A recent story about a discovery of an ancient papyrus
fragment that seemed to indicate that Jesus was married caught my eye as well
as the interest of the general public; all news media carried the story.
Biblical archaeology is my bag and maybe my passion so all
stories dealing with the subject will get my attention.
The Vatican
was quick to declare the ancient document a “fake” as they always do with
ancient documents that do not agree with what the Vatican believes and teaches.
The belief that Jesus was married (to Mary Magdalene) goes
back centuries and the fact that people are still surprised by that hypothesis
proves again that Christians know very little about the history of their
religion if anything at all.
What many Christians do not know is that there are and were
“many” gospels in existence beside the ones in their bible; the ones in the
bible were picked from hundreds of gospels floating around at that time in
history and therefore are considered ”canonical” gospels since they are part of
the “canon” that makes up the “accepted” bible.
St. Paul of Tarsus, the
inventor of Christianity, did not know Jesus and knew very little about Jesus
so he did not say much about the actual Jesus and his life and based his
religion on the death and resurrection of Jesus and not on Jesus himself, what
he did and what he taught.
The gospels in our bible came after the writings of St. Paul
and are not meant as biographies of Jesus as in the history of Jesus but are
mainly works of theology and deal with what they believe are the teachings and
acts of Jesus; they do not mention if Jesus was married.
In those ancient times, most men Jesus’ age were married and
so it is not a stretch to think that Jesus was married but the belief would
play havoc with the Vatican’s
celibacy argument.
Biblical historians also point to the fact that Mary
Magdalene plays a pretty important role in the Jesus story. The fact that Mary
Magdalene was the first to hear (from an angel) that Jesus has risen from the
dead instead of Peter or any of the other apostles, places her in a high
position ahead of the other apostles and suggests that she may have been the
“first” or the “highest in rank” apostle because she was his sponsor (money)
and his wife.
As the world turned patriarchal (or was it always that way),
women sank lower and lower on the food chain and even though the first
Christian bishops were women who allowed their homes to be used as churches,
men eventually put the women in their place (kitchen) and told them to shut up
as seen in later Pauline Epistles (pseudo).
It is quite possible that as women were marginalized through
history, the gospel writers just followed the trend and diminished the role of
Mary Magdalene in Jesus’ life. To this day, Catholics were and are severely criticized
for their “worship” of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus by Protestant sects
because after all, she was just a woman.
Biblical scholars are already arguing if the tiny piece of
ancient papyrus is “authentic” but we must always remind ourselves that anybody
could have written a “gospel” and in this case it was a “Coptic” gospel
(Egyptian sect of Christianity) which belongs to a group of Christians that to
this day, is not lock and step with Western Christianity and never were.
Gospels are not based on historic fact but some may have a
modicum of fact as gleaned from oral histories passed down for centuries but
the fact remains that no one and I mean no one including the Vatican, has any
idea if Jesus was married or not since Jesus did not write (illiterate as most
men at that age were) and his apostles did not write anything down either
(Gospels in the Bible were not written by Jesus’ apostles who died many years
before they were written).
Even though the point of Jesus’ marital status is only conjecture
and can only be conjecture, it still amazes me how much hubbub a discovery like
this causes and that is because no one likes to see their very strongly held
beliefs dashed by a chance discovery…especially the old guys in the Vatican.
