Jesus had a wife! It’s the Gospel of Judas all over again. An exotic Gnostic document claimed to date from the fourth century,* written in Coptic, containing something startling about Jesus, and shrouded in secrecy until its sudden and dramatic unveiling. Next comes the derecho of media publicity, the carefully timed television documentary, the speculation that this means the end of Christianity as we know it, and then, with the finality of a soufflé collapsing as the oven door opens, the revelation that the document isn’t, or may well not be, exactly what its promoters say it is.
In Judas’ case the deflation took several months over 2006 and 2007, as it became clear that the “good Judas” (instead of the traitor Judas of the four Christian gospels) revealed in the Gnostic document was the product of hasty mistranscriptions and wishful thinking. In the case of “Jesus’ Wife”â??—â??a tiny rectangle of tattered papyrus on which the words “Jesus said to them, ‘my wife’ ” appear in Coptic, contradicting two thousand years of Christian belief that he was celibateâ??—â??the deflation process has taken only a week. Amid the Niagara of press coverage and speculation, a number of Coptic scholars have concluded that the “Jesus’ Wife” fragment is a fake. They deem it a collage of phrases cribbed nearly word for word from another fourth-century Gnostic text, the Gospel of Thomas, and inked by a modern forger onto a blank scrap of ancient papyrus.
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