Tag Archives: bible

Scholar’s discovery reignites controversy over Jesus’ “wife”

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Theologian Mark D. Roberts explains why he’s not overwhelmed by new research that has turned up a 4th century fragment that refers to someone named Jesus having a wife. Notice how many of these “fragments” of later centuries keep showing up in revisionist texts. Before this, there was the Secret Gospel of Mark, which was used to argue that Jesus had homosexual relations with Lazarus and other young men who “loved him.”

I’m now waiting for “Fifty Shades of Jesus,” wherein it will be proved, in the style of all those sites promoting Christian porn or Christian BDSM, that Jesus was actually a sado-masochistic cannibal, who invited his followers to eat him and enjoyed his flagellation, torture and killing on the cross. [Note: THIS IS SARCASM]

The disturbing fact is that in an age of multiple-choice tests and zero-sum debates, the ability to place things in context, balance the weight of a piece of evidence against contradictory claims, the ability to study a text on its own terms without projecting onto it the prejudices and obsessions of the contemporary world, has vanished.

No matter how carefully a scholar frames a question, all the nuances are thrown aside when the media gets hold of a piece of information.

Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesus was married.  It was a requirement among Jewish rabbis. Perhaps he was married when he was younger and his wife died. Or she herself became a teacher.  Or maybe she was a silent part of his ministry.  Who knows. Even, if against all odds, this new research finds support in the future,  I fail to see how it affects Jesus’ explicit teaching about sexuality. Nor does it alter the judgment of his contemporaries, as recorded in the Gospels, that “there was no sin found in him.”

Since they were looking very very hard for it, I think that’s fairly conclusive just there.

However, knowing that there are many people who have an axe to grind with the traditional Christian teaching that elevates celibacy (which is also elevated in Buddhism and Hinduism), I also know that it isn’t dispassionate scholarship or intellectual curiosity or respectful disagreement that drives these debates. Rather it is political activism that wants to rewrite the people and events of the past into forms more palatable to modern sensibility.  I have advice for them. If  you don’t like what Jesus had to say, don’t read him or follow him or try to follow him. Get a teacher after your own heart.

Dr. Mark D. Roberts:

“Did Jesus have a wife, after all?

Major news outlets, such as the New York Times, are reporting on the discovery of a new document that refers to Jesus’ wife. More precisely, a small fragment from a previously unknown document contains a statement by a character named “Jesus” referring to “my wife.”

Does this give us new historical evidence for the literal marriage of Jesus of Nazareth to some woman, perhaps Mary Magdalene?

Professor Karen King displays the fragment of the so-called Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. Photo from http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/090512_AncientPapyrus_1714_605.jpg

No, says Karen L. King, the scholar who recently revealed the existence of the manuscript fragment in which “Jesus” speaks of “my wife.” In an article to be published in the Harvard Theological Review, King writes:

This is the only extant ancient text which explicitly portrays Jesus as referring to a wife. It does not, however, provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married, given the late date of the fragment and the probable date of original composition only in the second half of the second century.

Near the end of her article, King, with contributions by AnneMarie Luijendijk, reiterates:

Does this fragment constitute evidence that Jesus was married? In our opinion, the late date of the Coptic papyrus (c. fourth century), and even of the possible date of composition in the second half of the second century, argues against its value as evidence for the life of the historical Jesus.

Of course, King’s measured judgment here will do little to stop the coming tidal wave of claims that we now have definitive evidence if not proof that Jesus was actually married. Dan Brown and his spokesman, Sir Leigh Teabing, appear to have been right all along! At least this is what we’ll hear in the days to come.

In fact, as Karen King rightly observes, the discovery and publication of the fragment known as the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife in fact tells us nothing about the first-century man we know as Jesus of Nazareth. If it is genuine, the fragment of the otherwise unknown document will tell us something about the beliefs of people who lived a century or two after Jesus, though what exactly we should conclude on the basis of this small piece of an ancient manuscript is yet to be determined.”

Jesus, The Trend Follower

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King James Bible, Chapter 12, Verse 54

“And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is. And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?”

My Comment

The notion that you could look at nature and “read” it is part of the so-called “hermetic” tradition of the West and very much a part of eastern religion (Buddhism, Hinduism) as well, from where they might have been derived partially. In the hermetic tradition, the world was conceived of as a complex fractal system in which each part reflected the whole in a succession of patterns that extended from the stars in the sky down to star fish in the ocean. This way of looking at nature holistically in symbolic terms is not necessarily diametrically opposed to the scientific method, a truth that is evident from the fact that leading scientists from the Renaissance to the twentieth century have managed to pursue impeccably empirical research, while holding beliefs that the intellectual class today would call obscurantist.

Happy Birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach

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Norwegian soprano Sissel Kyrkjebo (also excellent as a cross-over singer) sings Bach’s well-known Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 645). I originally had a Michelangeli performance of the D Minor Chaconne up here, but though that felt right as a general reflection on the state of the economic world, it was a tad somber for the vernal equinox, March 21, also Bach’s birthday……

[Correction: this year the vernal equinox was actually on March 20, which makes my greeting belated twice over]

…so I exchanged it for one of the great sacred cantatas.  I think Bach would approve of Sissel’s upbeat version: Sleepers wake, for night is flying…..

The word “sleepers” is a reference to the parable of the ten virigins in the Bible (Matthew 25: 1-13) .

In a bridal party, ten virgins awaiting the bridegroom fall asleep. Five of them have run out of oil in their lamps and ask the others to give them some at the last minute. The parable is pretty fitting for the times. For “oil,” just substitute savings, hard assets, land, precious metals, undervalued stocks.

….And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out. But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves…..

Genesis On the Resource Wars…

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From the Parsha of Toldot (Genesis 25: 19 -28:9)

“Isaac has now moved into the valley of Gerar (meaning: Lodging Place) and settled his family. Here alone I believe we can stop and look at what he has gone through. Surely we can say this was a man of faith. He had to believe that the L-rd truly intended to bless him as He had his father Abraham. Isaac demonstrated patience by never giving up on G-d, for the birth of his heirs. He trusted in the midst of a famine that the land he was led to would be blessed. He even had to trust, that now, as he was being “forced” from the land where he became so wealthy, that G-d still was faithful to keep His promises. We know that Abraham was a man of faith but likewise so was Isaac. Yet, it’s still not here where our lesson stems. It is in the land where Isaac has now settled, in the valley.

Isaac is in this valley, the very same place his father had been years before Isaac’s birth. Isaac now decides to re-dig the wells his father had once dug. He even intended to give each the same name his father had given to each. These wells had to be restored, because after the death of Abraham, the Philistines had sealed off all of the wells that Abraham had dug. As the servants of Isaac dug and discovered water, the herdsmen of the valley began to quarrel with Isaac’s men. These men demanded that the water of this new well belonged to them. This quarrel led Isaac to name the well Esek, which means “contention”. However, instead of stewing over or forcing his way into ownership of this well he moves on to dig another. Again, there is another argument of this the second well. Once more the long-suffering character of Isaac, which was formed through his twenty years of waiting on the L-rd for children, through his stay with the Philistines and here in the “lodging place”, becomes evident. Instead of arguing over this second well he leaves it as well and calls it Sitnah which means “enmity”. Many of us may be tempted to quit at this point and submit ourselves to the task of just trying to make as little stir as possible and not run the risk of having our work stolen from us again. Not Isaac.

Just when it seems as though every well Isaac seeks to dig will be stolen by the people of the valley, his servants dig another well. Isaac doesn’t stop and think what if I dig this well and they come and take it from me again. Instead, he decides he will dig once more. If the L-rd has blessed him then no man can stop that blessing. Isaac’s faith further deepened his resolve to go out and dig one more time. It is this well where, finally, no conflict arises……”

My Comment

And likewise with inventing or writing or starting a business….

The libertarian way is to move on, realizing that the answer to a fight over resources or markets (or attribution), is to move to a new place. It’s also the thesis of a popular business book, The Blue Ocean Strategy

Unlike Malthusians or Marxists, the true free marketer (unlike the opportunistic free marketer) recognizes that neither resources nor markets nor credit are really limited (they might sometimes seem to be) and that only the uncreative needs to poach.

Matthew 24:33

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Matthew 24:33

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and cares of this life; and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.

But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but my Father only.”

My Comment:

And that pretty much takes care of anyone who says that specific historical events can be foretold from the Bible…

[Correction: “specific historical events” – means, in this context, the “last days” of the apocalyptic passages in the Gospel.]

Even the scripture that they claim as infallible in its literal sense contradicts them..

Debt And Sin In The Bible

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A British Christian libertarian blog on why canceling the debt is questionable from a Christian perspective:

“Should Christians be concerned about this [the levels of debt contracted by the government]? One angle on this is the fact that in the teaching of Jesus, sin is often compared with debt. Two obvious examples are the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:23-35), and the fact that in the Lord’s Prayer as found in Matthew’s gospel, disciples are taught to pray “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” (Matthew 6:12) In other words, there is a correspondence between sin and debt.

Many may consider sin not to be serious, but the Christian does. I am reminded of the words of Anselm of Canterbury, addressing Boso in Cur Deus Homo (Book 1, chapter 21) “You have not yet considered what a heavy weight sin is.”

If sin is serious and Jesus compares sin to debt, surely it follows that for Christians, debt is serious as well. And if that is so, government borrowing which will saddle our country with huge levels of debt, possibly for decades, is serious.

Yes, it is true that in the Old Testament, there was provision for the cancellation of debt every 50 years in the Jubilee, but to argue that such a provision means that one of the world’s wealthiest nations (that has incurred its debts by living beyond its means) should have its slate wiped clean is simply ridiculous.

Perhaps the message for Christians who are not horrified by the levels of debt that we are incurring is: “You have not yet considered what a heavy weight debt is.”