Here’s a round up of thoughts on the scrap of pyprus that refered to Jesus’ wife:
Stephen Prothero, Boston University religion scholar and author, CNN Belief Blog:
What we do know is that we live in a country besotted with Jesus and in an age obsessed with marriage and sexuality and the body, which is why this tiny papyrus is making such big waves. As for me, I don’t much care what Jesus thought about marriage, or whether he engaged in it. I think we as a society tend to collapse religion far too readily into bedroom questions, as if Jesus came into the world to tell us with whom we should be having sex, and how. I’m more interested in what Jesus has to say about wealth and poverty, the rich and the poor. And there is plenty in the available record to read and heed, “if only we have ears to hear.”
Steven R. Harmon, professor Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity and author, Associate Baptist Press News Blog:
The celibacy of Jesus is not essential to Christology, just as Jesus’ maleness is not essential to Christology… The particularities of Jesus’ historical existence are representative of the totality of human experience, from birth through death and resurrection, even if they do not reflect the particularities of every human being’s experiences… Theologically, for Jesus to have been married would not require us to re-think historic Christological doctrine. But historically, there is not sufficient evidence to suppose that he was–even if the best interpretation of this fragment is that Jesus therein is referring to a woman named Mary as his “wife” in the usual sense of that word.
Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, via LA Times:
With the “fall of Christianity” threatening to end the faith as we know it (yeah right), The Barna Group conducted a study of 1,002 U.S. adults, discovered:
