Did you see the headline on the Fox News website?:“Harvard professor unveils a fourth-century fragment of papyrus she says quotes Jesus referring to having a wife…”
Many are making a big deal about this, and something of the history of the Gnostic influence of the first few centuries after Christ, simply yawn and wonder at the utter absurdity and inconsistency of this latest attack on the truth claims of the Christian faith. In the way of response, my friend, New Testament scholar, Dr. James White wrote the following:
Remember the Gospel of Judas a few years ago? Yeah, most people don’t. It was one of the last “Look, the Gnostics were a bunch of heretics, let’s call them Christians and say Christianity is silly” waves that was sponsored by a major institution with hundreds of thousands of dollars to burn in the never ending campaign to attack the Christian faith. Well, looks like the 2012 version has arrived courtesy of the Queen of Gnostic Looniness, Karen King.
Karen King makes her money writing books attacking Christianity based upon digging up the same gnostic myths rejected and refuted long, long ago. Just do a quick look on her name on Amazon. Some of her real winners include The Gospel of Mary Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (2003), What is Gnosticism? (2005), and Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (2007) co-authored with the other Queen of Gnostic silliness, Elaine Pagels. As you can see, she makes her shoe fund money digging the gnostics out of their graves and propping up their inane stories. But, that’s what the media craves, and so, here we go again. Get ready, and be prepared to explain that gnostics were not Christians, for anyone who thinks the God of Abraham was an evil deity or that Jesus did not have a physical body is not, was not, and never will be, a Christian. Period. Just a heads up.
Continuing on, in an article today entitled “A Note to the Secular World: Do Your History” Dr. White writes:
And so another round of “the story of Jesus in the Bible is bunk, there were all these Christians back then who believed wildly different things” has begun. It will go for a few months, then fade away, only to be replaced by some new book, film, movie, etc., next year or the year after. For young folks who don’t have enough perspective yet to start discerning the patterns, this may be a real big thing, so we cannot just roll our eyes and move on. But that does not mean that the modern day Gnostics have anything important or meaningful to say. They do not. But they sure insist upon repeating themselves. Repeatedly.
Here are some talking points for the conversations that may come up at work, school, even home:
1) “Funny how the media makes so much of tiny scraps from the fourth century but never tell anyone about the tiny scraps from the second century that substantiate the canonical, biblical testimony of Jesus, isn’t it? Makes you wonder where the true journalists are anymore, doesn’t it?”
2) “There are a small group of anti-Christian academics that the media just adores who do nothing but repeat the wild eyed fanciful theories that a small group of heretics dreamed up a hundred years and more after Jesus. They write books and make money recycling stuff the Christians wrote entire tomes debunking long, long ago. Do you ever hear the media pointing to the multi-volume refutations of these folks penned by men like Irenaeus as early as the end of the second century? Have you ever read those replies? In fact, have you ever read the Gnostic gospels yourself?”
3) “A fourth century Gnostic said Jesus was married? Shocking news…given that we have known all about such stories for hundreds of years! The stories the Gnostics made up starting in the second century only got wilder and wilder through the fourth century, when they started to die out. Just like our modern anti-Christian media to focus upon stories completely disconnected from the times of Jesus and based upon foundational beliefs directly contrary to those of the Jews of the first century, the people from whom Jesus came and amongst whom He ministered.”
The problem, of course, is that sound bites are not how these things should be handled in the first place. It takes time to establish the provenance of such papyri finds, their meaning, context, relationship to other literature, etc., and normally such things take place outside the observation of the general public. What is more, the background material needed to make sense of much of that is far beyond your average religion reporter today. The result is that the bias of the media is simply unfiltered: if it can be spun to be in opposition to “traditional Christian belief,” it will be hyped; if it is supportive of the same, it will not even get a mention.
All of this is all the more problematic because of the general acceptance—uncritical acceptance—of the “Bauer hypothesis,” popularized today by Bart Ehrman, that the early church was a mish-mash of equally valid, equally apostolic, but mutually contradictory views. Combine that idea with every little scrap of gnostic nonsense and you have today’s paradigm right in front of your eyes. [For one of the best currently published books debunking this viewpoint, you really need to click here.]
Finally, it is worthwhile to compare and contrast the response this story is getting with the worldwide Islamic rage against a vacuous, silly, absurd Internet video. Muslims are offended by its mockery of Muhammad. I am offended by the mainstream press propping up Gnostic absurdities and blasphemies about Jesus. We watch as Muslim Imams in Egypt tear up the Bible and then burn it in protest. We see death and burning and destruction as signs of an honor religion lashing out at a perceived denial of honor. And how do Christians respond to this attack upon our Savior? We seek to find ways to open dialogue so that we might speak the truth and dispel error. We consider the issues and point out deep and abiding world view issues and historical context errors. We respond with our minds, not with our fists. I truly doubt that Karen King has had to go into hiding due to the story about the papyri scrap. Christianity is not an honor religion. We leave judgment and vindication to the Last Day and we leave it in the hands of the Just Judge.
But one last word of irony: Muslims say they do not differentiate between one prophet and another. OK—so why are there no riots in Egypt about this papyri and its allegation that Jesus was married? The Qur’an does not say Jesus was married. The Qur’an says Jesus was virgin born, was a true man, etc. So why not be enraged about all the constant attacks upon Jesus? I have never heard about a single KFC being burned due to some denial of the virgin birth by a Western scholar, have you? But let someone draw a cartoon image of Muhammad, and the world erupts in flames. I am left once again asking, “Where’s the consistency?”
*** UPDATE: Christian Askeland has a post at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog that indicates that most of his fellow scholars who are meeting right now at the International Association of Coptic Studies, in Rome, and who are experts in Nag Hammadi and early manuscripts think the fragment is a fraud. He gives his reasons in the post here.
*** UPDATE #2: Michael J. Kruger is professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the author of Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Crossway, 2012). He has weighed in on this issue here.
Quote: “This is sensationalism masquerading as scholarship. One British newspaper noted that the claims about a married Jesus seemed more worthy of fans of Dan Brown’s fictional work, The Da Vinci Code than ‘real-life Harvard professors.’ If the fragment is authenticated, the existence of this little document will be of interest to historians of the era, but it is insanity to make the claims now running through the media.” – Dr. Al Mohler
UPDATE #3: Dr. Daniel Wallace states the facts – http://danielbwallace.com/2012/09/21/reality-check-the-jesus-wife-coptic-fragment/