Gospel of Jesus' Wife in New Testament Studies

In April 2014, Harvard Theological Review devoted an issue to the discussion of The Gospel of Jesus' Wife, a fragmentary text thought by many to be a forgery. Regular readers of this blog will know that this fragment has been a hot topic of discussion since the first media reports of its existence in September 2012. (You can find the many NT Blog posts on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife here).

New Testament Studies has now devoted its latest issue to a critical discussion of the authenticity of the fragment. After an editorial by Francis Watson, the following articles expound different elements of the problem:

The Gospel of Jesus' Wife: Constructing a Context

Simon Gathercole

A Lycopolitan Forgery of John's Gospel

Christian Askeland

The Gospel of Jesus' Wife: Textual Evidence of Modern Forgery

Andrew Bernhard

Material Criteria and their Clues for Dating

Myriam Krutzsch and Ira Rabin

The Jesus' Wife Papyrus in the History of Forgery

Christopher Jones

How a Papyrus Fragment Became a Sensation

Gesine Schenke Robinson

Congratulations to the editor and the authors for their fine work on this volume, and thanks to Cambridge University Press for making it available free for all, just as they did just over a year ago with the HTR volume.

See also this video from Simon Gathercole, posted a couple of days ago by CUP in tandem with the release of this issue of the journal:

Jesus' Wife Attempts a Comeback: Initial Response, Francis Watson

I am grateful to Prof. Francis Watson, Research Chair of Biblical Interpretation, Durham University, for permission to post here his initial response to the recent re-emergence of discussion on the Jesus' Wife Fragment (see The Jesus' Wife Fragment is Back):

Jesus' Wife Attempts a Comeback: Initial Response

Francis Watson

Earlier pieces by Prof. Watson on the fragment are gathered here.

Francis Watson discusses Gospel Writing

Eerdmans has posted a new interview, this time with Francis Watson, all about his excellent Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective. It's about 25 minutes long, and is in black and white for added gravitas:


HT: Matthew Montonini.

Revised versions of Francis Watson's Articles on the Jesus Wife Fragment

I am grateful to Francis Watson for sending over revised and updated versions of his short articles on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment.  These revised versions take account of the new findings on lines 6 and 7.  Prof. Watson explains his revisions in the main article, note 1, crediting the various people responsible for them both there and at appropriate points later.  I have uploaded the pieces to the same places as before, so the old links will all work, but the links are gathered here again for convenience.

Of the three articles, the first is for the non-specialist and the other two include discussion of the language.  The second here is the main piece:

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: How a fake Gospel-Fragment was composed
INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

Francis Watson

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: How a fake Gospel-Fragment was composed
Francis Watson

Addendum: The End of the Line?

Francis Watson

The Gospel of Jesus' Wife: Latest News

When I was blogging about this last Thursday, just a couple of days after the announcement of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife, I commented that "the story is moving fast!".  There has been no change in that pace over the last few days.  Francis Watson's three articles on the topic (plus Bible and Interpretation piece) made the papers and convinced many scholars that there is sufficient reason at least to question the authenticity of the fragment.

Watson's case is that the fragment is so clearly made up of a patchwork of pieces from our one complete Coptic textual witness of the Gospel of Thomas that scepticism about its antiquity should be the order of the day.  The issue of the parallel line break, in the very first line of the fragment, is particularly telling.  This is not a case of one text being broadly influenced by another.  It is a matter of a fragment that features a patchwork of agreement in Coptic with a specific textual witness of a work probably composed in Greek.

Watson's essay raised a couple of questions, though, about lines 6 and 7 of the fragment, which did not appear to be paralleled in Thomas.  I suggested last night that the last line is also from Thomas, something that Päivi Vähäkangas had also pointed out on Facebook (with thanks to Alin Suciu for pointing this out).  And then Oli Homron, in a comment here, noted the following parallel for line 6:

This meant that every line, practically every word, of the Jesus Wife Fragment appeared to have a parallel in Coptic Thomas as found in Nag Hammadi Codex II.

Meanwhile, Andrew Bernhard, author of Other Early Christian Gospels and the long time author of the gospels. net website, was working hard on a superb synopsis that illustrates clearly the parallels between the Gospel of Jesus' Wife and the Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas:

Synopsis of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife and the Coptic Gospel of Thomas

And he has an article that discusses the parallels:

Could the Gospel of Jesus' Wife be a "Collage" of Words and Phrases Culled Exclusively from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas?
By Andrew Bernhard

It's a detailed, clear and also well-measured piece, that draws together others' discussions (above) though in discoveries that Bernhard made independently of them.  It also features the intriguing suggestion that a modern forger could have used not a printed edition of Coptic Thomas but Mike Grondin's interlinear edition on the net, alongside a rudimentary knowledge of the first few pages of Lambdin's grammar.  To keep up to date with Bernhard's postings, see his page at gospels.net:

The Gospel of Jesus' Wife

When a story like this is moving so fast, it is great to have James McGrath around.  He has continued to post updates and today has produced a great round-up with the amusing header:

Is Jesus' Wife Turning into Thomas?

I do not want to give the impression that opinion has all coalesced against the authenticity of the fragment, though.  Michael Peppard tonight adds the following thoughtful piece:

Is the "Jesus wife" papyrus a forgery? And other queries

And it's worth adding that the issue of whether or not the historical Jesus had a wife continues to be discussed, including this lively piece by Heather Hahn for the United Methodist Church:

Did Jesus have a wife?

The piece even has a little quotation of me, and has other new material including quotations from Mark Chancey of SMU.

At this point, though, there does not seem to be much doubt about the way that the wind is blowing, and there does seem to be sufficient doubt about the authenticity of the piece for most to feel ill at ease with some of the more sanguine assessments that were being made only a week ago.

Then this evening it was reported that Harvard Theological Review had "decided against publishing Karen King's paper on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife" (Update on the the Gospel of Jesus' Wife (from Craig Evans), via Brian LePort on Near Emmaus).  If this report is indeed accurate, I suspect that this may be a good decision given the questions that have been raised about the fragment over the last week, but of course time will tell whether there will be further twists in the tale.

I'd guess that the impact of the Smithsonian Channel's documentary (Youtube clips) will be lessened in the light of the questions over the fragment's authenticity, but I will certainly be watching and hope to live blog it too.  It's scheduled for broadcast on Sunday at 8pm and again at 11pm, either side of a documentary about the Titanic.

Gospel of Jesus' Wife: the last line is also from Thomas

Francis Watson's essay, The Gospel of Jesus' Wife: How a Fake Gospel Fragment was Composed, argues, I think persuasively, that the Gospel fragment that has been at the centre of so much discussion over the last week or so was composed by means of collecting together a patchwork of pieces from the Gospel of Thomas.

Watson suggested that the last line of the fragment (line 7), however, was taken over not from Thomas but from Matthew.  I would like to suggest that in fact this line is also derived from Thomas.

Here is the last line of the fragment:

] . ⲁⲛⲟⲕ  ϯϣⲟⲟⲡ  ⲛⲙⲙⲁⲥ ⲉⲧⲃⲉ ⲡ [

" . I am with her on account of . . . "

This bears a striking resemblance to the last part of Thomas 30:

ⲡⲙⲁ ⲉⲩⲛ̅ⲥⲛⲁⲩ ⲏ ⲟⲩⲁ ⲁⲛⲟⲕ ϯϣⲟⲟⲡ ⲛⲙⲙⲁϥ

"The place which has two or one, I am with him"

Here we have the same three words in Coptic in sequence, ⲁⲛⲟⲕ ϯϣⲟⲟⲡ ⲛⲙⲙⲁ(ϥ / ⲥ), "I am with her / him", with just the switch from male to female.  Moreover, even the last word and a bit of the line is found in the same context -- ⲉⲧⲃⲉ ⲡ . . ., "on account of ?" comes twice in Thomas 29, ⲉⲧⲃⲉ  ⲡ̅ⲛ̅ⲁ̅, "because of spirit" and ⲉⲧⲃⲉ ⲡⲥⲱⲙⲁ, "because of the body".  

I would like to suggest, then, that Francis Watson is bang on the money in finding the Gospel of Jesus' Wife to be a patchwork of pieces from the Gospel of Thomas, and to offer this suggestion as extending and so confirming his excellent case.

Note: I have used a Coptic unicode font above.  If you can't see the Coptic, please see this PDF of the post instead.

Francis Watson, Addendum: The End of the Line?

Prof. Francis Watson has written another piece on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife which I am happy to post here:

Addendum: The End of the Line?

Francis Watson

There are therefore three articles in total, which I will gather here for the reader's convenience.  The first is for the non-specialist and the other two include discussion of the language:

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: How a fake Gospel-Fragment was composed
INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

Francis Watson

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: How a fake Gospel-Fragment was composed
Francis Watson

Addendum: The End of the Line?

Francis Watson

Update (Monday): Francis Watson has now written a fourth piece over at Bible and Interpretation, with thanks to both Francis and to Jim West for sending me the link:

Inventing Jesus' Wife
Francis Watson

The essay summarizes the case for non-specialists and goes on to answer several key questions that arise from the analysis.

Francis Watson's Introduction and Summary on the composition of a fake Gospel-fragment

I am grateful to Prof. Francis Watson for following up his earlier article, The Gospel of Jesus' Wife: How a fake Gospel-Fragment was composed, with a piece providing an introduction and summary, which will be particularly helpful for non-specialists:

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: How a fake Gospel-Fragment was composed
INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY
Francis Watson

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: How a fake Gospel-Fragment was composed, by Francis Watson

I would like to thank Francis Watson, Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University for the opportunity to publish the following short article:

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: How a fake Gospel-Fragment was composed
Francis Watson

Update (9.49): see now also Watson's Introduction and Summary for non-specialists.

Update (15.24): The story has made The Guardian:

Gospel of Jesus's Wife is fake, claims expert
Scholar says papyrus fragment believed to provide evidence that Jesus was married is a modern forgery
Andrew Brown

(Note: there are three errors in the piece; (1) "Karen King from Harvard university holds the papyrus fragment that has four words written in Coptic, which are believed to prove
Jesus was married".  She does not believe that these prove that Jesus was married.  Rather, she holds that some Christians believe that this was the case in the second half of the second century.  The fragment has a lot more than "four words" too.  (2) In the second half of the article, Francis Watson is called "Martin" by mistake. (3) In Secret Mark, it is not correct that "Jesus spent the night with naked youths"; he spends the night, of the duration of this passage at least, with just one naked youth.)