Scholarly skepticism continues toward the "Jesus' Wife Fragment" even as Smithsonian plans to air positive documentary May 5

In the latest edition of The Weekly Standard, Charlotte Allen, author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus, queries whether the investigation into the so-called "Jesus' Wife Fragment" has after all raised more questions concerning the fragment's authenticity than it's answered. Entitled "The Wife of Jesus Tale," Allen writes of the scientific tests on the papyrus itself:

[T]he scientific results have raised more questions than they’ve answered, especially within the cohort of scholars who were already convinced that the fragment was a modern forgery. For one thing, the papyrus scrap qualifies as “ancient” only if you count the Middle Ages as “ancient.” The scrap’s fibers were carbon-dated twice. An analysis conducted at the University of Arizona during the summer of 2013 yielded a date range for the papyrus of between 405 and 209 b.c. That would have automatically meant that the document was a forgery. The papyrus was retested by Harvard biologist Noreen Tuross just a few months ago, in January and February 2014. Tuross found that the “Jesus’ wife” papyrus dated from between 681 a.d. and 877 a.d., with a median, or most probable, date of 741 a.d. 

To put the 740s into a historical context, that was the decade in which Charlemagne was born. Egypt, hitherto part of the Roman and later the Byzantine empire, had been invaded and conquered by Muslims in 639. By the 700s, the official language of Egypt was Arabic, not Coptic or Greek. It was a very different world from the Egyptian world of the fourth century, much less the second century, and it is hard to imagine Gnostic intellectuals debating marriage and sexuality at a time when the Copts were engaging in a series of unsuccessful rebellions against Egypt’s Islamic rulers.

Allen's "The Wife of Jesus Tale" is worth your time. She helpfully summarizes the response from both the scholarly world as well as mainstream media exposure since Harvard professor, Karen King, first went public with the papyrus fragment in September, 2012. I also found it highly interesting that the skepticism Allen mentions is not coming from the evangelical world of scholarship ever how skeptical we may be (for example, see Al Mohler's excellent response to the "Jesus' Wife Fragment). Rather the skepticism Allen rehearses comes from scholarship outside evangelical circles, scholarship many evangelicals judge to be Liberal at best and hostile to evangelcal Christianity at worst.

Other helpful pieces:

• The Deepening Mystey of 'Jesus' Wife' Papyrus by Charlotte Allen

Several articles from Larry Hurtado:

• Initial Thoughts on Jesus' Wife Fragment
• Further Observations on Jesus' Wife Fragment
• Jesus' Wife Arguments: and the beat goes on
• On Fragments and Alleged Forgies

 

 

 

  

Comments

[Josh]

This sort of thing makes me so angry - the press never hype it up when the Bible yet again stands up to scrutiny. Only when a new challenge comes along. Great summary - I only heard about this development here.