Blogs Abuzz for Jesus' Wife

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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JoeWallack
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Re: Blogs Abuzz for Jesus' Wife

Post by JoeWallack »

JW:
The other issue that Goodacre/CBS are in denial about is motivation. In place of hard evidence CBS asserts that Jesus having a wife is a modern issue. However, there has always been an entire industry of forged artifacts praying on gullible Christians. The main motivation for forgery is money and money is where the demand is. Here the demand is for supposed artifacts that support Christian assertion, not go against it. How much would the Hobby Lobby pay for a supposed ancient fragment that has Jesus saying rain down fire on Fire Island.


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TedM
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Re: Blogs Abuzz for Jesus' Wife

Post by TedM »

Just a quick acknowledgement of your post. I appreciate it. Sounds like the Watson article may not be as insightful as it presents itself to be.
PhilosopherJay wrote:Image

Hi TedM,

The very first word in the "wife" papyrus seems to be Jesus.
There are mulitiple fragments/manuscripts of the Gospel of Thomas. That one of them should also begin with the word Jesus is not that unusual. About 90 of the 114 sayings in the Gospel of Thomas starts with the words "Jesus said."
Of the four sayings that Watson points to, three of them begin with the phrase Jesus said:
(30) Jesus said, "Where there are three gods, they are gods. Where there are two or one, I am with him."
(45) (45) Jesus said, "Grapes are not harvested from thorns, nor are figs gathered from thistles, for they do not produce fruit. A good man brings forth good from his storehouse; an evil man brings forth evil things from his evil storehouse, which is in his heart, and says evil things. For out of the abundance of the heart he brings forth evil things."
(101) <Jesus said,> "Whoever does not hate his father and his mother as I do cannot become a disciple to me. And whoever does not love his father and his mother as I do cannot become a disciple to me. For my mother [...], but my true mother gave me life."
(114) Simon Peter said to him, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life."
Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."

The fact that the "wife" manuscript has the word "my" at the end of the first line, and the Gospel of Thomas saying #101 has it at the end of the second line is meaningless. The word "my" appears about 30 times in the Gospel of Thomas. Since there are less than 10 words per line, and the word "my" appears 30 times, the odds are that it will appear in 3 lines in the text at the end of a line. Since most of the sayings are "Jesus said" sayings, and are only about three lines long, the odds are pretty good that you would find the word "my" at the end of line 1, 2, or 3 of a saying beginning with "Jesus said." Watson was unlucky in that the word "my" does not appear on the same line with the word "Jesus." Instead, he has to wreck his parallel and suggest that the second line of saying 101 ends in "my," while the first line in the "wife" papyrus ends in "my".

Using the logic of Watson we can say that all four gospels must have been copied from the Gospel of Thomas because they all contain the phrase "Jesus" at the beginning of a line and all contain the word "my" somewhere in the next three lines afterwards.

I am not sure if I have interpreted Watson's points correctly, but if I haven not, it is only because they are presented in such an absurdly vague manner as to make them incomprehensible and worthless. This kind of incoherent argument may mean something to apologists, but it doesn't mean anything outside that world.

Instead of doubling down on his wrong bet, now that the scientific evidence is in, Watson should apologize to the scholars whose reputations he has impugned.
Warmly,

Jay Raskin

TedM wrote:From the article in question, we have the following:
..the text has been constructed out of small pieces–words or phrases–culled from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (GTh), especially Sayings 30, 45, 101 and 114, and set in new ontexts...The author has used a kind of “collage” technique to assemble the items selected from Thomas into a new composition. While this is a very unlikely way for an ancient author to compose a text, it’s what might be expected of a modern forger with limited facility in the Coptic language.4I do not see anything in Dr King’s response to cause me to retract that last sentence.Furthermore, I pointed out that the very first line of the fragment begins in the middle of a word, at exactly the same place as in the equivalent passagei n the one surviving Gospel of Thomas manuscript. And line 1 ends with the same ending as the following line in Thomas.This is quite a coincidence, and it suggests that the author f[the Jesus’ wife fragment]may have drawn his Thomas material from a modern printed edition
If the part in italics is correct, IMO this text is almost certainly a forgery, and there is no need for experts to weigh in. All that is needed is some common sense.
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JoeWallack
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My Wife

Post by JoeWallack »

I Ain't Been Home Since Friday Night and Now my Wife, is Coming After me

JW:
The other thing that gets me here is when a fragment is discovered that has strong parallels to what is extant, CBS takes that as evidence of authenticity, if they like what it says. And when there is just one significant difference in an area, like "Matthew's" Jesus' family has a father and "Mark's" does not, not only is it no evidence against authenticity, it is evidence for because now it is an independent witness.


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PhilosopherJay
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Re: Blogs Abuzz for Jesus' Wife

Post by PhilosopherJay »

Hi Andrew,

Watson apparently does not argue that the forgery was done in the 17th century. He apparently argues that Morton Smith forged it. James Tabor points this out about Watson (http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/th ... -fake.html) in a 2012 comment to Mark Goodacre on Watson's arguments against the authenticity of Jesus' wife gospel:
I am curious as to how convincing you find Watson's analysis here Mark, given the ways in which these materials, as you know, often repeat themes, lines, and set theological tropes. I found it very weak, and coupled with the slanderous charge against Morton Smith, whom I knew well and highly respected, it falls rather flat for me. The false charges against Morton have been ably refuted by several and it seems to me that Karen and her consultants, judging from her paper, have already considered everything that Watson points out.
Note also this from a 2010 blog by Roger Viklunds (http://rogerviklund.wordpress.com/2010/ ... is-watson/:
Francis Watson, professor of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Durham, has in an article from April this year, Beyond Suspicion: on the Authorship of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark (JTS 61, 2010, 128-170), concluded that Clement’s letter to Theodoros “is manifestly pseudonymous” and that “it is clear that the author of this letter is Morton Smith”.
Watson used slander and poor arguments to try to discredit a major discovery in early Christian history with the "Secret Gospel of Mark." He is doing the same thing here. With the scientific evidence proving that this is an ancient document, in light of his past charges against Morton Smith, Watson's actions in labeling Professor's King's discovery a modern forgery seem reprehensible.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

andrewcriddle wrote:
ficino wrote:Wasn't the supposed letter of Clement copied onto one of the flyleaves of a manuscript? If so, and if Smith forged it, he would have had to have done that in situ - unless he spirited the manuscript away to his room when he was staying at Mar Saba and later spirited it back to the library. Maybe possible...

sorry, just realized - derailing further!

w/ smith's book being reissued, do we need a separate thread on his work?
The letter was copied onto the flyleaves of a 17th century printed book.

Most of those who regard the letter of Clement as a modern work believe that this printed book (with the additional material) was surreptitiously added to the Mar Saba library.

Andrew Criddle

(Hopefully my last post on this point in this thread.)
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Re: Blogs Abuzz for Jesus' Wife

Post by andrewcriddle »

PhilosopherJay wrote:Hi Andrew,

Watson apparently does not argue that the forgery was done in the 17th century. He apparently argues that Morton Smith forged it.
Against my better judgment I will reply.

Watson does not believe that the Mar Saba letter involved a conspiracy.
Hence he is not a conspiracy theorist.


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Roger Pearse
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Re: Blogs Abuzz for Jesus' Wife

Post by Roger Pearse »

DCHindley wrote:
Roger Pearse wrote: It pongs a bit to me.
Honestly, to me it seems that the extreme negative reaction to this fragment is nothing more than knee jerk reactions from the crowd who are aghast that anyone could so much as suggest that the divine aspect of the Son of God could have stooped to union with a <shudder> human female! ... That is only speculation, of course.
You are obviously more theologically minded than I am.

Forgeries have a certain smell to them. One of their characteristics is that they appeal very strongly, not to the fads of the time in which they were supposed to be written, but to those of the period in which they ARE written. This fingerprint is inevitable; because unless an item is "exciting", then it will not attract notice. And you don't forge something for it to not attract notice. Consequently you may be sure that any item which presses a hot-button in a particular period is quite likely to have been composed in and for that period. Real finds tend to be dull.

All the best,

Roger Pearse
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Re: Blogs Abuzz for Jesus' Wife

Post by Peter Kirby »

Roger Pearse wrote:
DCHindley wrote:
Roger Pearse wrote: It pongs a bit to me.
Honestly, to me it seems that the extreme negative reaction to this fragment is nothing more than knee jerk reactions from the crowd who are aghast that anyone could so much as suggest that the divine aspect of the Son of God could have stooped to union with a <shudder> human female! ... That is only speculation, of course.
You are obviously more theologically minded than I am.

Forgeries have a certain smell to them. One of their characteristics is that they appeal very strongly, not to the fads of the time in which they were supposed to be written, but to those of the period in which they ARE written. This fingerprint is inevitable; because unless an item is "exciting", then it will not attract notice. And you don't forge something for it to not attract notice. Consequently you may be sure that any item which presses a hot-button in a particular period is quite likely to have been composed in and for that period. Real finds tend to be dull.
I agree with this. As a criterion, the content points to forgery.

The content might also annoy some people today (making them biased) or excite others (making them biased the other way), but that's irrelevant. Bias on the part of some people is not evidence of anything.

But the content itself is much more likely in a case of forgery than it is in a case of authenticity, to look at it from a Bayesian perspective. Of course that is only one factor for consideration.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
TedM
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Re: Blogs Abuzz for Jesus' Wife

Post by TedM »

I second the agreement on that criteria. Unless suddenly new interest has emerged which has spawned greater research and treasure hunting where it hasn't existed before, then authenticity given this criteria would be an unlikely coincidence.
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Re: Blogs Abuzz for Jesus' Wife

Post by DCHindley »

Roger,

I must not have as sensitive a sense of smell as you have.

To me, it is just a line of text that is not an implausible product from a 6th-8th century CE Egyptian Gnostic (provided Gnosticism still actually existed in that time). Perhaps a mystical text with an Islamic twist? Muslims have no problem with a married prophet like Jesus.

Nothing in it prompts me to immediately have to denounce it as if all Christendom will collapse if Jesus was thought to be married by someone 6 or more centuries removed from Jesus' time.

The owner of the full manuscript from which this sample was cut (I think everyone agrees that it was cut with scissors) certainly hopes to sell the whole ms if the sample can be verified as ancient. If I am not mistaken, it is believed that a number of ancient mss, maybe even from Qumran caves or Egypt, are out there, wasting away in poor conditions, by folks who are now afraid to be caught with contraband. Short of a general amnesty and the promise of a 'finders fee" they will likely be burned in the oven before they will ever be turned over to a reputable institution.

It may turn out to be in such hands, and the unsophisticated way the sample was supplied suggests that whoever holds it is not a reputable artifact or manuscript dealer. Think of something spirited away from Egypt in Napoleon's time by a soldier or bureaucrat as a souvenir. Now, discovered in a dusty library long after the death of the souvenir taker, the present holder hopes to make a buck or two.

Whoo wee! But so what. The truth will come out eventually.

DCH
Roger Pearse wrote:You [DCH] are obviously more theologically minded than I am.

Forgeries have a certain smell to them. One of their characteristics is that they appeal very strongly, not to the fads of the time in which they were supposed to be written, but to those of the period in which they ARE written. This fingerprint is inevitable; because unless an item is "exciting", then it will not attract notice. And you don't forge something for it to not attract notice. Consequently you may be sure that any item which presses a hot-button in a particular period is quite likely to have been composed in and for that period. Real finds tend to be dull.
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Re: Blogs Abuzz for Jesus' Wife

Post by DCHindley »

As I have been watching TV coverage of the missing Malaysian 777 and the passenger families' complaints about the handling by Malay authorities, I noted an overlap with this "Jesus' Wife" fragment.

Folks 1) making up their minds about cause, in advance of evidence, 2) refusing to consider any other alternatives, 3) offer misleading and twisted versions of actual evidence as it becomes available to favor the predetermined view, and 4) vilify the key persons involved.

These exact same traits have happened with Jesus' Wife as well as Smith's Secret Gospel.

What on earth are these folks afraid of? The sky will fall if 1) a plane can disappear without a trace without sinister forces affecting things, 2) 6th century or later Gnostics believed Jesus was married, 3) 2nd century Gnostics believed that Jesus performed secret initiations all oddy nagoy.

DCH
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