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Title: Origins of 'Gospel of Jesus's Wife' Begin to Emerge
Source:
Live Science
URL Source: http://www.livescience.com/51954-gospel-of-jesus-wife-origins.html
Published: Aug 24, 2015
Author: Owen Jarus, Live Science Contributor
Post Date: 2015-08-24 21:47:48 by cranky
Keywords: None
Views: 13579
Comments: 135
Written in Coptic (an Egyptian language), the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, if authentic, suggests that some people in ancient times believed Jesus was married, apparently to Mary Magdalene. The truth may be finally emerging about the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife," a highly controversial papyrus suggesting that some people, in ancient times, believed Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. New research on the papyrus' ink points to the possibility that it is authentic, researchers say, while newly obtained documents may shed light on the origins of the business-card-sized fragment. Debate about the credibility of the "gospel" began as soon as Harvard University professor Karen King reported her discovery of the papyrus in September 2012. Written in Coptic (an Egyptian language), the papyrus fragment contains a translated line that reads, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife …'" and also refers to a "Mary," possibly Mary Magdalene. King had tentatively dated the papyrus to the fourth century, saying it may be a copy of a gospel written in the second century in Greek. [Read Translation of Gospel of Jesus's Wife Papyrus] Analysis of the papyrus, detailed last year in the Harvard Theological Review journal, suggested the papyrus dates back around 1,200 years (somewhere between the sixth and ninth centuries) while the ink is of a type that could have been created at that time. These findings have led King to support the text's authenticity. However over the past year many scholars have come to the conclusion that the papyrus is a modern-day forgery, though King and a few other researchers say they are not ready to concede this: "At this point, when discussions and research are ongoing, I think it is important, however difficult, to stay open regarding the possible dates of the inscription and other matters of interpretation," wrote King in a letter recently published in the magazine Biblical Archaeological Review. King has not responded to several interview requests from Live Science. Now, researchers at Columbia University are running new tests on the ink used on the papyrus. Initial tests published by the Columbia University team in 2014 indicated the ink could have been made in ancient times. Researchers are saying little until their report is published; however they did talk about one finding that could provide some support for its authenticity. A gospel steeped in mystery The current owner of the papyrus has insisted on remaining anonymous, claiming that he bought the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, along with other Coptic texts, in 1999 from a man named Hans-Ulrich Laukamp. This person, in turn, got it from Potsdam, in what was East Germany, in 1963, the owner said. Laukamp died in 2002, and the claim that he owned the text has been strongly disputed: Rene Ernest, the man whom Laukamp and his wife Helga charged with representing their estate, said that Laukamp had no interest in antiquities, did not collect them and was living in West Berlin in 1963. Therefore, he couldn't have crossed the Berlin Wall into Potsdam. Axel Herzsprung, a business partner of Laukamp's, similarly said that Laukamp never had an interest in antiquities and never owned a papyrus. Laukamp has no children or living relatives who could verify these claims. [6 Archaeological Forgeries That Tried to Change History] Over the past few months, new documents have been found that not only reconstruct Laukamp's life in greater detail, but also provide a new way to check the anonymous owner's story. King reported in a 2014 Harvard Theological Review article that the anonymous owner "provided me with a photocopy of a contract for the sale of '6 Coptic papyrus fragments, one believed to be a Gospel' from Hans-Ulrich Laukamp, dated Nov. 12, 1999, and signed by both parties." King also notes that "a handwritten comment on the contract states, 'Seller surrenders photocopies of correspondence in German. Papyri were acquired in 1963 by the seller in Potsdam (East Germany).'" After searching public databases in Florida a Live Science reporter uncovered seven signatures signed by Laukamp between 1997 and 2001 on five notarized documents. Anyone can search these databases and download these documents. These signatures can be compared with the signature recording the sale of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife — providing another way to verify or disprove the story of how the "gospel" made its way to Harvard. The signature of Hans-Ulrich Laukamp from September 1997. While Harvard University would have to work with forensic handwriting experts to verify the signature, the fact that these notarized documents exist, and are publicly available, presents the opportunity to see if Laukamp really did own the Gospel of Jesus's Wife. Forensic handwriting analysis, while not always conclusive, has been used to determine if signatures made on documents or works of art are authentic or forged. If Laukamp did own the papyrus, authentic or not, then the origins of the enigmatic text lie with him. The new Laukamp documents allow the story of his life between 1995 and 2002 to be told in some detail. However if Laukamp didn't own the papyrus and the anonymous owner has not been truthful, then further doubt would be cast on the papyrus' authenticity, and information leading to the identity, motives and techniques of the forgers could be found. Authentic or forged? One important find, which indicates the Gospel of Jesus's Wife is a fake, was made last year by Christian Askeland, a research associate with the Institute for Septuagint and Biblical Research in Wuppertal, Germany. He examined a second Coptic papyrus containing part of the Gospel of John, which the anonymous owner of the Gospel of Jesus's Wife had also given to Harvard. This text was likewise supposedly purchased from Laukamp, and radiocarbon testing of that papyrus similarly found that it dates back around 1,200 years. [See Images of the Ancient Gospel of Judas] Askeland found that the text and line breaks— where one line of a text ends and another begins — are identical to those of another papyrus, published in a 1924 book. That second papyrus was written in a dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which went extinct around 1,500 years ago. Askeland concluded that the John papyrus is a forgery. Furthermore, it shares other features with the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, Askeland said, suggesting both are forgeries. "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," Askeland wrote in a paper recently published in the journal New Testament Studies. King objected to this conclusion in her Biblical Archaeology Review letter, noting that the John fragment could have been copied in ancient times, long after Lycopolitan went extinct, from a text that had similar line breaks. In addition, James Yardley, a senior research scientist at Columbia University, told Live Science that the new tests confirm that the Gospel of Jesus's Wife holds different ink than the John papyrus. This could undercut Askeland's argument that the two papyri were written by the same person. "In our first exploration, we did state that the inks used for the two documents of interest [the John papyrus and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife] were quite different. The more recent results do confirm this observation strongly," Yardley told Live Science. He added that until his new research is published in a peer-reviewed journal, he doesn't want to say anything more publicly. And once it's published, Askeland and other researchers will have a chance to respond. Askeland's find is far from the only argument that the Gospel of Jesus's Wife is a fake: A number of scholars have noted that the Coptic writing in the Gospel of Jesus's Wife is similar to another early Christian text called the "Gospel of Thomas," even including a modern-day typo made in a 2002 edition of the Gospel of Thomas that is available for free online. That typo indicates the forgers copied from this modern-day text. King disputed this assertion in 2014, saying that ancient scribes made grammatical errors similar to the modern-day typo. King and communications staff at Harvard Divinity School have not responded to repeated requests for comment. 
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 21.
#2. To: cranky (#0)
Heretics and scoffers will not give up until the very end.
Some people prefer proof to faith, I guess.
The proof thusfar has been that this fragment is a later fabrication...fraud. It's in the article. What these 'researchers' are after is to find something believing it contradicts the Scriptures we have now. They lose everytime because even though they tout scholarship, they fail to even understand the time period involved. Even in the days of the Apostles in the early 1st century there were already heretics they warned believers about. Let's put this in perspective. If today thousands of people wrote cranky was a stand up guy, that he gave to the poor and spent all his earthly wealth on hospitals for disabled children. Fast forward 1,000 years as everyone was going through 10's of thousands of the 'cranky archives' and they find out all these wonderful things about you. But someone digs one or two blogs on cranky calling him a child abuser, a cheat on his wife and a secret Hillary Clinton supporter. Shocking! Modern liberal 'scholarship' tells us the 10s of thousands of documents saying otherwise must be discredited for some jealous jerk who happened to spend a few bucks on his own blog site to bear false witness. That's exactly what you have with these fragments of ancient 'jerks' who were either deceived or had an axe to grind. But people who really know cranky and his works (which live on thousands of yers later by people inspired by what he did), know the jerk who wrote garbage about him is just a jerk who should be paid no mind.
By those standards the whole Old Testament is a fraud.
The Dead Sea Scrolls say otherwise. When these researchers find thousands of fragments that "Jesus had a wife" then you can jump for joy. But this is only one fragment and the author is unknown, the ink is in question for the time period of the 'paper' used. Also, the NT points to the use of the "OT" (TaNaKh) both Hebrew and Greek version. The OT is quoted in the NT and Jesus Christ picks up a scroll in Luke 4 and reads from the Prophet Isaiah. The forgery in question in the article has no such linkages or uses in history. Let us visit how this one, ONE, forgery stands with the manuscript and historical evidence of the Bible the OT (TaNaKh) and NT (Brit HaHadashah): Old Testament The following is a list of the oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament that are still in existence. •The Dead Sea Scrolls: date from 200 B.C. - 70 A.D. and contain the entire book of Isaiah and portions of every other Old Testament book but Esther. •Geniza Fragments: portions the Old Testament in Hebrew and Aramaic, discovered in 1947 in an old synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, which date from about 400 A.D. •Ben Asher Manuscripts: five or six generations of this family made copies of the Old Testament using the Masoretic Hebrew text, from 700-950 A.D. The following are examples of the Hebrew Masoretic text-type. ◦Aleppo Codex: contains the complete Old Testament and is dated around 950 A.D. Unfortunately over one quarter of this Codex was destroyed in anti-Jewish riots in 1947. ◦Codex Leningradensis: The complete Old Testament in Hebrew copied by the last member of the Ben Asher family in A.D. 1008. Translations The Old Testament was translated very early into Aramaic and Greek. •400 B.C. The Old Testament began to be translated into Aramaic. This translation is called the Aramaic Targums. This translation helped the Jewish people, who began to speak Aramaic from the time of their captivity in Babylon, to understand the Old Testament in the language that they commonly spoke. In the first century Palestine of Jesus' day, Aramaic was still the commonly spoken language. For example maranatha: "Our Lord has come," 1 Corinthians 16:22 is an example of an Aramaic word that is used in the New Testament. •250 B.C. The Old Testament was translated into Greek. This translation is known as the Septuagint. It is sometimes designated "LXX" (which is Roman numeral for "70") because it was believed that 70 to 72 translators worked to translate the Hebrew Old Testament in Greek. The Septuagint was often used by New Testament writers when they quoted from the Old Testament. The LXX was translation of the Old Testament that was used by the early Church. 1. The following is a list of the oldest Greek LXX translations of the Old Testament that are still in existence. ◦Chester Beatty Papyri: Contains nine Old Testament Books in the Greek Septuagint and dates between 100-400 A.D. ◦Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus each contain almost the entire Old Testament of the Greek Septuagint and they both date around 350 A.D. New Testament There are over 5,600 early Greek Manuscripts of the New Testament that are still in existence. The oldest manuscripts were written on papyrus and the later manuscripts were written on leather called parchment. •125 A.D. The New Testament manuscript which dates most closely to the original autograph was copied around 125 A.D, within 35 years of the original. It is designated "p 52" and contains a small portion of John 18. (The "p" stands for papyrus.) •200 A.D. Bodmer p 66 a papyrus manuscript which contains a large part of the Gospel of John. •200 A.D. Chester Beatty Biblical papyrus p 46 contains the Pauline Epistles and Hebrews. •225 A.D. Bodmer Papyrus p 75 contains the Gospels of Luke and John. •250-300 A.D. Chester Beatty Biblical papyrus p 45 contains portions of the four Gospels and Acts. •350 A.D. Codex Sinaiticus contains the entire New Testament and almost the entire Old Testament in Greek. It was discovered by a German scholar Tisendorf in 1856 at an Orthodox monastery at Mt. Sinai. •350 A.D. Codex Vaticanus: {B} is an almost complete New Testament. It was cataloged as being in the Vatican Library since 1475. Translations Early translations of the New Testament can give important insight into the underlying Greek manuscripts from which they were translated. •180 A.D. Early translations of the New Testament from Greek into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic versions began about 180 A.D. •195 A.D. The name of the first translation of the Old and New Testaments into Latin was termed Old Latin, both Testaments having been translated from the Greek. Parts of the Old Latin were found in quotes by the church father Tertullian, who lived around 160-220 A.D. in north Africa and wrote treatises on theology. •300 A.D. The Old Syriac was a translation of the New Testament from the Greek into Syriac. •300 A.D. The Coptic Versions: Coptic was spoken in four dialects in Egypt. The Bible was translated into each of these four dialects. •380 A.D. The Latin Vulgate was translated by St. Jerome. He translated into Latin the Old Testament from the Hebrew and the New Testament from Greek. The Latin Vulgate became the Bible of the Western Church until the Protestant Reformation in the 1500's. It continues to be the authoritative translation of the Roman Catholic Church to this day. The Protestant Reformation saw an increase in translations of the Bible into the common languages of the people. •Other early translations of the Bible were in Armenian, Georgian, and Ethiopic, Slavic, and Gothic. •1380 A.D. The first English translation of the Bible was by John Wycliffe. He translated the Bible into English from the Latin Vulgate. This was a translation from a translation and not a translation from the original Hebrew and Greek. Wycliffe was forced to translate from the Latin Vulgate because he did not know Hebrew or Greek. There's much more here: History of the Bible: How The Bible Came To Us And here: When were the New Testament Books written? Perspective is important. After reviewing the above we have this to compare: •Caesar’s Gallic Wars was written in the first century B.C. There are only 10 manuscripts in existence. The earliest textual evidence we have was copied 1,000 years after the original. •Aristotle’s Poetics was written in the fourth century B.C. There are only 5 manuscripts in existence. The earliest textual evidence we have was copied 1,400 years after the original.
#55. To: redleghunter (#21)
Un,huh. And what are they,other than oral tradition handed down over generations that were finally put into written words? When these researchers find thousands of fragments that "Jesus had a wife" then you can jump for joy. I won't be jumping for joy or disappointed. I don't really care other than in a "good for him,maybe he wasn't queer after all" sort of way.
Read Titus 3:10
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#11. To: Don (#2)
Heretics and scoffers will not give up until the very end.
#15. To: cranky, Don, GarySpFc, liberator, Vicomte13 (#11)
Some people prefer proof to faith, I guess.
#16. To: redleghunter (#15)
The proof thusfar has been that this fragment is a later fabrication...fraud.
#21. To: sneakypete, GarySpFc, liberator, tomder55, cranky, A K A Stone, BobCeleste, Don, CZ82, Chuck_Wagon, *Bible Study Ping* (#16)
By those standards the whole Old Testament is a fraud.
Manuscripts
Manuscripts
Replies to Comment # 21. The Dead Sea Scrolls say otherwise.
#80. To: redleghunter (#21)
End Trace Mode for Comment # 21.
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