Scientists Believe Manuscript Suggesting Jesus Was Married Could Be Genuine

Last year the Boston Globe reported on how the document was originally dismissed as “fake” by academics, and even by the Vatican’s own official newspaper. Karen L. King, the Harvard professor who first discovered the ancient text, wanted the scientific and divinity community to get past the date, and to begin focusing on the content instead:

“I’m basically hoping that we can move past the issue of forgery to questions about the significance of this fragment for the history of Christianity, for thinking about questions like, ‘Why does Jesus being married, or not, even matter? Why is it that people had such an incredible reaction to this?’ ”

“Now when I come back and read the fragment, it seems the major issue being talked about was that Jesus was affirming that wives and mothers can be his disciples,” King said.

Now new testimony has come forward from other scholars who believe the document to be authentic…

A team of scientists from Columbia University tested the ink used to write the manuscript to refute last year’s claims by German scientist Christian Askeland that the artifact was a fake.

Askeland, a research associate with the Institute for Septuagint and Biblical Research in Wuppertal, Germany, said he found that another ancient manuscript with abstracts from the Gospel of John was a forgery, as radiocarbon dating showed the manuscript was written 1200 years ago in a rare Lycopolitan dialect of the Coptic language that had been extinct for three centuries.

RELATED: Jesus & Mary Magdalene were ‘married with children,’ ancient manuscript claims

He pointed out the similarities between the Gospel of John papyrus and the manuscript of the Gospel of Jesus’ wife, which in his opinion proved both were fake. 

“The two Coptic fragments clearly shared the same ink, writing implement and scribal hand. The same artisan had created both essentially at the same time,” said Askeland as cited by Live Science.

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The Columbia University researchers now say the inks used in the two manuscripts are different.

“In our first exploration, we did state that the inks used for the two documents of interest were quite different. The more recent results do confirm this observation strongly,” said James Yardley from the Columbia University as cited by Live Science. The scientists refused to go into details before publishing the article.

The so-called Gospel of Jesus’ wife is a business card-sized papyrus fragment written in the Coptic language that was obtained by Harvard University professor Karen King from a collector who wanted to remain unnamed. King presented the manuscript at the International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome in 2012, saying that the manuscript had been created around the fourth century AD and possibly translated from an earlier Greek document…

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