A Married Jesus - Newly Found "Gospel of Jesus's Wife"
A newly released fragment dubbed "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife" has been released by the Harvard School of Divinity.
The draft of the document, written by Karen L. King can be found here.
The article can be found at: http://www.hds.harvard.edu/faculty-research/research-projects/the-g...
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Ferran Sanz Orriols on
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thanks for the post, Joe!!! :-)
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Permalink Reply by Hari Menon on
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Dear Joe - A lot of people can now rest happy and vindicated !!I hope the Apostles do not turn out to be his kids from an extended family and their gospels nothing more than a lot of disgruntled inheritors trying to unravel the mysteries of an intestate elder .
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Permalink Reply by Dr. Lewis Keizer on
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As I pointed out to people who asked me, the Coptic fragment uses a word that can mean wife but also female companion, close friend, relative, or even a daughter. Whatever its source, it is late 2nd century at the earliest and clearly uses familiar gnostic jargon. It is not a source for the historical life of Yeshua. That said, in my historical novel Yeshua: The Unknown Jesus, I have him as married to a brilliant women in Babylon who dies along with their child during pregnancy, and whose companionship exists on a soul-mate (yechid-yechidah) level to help guide him through his public ministry. As I explained in the rationale for my fictional plot, "The unique sympathy and understanding for women that characterizes so much of the teachings of Yeshua, taken with the fact that he was the only Rav of his era that accepted female disciples (one exception: a Galilean Rabbi who secretly taught his daughter), clearly indicates he was not an ascetic hermit with no experience of women. I postulate that he loved, married, and lost his wife before becoming a wandering master and prophet, and that he had no children from this union. I further postulate a powerful psychic connection between Yeshua and the soul of his extraordinary wife that significantly enabled his ministry and ended any desire to remarry and become a householder."
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Permalink Reply by Sharon on
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Here's more info, as the Harvard Review withdrew the article: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bi...
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ModeratorPermalink Reply by John on -
I would take this more as a delay in publishing. A one-sentence issue/change on authenticity could make it publishable.
2 out 3 claim it is authentic. that is no "show stopper." King has written very controversial items in the past.
just my two cents.
John
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King does not claim that this fragment is evidence that Yeshua was married. Only that by the 4th century the issue of marriage with Miriam Magdala was being assumed by at least one Gnostic group. I think the provenance could be as early as late 2nd century, but after the Gospel of Philip, which seems to have been earlier ("sayings" format; Miriam as "companion"). Also, there is no evidence it is from a lost Gnostic gospel. Early Gnostic gospels tended to have been a string of sayings like Philip, of whom only Thomas has a true, historical Aramaic core of davrim and mashlim from the earliest Apostolic oral tradition. The so-called "Gospel" of Miriam (Magdala) is in the form of a revelation and, in my opinion, quite early, representing Johannine--i.e. Magdalenic--oral tradition. Miriam Magdala was probably Yeshua's greatest Apostle. She was about the age of his mother. How do we know? The most credible legends about her from Eastern Orthodoxy say she traveled to Asia Minor with the mother of Yeshua and the youngest of all Apostles, John, whose brother James had been martyred. ("Mother, behold thy son;" John put under Miriam's care according to Johannine tradition.) They both shared the initiatic name Boanerges, and Miriam had been given the initiatic name Magdala, which means "Tower of Strength." (In the synoptic gospels only Shimone is given an initiatic name because the other apostolic traditions were marginalized in Mark and the other synoptics. Yeshua re-named him Cephas, meaning "Rock," translated into the Koine Greek of the NT as Petros, and into English as Peter.) The English name Mary Magdalene means Miriam of Magdala, but there never was town or village called Magdala. Miriam may have been from Migdal and could have been called Miriam of Migdal. But Magdala was probably the initiatic name given by Yeshua. (The initiatic name tradition was perpetuated in Christianity as the "Christian" name given at baptism; but Yeshua gave the new name to those he had initiated into the Razim Ha-Malkuth Ha-Shamayyim, incorrectly translated as the Mysteries of the "Kingdom" of "Heaven." The baptism of John that Yeshua's disciples performed was not an initiation, but a preliminary vow.) The Gospel of Mary describes a Merkabah-like ascent overseen by Yeshua. Unlike Paul's ascent described in I Corinthians, which raised his consciousness to the Pardes of the Third Heaven (Paul never knew or studied with Yeshua), Miriam's seems to have taken her to the Eighth Heaven of ascended tzadikim in an initiatic ritual of perfection, not unlike that done in the final stage of the first-century Mysteries of Hermes Trismegistos. Miriam died of old age about the same time as the mother of Yeshua, according to Eastern Orthodox legend. See my three-hour presentation called The Gospel of Mary and Magdalenic Gnosis on the Catalogue page of my www.wisdomseminars.org site for a scholarly treatment.
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Permalink Reply by Jeffrey Smart on
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I've always wondered why people are so obsessed with such meaningless detail. Who cares if Jesus was married. It is his teachings that are important.
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Yeshua's authentic historical teachings--not the flawed and diminished Christian versions--are at least as sublime and transformational as those of the Buddha.
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