“Does Papyrus Prove Jesus Was Married?”

September 23, 2012 By 3 Comments

 

“The Last Supper,” by Leonard da Vinci

 

An evaluation of the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” and a very brief reflection on what the implications would be if it could somehow be proven that Jesus was, in fact, married:

 

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765605862/Hamblin-and-Peterson-Does-papyrus-prove-Jesus-was-married.html

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized 3 Comments
  • http://Www.kurtsperspective.blogspot.com Kurt

    I read an article in The Guardian on the 21st indicating the papyrus text is a likely forgery and that the text appears to have been lifted from the Gospel of Thomas. The thesis appeared to be that there is no text that used to fill the blank spots, but that the precise wording and layout was a word for word, line for line forgery.

    Any thoughts on that claim?

    • danpeterson

      I would have to look very carefully at the question and at the arguments on both sides. I don’t really have a dog in this fight, particularly, but Karen King at Harvard and her papyrologist colleagues strongly believe it to be authentic. So we shall see.

  • http://nathanrichardson.com Nathan000000

    That’s funny—I used the same phrase I used when explaining to an author about LDS beliefs regarding Jesus being married:

    “While Latter-day Saints don’t necessarily assert that Jesus was married during his mortal life, our main departure from the rest of Christianity on this point is that we’d be OK if it turned out that he did. Whereas (as I understand it) most traditional Christians see Jesus’s divinity as necessarily excluding the possibility of him being married or being physically intimate with a wife or fathering children, Latter-day Saints don’t see the two as being mutually exclusive. … We will defend the virgin birth, the redemptive death, and the divine sonship of Christ, but we feel no concomitant need to insist on the single status of Jesus or God. We don’t have a dog in that fight.”