The Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a likely-forged papyrus fragment with Coptic text that includes the words, "Jesus said to them, 'my wife.... The text received widespread attention when first publicized in 2012 for the implication that some early Christians believed that Jesus was married.
The fragment was first presented by Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen L. King, who suggested that the papyrus contained a fourth-century Coptic translation of a gospel likely composed in Greek in the late second century. Following an investigative Atlantic article by Ariel Sabar published online in June 2016, King conceded that the evidence now "presses in the direction of forgery."
The fragment's provenance and similarity to another fragment from the same anonymous owner widely believed to be fake further supported a consensus among scholars that the text is a modern forgery written on a scrap of medieval papyrus.
Publication
After Professor Karen King's announcement of the existence of a papyrus fragment featuring the words "Jesus said to them, 'my wife...'" at the International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome on September 18, 2012, scholarly publication of the text with commentary was slated for the Harvard Theological Review in January 2013. On January 3, 2013, King and Kathryn Dodgson (director of communications for Harvard Divinity School) confirmed to CNN that publication was being delayed pending the results of (in Dodgson's words) "further testing and analysis of the fragment, including testing by independent laboratories with the resources and specific expertise necessary to produce and interpret reliable results." A revised version of the article appeared in the Harvard Theological Review in April 2014, together with several scientific reports on the testing of the papyrus.
In response to Ariel Sabar's article in The Atlantic, the Harvard Theological Review issued a statement saying that it had never committed itself to the authenticity of the papyrus and refused to print a retraction of King's article. Retraction Watch called the journal's decision "a cop-out of...Biblical proportions."
Text
One side of the fragmentary text reads, word-for-word:
The opposite side of the text reads, word-for-word:
The next two lines of this side feature illegible ink traces.
Features
The fragment is rectangular, approximately . According to reports, "the fragment has eight incomplete lines of writing on one side and is badly damaged on the other side, with only three faded words and a few letters of ink that are visible, even with the use of infrared photography and computer-aided enhancement."
King and AnneMarie Luijendijk, an associate professor of religion at Princeton University, named the fragment the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife" for reference purposes but have since acknowledged that the name was inflammatory. Asked about her handling of the public disclosure of the fragment, King admitted that she had "misjudged just how inflammatory that title would turn out to be". According to Tom Bartlett of The Chronicle of Higher Education, "she's been asking around for ideas on a new, less exciting name". They further suggested the text was written by Egyptian Christians before AD 400; it is in the language they believed was used by those people at that time. They considered that the papyrus fragment comes from a codex, rather than a scroll, as text appears on both sides. King has stated that the fragment should not be taken as proof that the historical Jesus got married. Testing has dated the papyrus itself to somewhere between the seventh and ninth centuries, and Professor Christian Askeland of Indiana Wesleyan University has shown that the text is written in Lycopolitan, a Coptic dialect that fell out of use during or prior to the sixth century.
With reference to the speculative source of the text on the fragment, King and Luijendijk used the term gospel in a capacious sense, as it includes all early Christian writings about Jesus' career.