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The Persecuted Church

 

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Did Jesus Christ have a wife?

Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” propagated this, and so does the Mormon religion. Now those who have promoted the Gnostic gospels from Harvard Divinity School (Elaine Pagel's)  has delivered another scrap to have the hardened skeptics feast on.

The Harvard Professor Karen King’s release of the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” a papyrus fragment has gained international attention. This is actually a fragmented text smaller than a business card.. The torn papyrus that has eight incomplete lines of Coptic scrip on one side of the fragment with 30 words. The black ink is legible under a magnifying glass. The convincing factor of the papyrus being genuine is the fading of the ink on the papyrus fibers, and traces of ink adhered to the bent fibers at the torn edges. The back side is so faint that only five words are visible, one only partly: “my moth[er],” “three,” “forth which.” The lines are all fragmentary, with the third line reading “deny. Mary is worthy of it,” and “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife.’” The fifth states, “she will be able to be my disciple.” One has to assume what is being said, depending on what premise they come from they read into it what they want to.

So Jesus apparently left his wife; He ascended to heaven and abandoned her on earth? Does this sound like the morals Jesus taught?

Karen King reports first learning about it from an email back in 2010 from a private collector asking for it to be translated The individual does not want his name released (which always does dampen the pursuit of his discovery). King, an expert in the history of Christianity, says the text contains a dialogue in which Jesus refers to "my wife," whom he identified as Mary. King says the fragment of Coptic script is a copy of a gospel, probably written in Greek in the second century: AP) This too is a theory .

King herself says, it tells us nothing about the actual facts as to whether Jesus had a wife. Yet headlines continue to state that a 'historical document' says Jesus had a wife."
http://www.christianpost.com/news/christian-scholars-not-fazed-by-gospel-of-jesus-wife-81974/#RixvusmKodhQPBzD.99

Dr. Luijendijk, who contributed to Dr. King’s paper says “It would be impossible to forge.” Carbon dating would certainly be the next prudent step to further the validation, or non validation.

Not all is well with this supposition:

London: A New Testament scholar claims to have found evidence suggesting that the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife is a modern forgery.

Professor Francis Watson, of Durham University, says the papyrus fragment, which caused a worldwide sensation when it appeared earlier this week because it appeared to refer to Jesus’s wife, is a patchwork of texts from the genuine Coptic-language Gospel of Thomas, which have been copied and reassembled out of order to make a suggestive new whole. http://gulfnews.com/news/world/gospel-of-jesus-s-wife-is-fake-claims-expert-1.1079727 and http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/21/gospel-jesus-wife-forgery

The two main dialects, Sahidic and Bohairic, Sahidic being the leading dialect. The earliest Bohairic manuscripts are from the 4th century, most texts come from the 9th century or later.

In Sahidic, some Biblical books survived with complete text, there is a large number of extant fragments representing most of the canonical books and certain of the deutero-canonical (Both Wisdom books, the Epistle of Jeremiah, and the Greek additions to Daniel).

Early manuscript of the New Testament :

Bodmer III is the oldest manuscript of the Bohairic. It was discovered by John M. Bodmer of Geneva in Upper Egypt. It contains the Gospel of John, dated palaeographically to the 4th century. It contains 239 pages, but the first 22 are damaged having John 1:1-21:25.

Manuscripts of the Sahidic.

The Crosby-Schøyen Codex is a papyrus manuscript of 52 leaves. It contains the complete text of 1 Peter (held at the University of Mississippi)

British Library MS. Oriental 7594 contains an unusual combination of books: Deuteronomy, Jonah, and Acts. It is dated paleographically to the late 3rd or early 4th century.

Michigan MS. Inv 3992, a papyrus codex, has 42 folios (among them are the New Testament books 1 Corinthians, Titus, and dated to the 4th century.

Berlin MS. Or. 408 and British Museum Or. 3518, The Berlin portion contains the Book of Revelation, 1 John, and Philemon (in this order), dated to the 4th century.

Bodmer XIX — Matthew 14:28-28:20; Romans 1:1-2:3; 4th or 5th century.

This new piece of a gospel does not bring any proof that Jesus was married, but has people question his singleness on a whim. This piecemeal of postulation may be solved by what has already been written as Christ calls himself a bridegroom throughout the New Testament, the church being his body (as Eve was to Adam) in a spiritual sense, not a literal manner. This new discovery can be added to all the other non biblical Gnostic texts that were counterfeit Christian writings that were made long after the church began, forged to bring confusion to what was already delivered and known within the first two centuries that were contrary to the eye witnesses.

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