Blog 5: Vatican Says Papyrus Referring to Jesus' Wife Is Probably Fake

The Vatican has raised doubts on a recently released of a text basically states that the Jesus alludes to having a wife. The Vatican believes it is a fake and considers it “problematic and controversial.” An editorial that was published on Friday in the Vatican newspaper stated that evidence existed to dismiss the papyrus as an “inept forgery.” Scholars that discuss the papyrus text end up in an intense discussion. Harvard scholar, Karen L. King, presented it as a fragment of a fourth-century gospel at an international conference of Coptic scholars this month in Rome. She didn’t say he was married; she just said questions his celibacy and marital status. Now the authenticity of the papyrus is being questioned. She arranged to have a chemical composition of the ink to be tested but it was hard for her to schedule a testing. The test should be able to approximate the date for when the ink was used. The suspicions that the papyrus was forged grew when Francis Watson, a scholar at Durham University in England, posted a paper online arguing that the text was cobbled together from phrases in the Gospel of Thomas. Experts say that kind of cobbling doesn’t prove it was forged because things like that show up in authentic ancient texts as well. Dr. Alberto Camplani said he was suspicious of the papyrus because it had been found on the antiquarian market and not through a dig. He believes that objects of such value demands for numerous precautions to establish its reliability and to exclude the possibility that it could be forgery.

                This is could definitely become a social problem because there are a lot of people who take the marital status of Jesus seriously and once it was out in the press it caused a lot of issues between Christians. There are a lot of people who already are conscious of what’s going on and are curious of what’s real and what’s not. It is also possible that it could extend to a global problem because religions that are closely knit to Christianity. It might cause other religions to look more into the topic because they too might think that Jesus did not marry or stay celibate. There is also a difference in beliefs in this situation.  Although it is within the Christian community the fact that some Christians believe one thing and others believe something else could cause controversy in a community. There is no telling how soon they can find out if the papyrus is real or not so until then it is quite obvious that there will be sn intense argument over what’s right and what’s wrong. There was also the issue of whether Dr. King should have given the information out to the press because they didn't know if it was real or not. That within itself is a controversy. I don’t see this situation getting worked out anytime soon because of the testing but maybe it will.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/world/europe/vatican-says-papyrus-referring-to-jesus-wife-is-probably-fake.html