Analyses of Jesus' Wife Fragment Finally Published

[Sparko]

Also, there is the matter of the church being the bride of Christ

I already mentioned that, but even so, that is a symbol. Unless you think Polygamy is a good thing since the church is all of the saints. Both sexes too. Taking that literally could lead to some very problematic theology.

[Teallaura]

Sure. Those who think it is very possible that Jesus was married would not necessarily think that Jesus planned on getting crucified and do not see most of the gospels as having much of a biographical or historical focus, at least not in the modern sense of the term. But, even with those assumptions, I would still think that Jesus was probably celibate and a few of his teachings suggest this.

Agreed.

[KingsGambit]

I already mentioned that, but even so, that is a symbol. Unless you think Polygamy is a good thing since the church is all of the saints. Both sexes too. Taking that literally could lead to some very problematic theology.

'Twas a joke

[Sparko]

'Twas a joke

I am reporting you to Mickiel.

[KingsGambit]

I am reporting you to Mickiel.

Harumph! Peace to you on your journey.

[Sparko]

Harumph! Peace to you on your journey.

I don't like being Harumphed! I am leaving.

[Juvenal]

Papyrus Referring to Jesus’ Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say

The test results do not prove that Jesus had a wife or disciples who were women, only that the fragment is more likely a snippet from an ancient manuscript than a fake, the scholars agree. Karen L. King, the historian at Harvard Divinity School who gave the papyrus its name and fame, has said all along that it should not be regarded as evidence that Jesus married, only that early Christians were actively discussing celibacy, sex, marriage and discipleship.

[One Bad Pig]

I've been following this for a couple years. Here is a neat analysis of the evidence for the forgery of the fragment.

Here is Prof. Watson's response to the recent article. In sum, the new evidence largely doesn't address his reasons for finding it to be a forgery; the text seems to be dependent on a modern edition of the Gospel of Thomas (to the point of including typographical errors only attested in the modern edition).

[Paprika]

Here is Prof. Watson's response to the recent article. In sum, the new evidence largely doesn't address his reasons for finding it to be a forgery; the text seems to be dependent on a modern edition of the Gospel of Thomas (to the point of including typographical errors only attested in the modern edition).

Would it be possible to forge the ink?

[Teallaura]

Would it be possible to forge the ink?

Yep.

http://markgoodacre.org/Watson4.pdf

[Paprika]

Yep.

http://markgoodacre.org/Watson4.pdf

I've read the paper, but I was hoping for more confirmation that it could be so.

[Teallaura]

Shy of carbon dating how would you tell the difference between modern and ancient lamp black? It's an easy ink to make and reasonable care with the formula should keep all but radiocarbon dating from identifying it.

[One Bad Pig]

Shy of carbon dating how would you tell the difference between modern and ancient lamp black? It's an easy ink to make and reasonable care with the formula should keep all but radiocarbon dating from identifying it.

A really clever forger could even scrape ink off an ancient manuscript and reconstitute it.

[Juvenal]

Here is Prof. Watson's response to the recent article. In sum, the new evidence largely doesn't address his reasons for finding it to be a forgery.

Thanks, OBP.

My schedule is ... :shrieklichkeit: (<— we need that smiley, and yes, that's the way I want it spelled) at the mo', so I can't contribute at anything near a good standard.

But here are some initial reactions.

First, the Goodacre Blog you linked in your earlier post:

The Jesus' Wife Fragment: How the Forgery Was Done

What's this "How the forgery was done" business? Has that been concluded already? I haven't seen that conclusion anywhere else. It can't possibly be a consensus, or I'd be seeing it elsewhere.

My first reaction is that this guy does not follow the usual standards of academic objectivity. The eyebrow has been raised.

And in fact his evidence is at best circumstantial, and at worst, made up of little more than personal bias.

1. Gos. Jes. Wife borrows the framework for a simple dialogue between Jesus and his disciples from Gos. Thom. 12.

2. All decipherable words in Gos. Jes. Wife appear in Gos. Thom. with a single exception: TAHIME (“my wife.”)

3. The words of each line of text in Gos. Jes. Wife are found in close proximity to each other in Gos. Thom.

4. The forger has slightly redacted Gos. Thom. by making masculine pronouns feminine and (attempting to) transform affirmative/negative statements into their opposites.

5. More than half a dozen notable textual features in Gos. Jes. Wife can be attributed to a forger’s dependence on Grondin’s Interlinear.

Numbers 1 and 4 are circumstantial, but interesting in my view for another reason, apart from evidence of forgery, because they support GoThomas as a literary source for the author of GoJesuswife. Hey, GoJw's got to have been based on something, right?

Numbers 2 and 3, though, are just bad statistics. You can see the fragment in all of these articles. The available sample of words and contiguities isn't big enough for anything but garbage-out analyses. Number 2 is worse; it's bad logic.

Number 5 is beyond my ability to critique, but lays to rest any lingering doubts that Goodacre may be referring to a 4th-8th century forger, unless Grondin was an early church father. And that's where I stop taking Goodacre seriously, because the fragment's papyrus and inks are now dated with a terminus ante quem that removes Grondin from the picture entirely.

The papyrus fragment has now been analyzed by professors of electrical engineering, chemistry and biology at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembles other ancient papyri from the fourth to the eighth centuries. (Scientists at the University of Arizona, who dated the fragment to centuries before the birth of Jesus, concluded that their results were unreliable.)

And no, critiques of the dating techniques do not constitute evidence of a modern forgery. They do no more than give us reasons to be hesitant when beginning analyses with an understanding that this is a fourth to eighth century fragment.

Your immediate link is to Professor Watson's response (PDF) which includes a quote from Leo Depuydt:

I am personally 100% certain that the Wife of Jesus Fragment is a forgery. I have otherwise never deemed ink or papyrus tests necessary or relevant in light of the evidence set forth below. I will make three brief observations, however. First, the ink tests show chemical composition, in this case carbon-based “lamp black,” not age. Carbon-based ink is exactly the type that I would have used if I had been the forger. Second, as for the papyrus, nothing is more common than for forged paintings to be painted on an old piece of wood. And third, in a letter of July 19, 2013, accompanying his report, the principal investigator of the radiocarbon dating test, Professor Greg Hodgins, states that certain stable isotope measurements “[cast] doubt upon the validity of the radiocarbon date.”

I don't see any reason to read that beyond the first sentence. But I did anyway. And I'm now officially blaming Goodacre for wasting my time.

The eyebrow is lowered, and replaced with an entirely justifiable sneer. Into the bucket with Holding you go, Goodacre.


Understand I take it for granted there are no surviving texts with reliable quotations from Jesus — sorry, I put most of the canonical gospels in that category, too — but that if he had a wife we'd know about it already, and that pseudepigrapha are more numerous in history than authentic texts. Paul's letters, by their pillorying of his own pseudigraphers — a pillorying ironically copied by his copiers for verisimilitude according to Ehrman — make it clear that that last was already an issue with Christian texts in the first century.

So it's reasonable to assume from the outset, at the very least, that a fragment from the fourth to eighth centuries can't be mined for biographical information on Jesus.

It can be mined for information on fourth to eighth century Christian splinter groups, though, and that's what I was trying to highlight with my earlier post.

As ever, Jesse

[Paprika]

And that's where I stop taking Goodacre seriously, because the fragment's papyrus and inks are now dated with a terminus ante quem that removes Grondin from the picture entirely.

The papyrus was dated, but the ink wasn't.