Didja Hear?

Well, according to a lot of headlines I read today, Jesus was married.

Yes, it seems that a scholar examining an ancient piece of papyrus written by Coptic Christians somewhere around 400 AD has translated it, and in it is a phrase in which Jesus says "My wife...she will be able to be my disciple."

You may be a skeptical sort and wonder why one fragment of a document written four centuries after the events it's supposed to describe matters at all. Well, because the scholar says it does and...she's a scholar. Dr. Karen King says the text is proof that some ancient Christians followed a tradition that Jesus was married. We might believe that, until you realize that although the difference between 1 AD and 401 AD may not be so great to us, it's pretty darn great by itself. Go back 400 years in our nation and the only Europeans on the North American continent were the remains of the Jamestown colony and Spanish explorers in Mexico and Florida. That's just a wee dram different than today, dontcha know. Why we would expect 1 and 401 to be any less different from each other than 1612 and 2012 is beyond me. Jesus certainly could have been married, but one sentence in one document dating 400 years after his life on earth will not carry me across that river.

In seminary, I ran across bushwa like this all the time. In one breath someone would tell me the gospels could not be considered reliable accounts of Jesus' life because they could be dated no earlier than 90 to 150 AD (that question's open, but never mind). And in the next breath some of the same scholars would laud some fragmentary text dated no earlier than 400 or even 500 as related to an authentic strain of some early Christian tradition, silenced and covered up by the winning side (kept down by the Man! #Occupy Nag Hammadi!)

In the end, a writer on one of the Patheos.com blogs in the "Progressive Christian" portal points out the only thing that can be proved beyond a doubt by this text: That the person who wrote it apparently believed Jesus was married. Even that's shaky; the Revelation of St. John speaks metaphorically of the church as the Bride of Christ and that could be going on in this piece too. So I'm not too worried about the traditional orthodox theism in which I remain mired being upended any time soon.

I am worried about one thing, though. Since this item is all over the news now, I am concerned that the usual suspects won't have anything to "rock the foundations of Christian belief" come next Easter.