An ancient papyrus fragment which a Harvard scholar says contains the first recorded mention that Jesus may have had a wife is a fake, the Vatican said Friday.Read the rest here.
"Substantial reasons would lead one to conclude that the papyrus is indeed a clumsy forgery," the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, said in an editorial by its editor, Gian Maria Vian. "In any case, it's a fake."
Joining a highly charged academic debate over the authenticity of the text, written in ancient Egyptian Coptic, the newspaper published a lengthy analysis by expert Alberto Camplani of Rome's La Sapienza university, outlining doubts about the manuscript and urging extreme caution.
The fragment, which reads "Jesus said to them, 'My wife...'" was unveiled by Harvard Professor Karen King as a text from the 4th century at a congress of Coptic Studies in Rome last week.
These sorts of cons pop up all the time. It can be amusing watching supposedly smart people being duped by really bad forgeries. Anyone remember Hitler's diaries?
1 comment:
Even if the scrap is real and not a fake, so what? This scrap does not even contain a complete sentence. How do we know how the sentence finishes?
Furthermore, who wrote this, anyway? We know that a lot of Gnostic groups were composing their own Gospels in the second century. That is why a Canon had to be fixed in the first place.
This only "disproves" Christianity to those who are already hostile to it anyway.
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