Catholic and Enjoying It!
…at least, according to the MSM, yet again. Turns out that a dubious scrap of paper the size of a business card–the provenance of which is uncertain, obtained from a guy hungry for cash, by a scholar hungry for publicity, and trumpeted by a media hungry to sell beer and shampoo–has a sentence fragment that reads, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’ ” something something “she will be able to be my disciple.”
That’s it. That’s all. And from this we are to conclude that Jesus was married, Dan Brown was right, Christianity is a fraud, everything you know is wrong and whatever other faddish self-congratulatory thing you’d like to believe about the Latest Real Jesus.
Even by the theologically ignorant standards of the MSM, this is one of the greatest mountains on a molehill in recent memory. Jimmy Akin does the full and sober autopsy on this complete non-news story. Tom McDonald does something more like dragging the corpse of the story through the streets behind a triumphal chariot, stopping every few yards to get out and kick it in a way that I found hilarious.
At the very very best case scenario (meaning, this really is a fourth century gnostic text (which is awfully late for gnosticism)), what you’ve got here is…. a sentence fragment.
What that fragment might mean, particularly in the intensely mystical world of gnosticism, is totally up for grabs. Even in Christian mysticism, nuptial language is used about Jesus without in the slightest referring to his literally being married (Christ is the Bridegroom and his Bride is the Church). In certain gnostic circles, something similar may obtain. But with this sentence fragment we don’t even have that much to go on. What we do know is that gnosticism was often deeply *hostile* both to marriage and to women (because they produce babies (aka spiritual souls trapped in evil fleshly bodies). The 21st century’s provincial obsession with sex is never more obviously on display than in its conviction that the primary concern of ancient gnostics was with the burning question of whether Jesus was a dead rabbi with a girlfriend. Gnosticism has very little interest in Jesus as a historical figure and immense interest in turning him into a disembodied talking head enunciating abstract mystical principles that just happen to be identical with the abstract mystical principles enuniciated by that particular gnostic sect.
In this, gnostics were remarkably like modern journalists who have far more faith than Catholics do and who imagine that a scrap of paper with a couple of sentence fragments is capable of overturning 2000 years of Christianity. That’s some mystical faith right there.
We are told by our Manufacturers of Culture that the Age of Faith has been superceded by the Age of Reason. Totally false. The High Middle Ages were the Age of Reason. And it was succeeded by our age: the Age of Credulity.
Meanwhile, I can’t help but notice that nobody is addressing the *real* bombshell revelation: Jesus’ shocking obesophobic hate speech against the Jolly community in line 6: “Let wicked people swell up.” As a member of the Lardo/Giganto/Brickhouse/Trans-Fatty community let me just say, “I AM OUTRAGED!! OOUUUUTRAAAAAGED!!!!!! When is the Church going to learn to affirm without question whatever my appetites want to do today? I demand a world in which I am accepted unquestioningly praised for forking what I want with whoever I want. Or else. Lack of tolerance will be punished with swift and merciless reprisals.
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