from the early 1980s indicating that a now-deceased professor in Germany
thought it evidence of a possible marriage of Jesus.
Some archaeologists
were quick to question Harvard's ethics, noting that the fragment has no known
provenance, or history of where it's been, and that its current owner may have
a financial interest in the publicity being generated about it.
King has said the
owner wants to sell his collection to Harvard.
"There are all
sorts of really dodgy things about this," said David Gill, professor of
archaeological heritage at University Campus Suffolk and author of the Looting
Matters blog, which closely follows the illicit trade in antiquities. "This
looks to me as if any sensible, responsible academic would keep their distance
from it."
He cited the
ongoing debate in academia over publishing articles about possibly dubiously
obtained antiquities, thus potentially fueling the illicit market.
The Archaeological
Institute of America, for example, won't publish articles in its journal
announcing the discovery of antiquities without a proven provenance that were
acquired after a UNESCO convention fighting the illicit trade went into effect
in 1973.
Similarly, many
American museums have adopted policies to no longer acquire antiquities without
a provenance, after being slapped with successful efforts by countries like
Italy to reclaim looted treasures.
Archaeologists also
complain that the looting of antiquities removes them from their historical
context, depriving scholars of a wealth of information.
However, AnneMarie
Luijendijk, the Princeton University expert whom King consulted to authenticate
the papyrus, said the fragment fit all the rules and criteria established by
the International Association of Papyrologists. She noted that papyrus
fragments frequently do not have a provenance, simply because so many were
removed from Egypt before such issues were of concern.
She acknowledged
the dilemma about buying such antiquities but said refraining from publishing
articles about them is another matter.
"You wouldn't
let an important new text go to waste," she said.
Hany Sadak, the
director general of the Coptic Museum in Cairo, said the fragment's existence
was unknown to Egypt's antiquities authorities until news articles this week.
"I personally
think, as a researcher, that the paper is not authentic because it was, if it
had been in Egypt before, we would have known of it and we would have heard of
it before it left Egypt," he said
