Analyses of Jesus' Wife Fragment Finally Published

[One Bad Pig]

The papyrus was dated, but the ink wasn't.

Hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good rant.

[One Bad Pig]

Thanks, OBP.

My schedule is ... :shrieklichkeit: (<— we need that smiley, and yes, that's the way I want it spelled) at the mo', so I can't contribute at anything near a good standard.

But here are some initial reactions.

First, the Goodacre Blog you linked in your earlier post:

The Jesus' Wife Fragment: How the Forgery Was Done

What's this "How the forgery was done" business? Has that been concluded already? I haven't seen that conclusion anywhere else. It can't possibly be a consensus, or I'd be seeing it elsewhere.

My first reaction is that this guy does not follow the usual standards of academic objectivity. The eyebrow has been raised.

And in fact his evidence is at best circumstantial, and at worst, made up of little more than personal bias.

1. Gos. Jes. Wife borrows the framework for a simple dialogue between Jesus and his disciples from Gos. Thom. 12.

2. All decipherable words in Gos. Jes. Wife appear in Gos. Thom. with a single exception: TAHIME (“my wife.”)

3. The words of each line of text in Gos. Jes. Wife are found in close proximity to each other in Gos. Thom.

4. The forger has slightly redacted Gos. Thom. by making masculine pronouns feminine and (attempting to) transform affirmative/negative statements into their opposites.

5. More than half a dozen notable textual features in Gos. Jes. Wife can be attributed to a forger’s dependence on Grondin’s Interlinear.

Numbers 1 and 4 are circumstantial, but interesting in my view for another reason, apart from evidence of forgery, because they support GoThomas as a literary source for the author of GoJesuswife. Hey, GoJw's got to have been based on something, right?

Numbers 2 and 3, though, are just bad statistics. You can see the fragment in all of these articles. The available sample of words and contiguities isn't big enough for anything but garbage-out analyses. Number 2 is worse; it's bad logic.

Number 5 is beyond my ability to critique, but lays to rest any lingering doubts that Goodacre may be referring to a 4th-8th century forger, unless Grondin was an early church father. And that's where I stop taking Goodacre seriously, because the fragment's papyrus and inks are now dated with a terminus ante quem that removes Grondin from the picture entirely.

The papyrus fragment has now been analyzed by professors of electrical engineering, chemistry and biology at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembles other ancient papyri from the fourth to the eighth centuries. (Scientists at the University of Arizona, who dated the fragment to centuries before the birth of Jesus, concluded that their results were unreliable.)

And no, critiques of the dating techniques do not constitute evidence of a modern forgery. They do no more than give us reasons to be hesitant when beginning analyses with an understanding that this is a fourth to eighth century fragment.

Your immediate link is to Professor Watson's response (PDF) which includes a quote from Leo Depuydt:

I am personally 100% certain that the Wife of Jesus Fragment is a forgery. I have otherwise never deemed ink or papyrus tests necessary or relevant in light of the evidence set forth below. I will make three brief observations, however. First, the ink tests show chemical composition, in this case carbon-based “lamp black,” not age. Carbon-based ink is exactly the type that I would have used if I had been the forger. Second, as for the papyrus, nothing is more common than for forged paintings to be painted on an old piece of wood. And third, in a letter of July 19, 2013, accompanying his report, the principal investigator of the radiocarbon dating test, Professor Greg Hodgins, states that certain stable isotope measurements “[cast] doubt upon the validity of the radiocarbon date.”

I don't see any reason to read that beyond the first sentence. But I did anyway. And I'm now officially blaming Goodacre for wasting my time.

The eyebrow is lowered, and replaced with an entirely justifiable sneer. Into the bucket with Holding you go, Goodacre.


Understand I take it for granted there are no surviving texts with reliable quotations from Jesus — sorry, I put most of the canonical gospels in that category, too — but that if he had a wife we'd know about it already, and that pseudepigrapha are more numerous in history than authentic texts. Paul's letters, by their pillorying of his own pseudigraphers — a pillorying ironically copied by his copiers for verisimilitude according to Ehrman — make it clear that that last was already an issue with Christian texts in the first century.

So it's reasonable to assume from the outset, at the very least, that a fragment from the fourth to eighth centuries can't be mined for biographical information on Jesus.

It can be mined for information on fourth to eighth century Christian splinter groups, though, and that's what I was trying to highlight with my earlier post.

As ever, Jesse

You may have missed it, toasti, but it's the scientists who ran the tests (see the bold bits above) who cast doubts on the results.

[Juvenal]

The papyrus was dated, but the ink wasn't.

Second, that's simply incorrect. Not only has the ink been dated, but we've got critiques of that dating in the thread already.

I'm sure you understand that not all dating is carbon based. There are chemical, electrical, and even photoluminscent methods in use, and that's only to my knowledge. Pottery styles are probably the most common measure, despite the fact the sherds can't be carbon-dated, and only supply relative dates. The entire horde of ANE tablets from the Sumerian through the Assyrian Empires are dated by paleographers using similar measures.

But first, and again, critiques of the dating do not constitute evidence for forgery. Even at best, evidence that it could have been forged is only evidence that it could have been forged. Anyone jumping the gun on the conclusion that it is a forgery based on that kind of hand-waving isn't worth my time, which is otherwise in very short supply right now.

As ever, Jesse

[Juvenal]

You may have missed it, toasti, but it's the scientists who ran the tests (see the bold bits above) who cast doubts on the results.

You may have missed it, piglet, but that's why the centuries-before-Christ date has been rejected in favor of somewhere inside the fourth to eighth centuries.

As ever, Jesse

[Paprika]

Second, that's simply incorrect. Not only has the ink been dated, but we've got critiques of that dating in the thread already.

I'm sure you understand that not all dating is carbon based. There are chemical, electrical, and even photoluminscent methods in use, and that's only to my knowledge.

I quote the conclusion of the ink study report: "The ink or inks used in this manuscript are primarily based on carbon black pigments such as Lamp Black. The observed Raman spectra are very similar to the carbon‐based inks studied for a wide variety of manuscripts including many dated from the early centuries of the Christian era."

Would you call this dating? It's so non-specific so as to be useless to tell what time period the ink came from, and with what probability.

But first, and again, critiques of the dating do not constitute evidence for forgery. Even at best, evidence that it could have been forged is only evidence that it could have been forged. Anyone jumping the gun on the conclusion that it is a forgery based on that kind of hand-waving isn't worth my time, which is otherwise in very short supply right now.

I don't think Watson or Goodacre, or any disputing scholar has critiqued the dating to prove forgery, but to argue against a competing hypothesis. If you know otherwise, please do name and quote the scholar.

[One Bad Pig]

You may have missed it, piglet, but that's why the centuries-before-Christ date has been rejected in favor of somewhere inside the fourth to eighth centuries.

As ever, Jesse

Er, seventh to ninth centuries. Even Karen King has apparently dropped the fourth century dating. And, as Paprika has noted, the ink study itself does not go into dating. That the papyrus is dated c. 800 CE does not guarantee that the ink was applied then.

[Juvenal]

I quote the conclusion of the ink study report: "The ink or inks used in this manuscript are primarily based on carbon black pigments such as Lamp Black. The observed Raman spectra are very similar to the carbon‐based inks studied for a wide variety of manuscripts including many dated from the early centuries of the Christian era."

Would you call this dating? It's so non-specific so as to be useless to tell what time period the ink came from, and with what probability.

It's a big range, with a lot of uncertainty, but it's still dating. It very well could have excluded the fourth to eighth century dating of the papyrus by establishing a termimus post quem beyond this interval.

I don't think Watson or Goodacre, or any disputing scholar has critiqued the dating to prove forgery, but to argue against a competing hypothesis. If you know otherwise, please do name and quote the scholar.

Goodacre linked approvingly to Watson who included the earlier quote by the redoubtable "I'm 100 percent certain" Depuydt. Oh no. Let's not call these guys scholars, okay? And let's not keep wasting time on fringe opinions.

I'm not 100 percent certain, but I'm quite sure Jesus didn't have a wife. I'm even more sure there have been Christian splinter groups, with their own gospels, from at least the section century. If it's authentic, the fragment shows there was one such sect, possibly descended from the Gospel of Thomas tradition, that believed Jesus had a wife.

Hardly earth-shattering, but interesting, I guess.

As ever, Jesse

[Paprika]

It's a big range, with a lot of uncertainty, but it's still dating. It very well could have excluded the fourth to eighth century dating of the papyrus by establishing a termimus post quem beyond this interval.

It doesn't. There is no terminus given at all in the paper.

[Juvenal]

Er, seventh to ninth centuries.

Nice footwork, piglet.

You understand your earlier post about the carbon dating issues was about the 410 to 200 BCE dating now, right? So we've got a terminus pro quem from the papyrus of c. 650 BCE at the two-sigma level, that lines up with an associated fragment from GoJohn.

Even Karen King has apparently dropped the fourth century dating. And, as Paprika has noted, the ink study itself does not go into dating. That the papyrus is dated c. 800 CE does not guarantee that the ink was applied then.

Paprika was wrong.

It happens.

So what we're looking at is, at best, evidence of a 7th to 9th century sect that believed Jesus had a wife, and at worst, a modern-day forger interested in showing there was a 7th to 9th century sect that believed Jesus had a wife. That's guessing there was a forger, and the forger knew his papyrus.

If that sect existed, they were wrong, too.

Jesus still didn't have a wife, IMHO. I can't imagine any reason why that would be excluded from the canonical gospels, and plenty of reason to think it would have made the canonical gospels if it were so. There's no embarrassment involved with a religious figure being married.

Now, the other half we haven't looked at is the suggestion that Jesus' wife could be a disciple, with the associated "Good enough for Jesus' wife, good enough for my gal, too" argument that women could have a greater role in the church. If I was milking conspiracy theories, I'd be looking at scholars supporting priesthood for women in the Catholic church.

But I'm not. So I'm left with a possible sect from early Medieval Christianity with some fairly odd views.

Anything else here I'm missing?

As ever, Jesse

[Juvenal]

It doesn't. There is no terminus given at all in the paper.

It could have. It didn't. Are you even reading my posts? Somehow missed the "could have excluded" bit?

I'm sorry. I'm tired and cranky and overstressed right now. My schedule has 34 hours, on my feet, in lecture for the next three months, and they already hurt, and that's the easy part. While I'm nursing my hurting dogs, I've got seven instructional videos, including three supporting the new adjuncts teaching their own sections of my course, and seven "Welcome" emails for my own students that need to go out today, along with a respectable pile of admin work from last term that needs to be finished before Monday before I can even begin my preps for next week.

Somewhere there's a milk carton with a picture of my weekend on its side. Help me find it. I just came here to chill for a bit. I'm not looking for an argument, just a discussion. And I don't have time to for anything else.

As ever, Jesse

[One Bad Pig]

Nice footwork, piglet.

You understand your earlier post about the carbon dating issues was about the 410 to 200 BCE dating now, right?

Yes. Though even for Egypt, that would be extremely old for papyrus, and would make the forgery obvious.

So we've got a terminus pro quem from the papyrus of c. 650 BCE at the two-sigma level, that lines up with an associated fragment from GoJohn.

CE, not BCE, yes?

Paprika was wrong.

It happens.

Did you look at the ink study I linked? Did I miss where it talked about date testing the ink? Is there some other ink study you can point me to which did discuss the dating? Because all I'm seeing is papyrus dated to the 7th to 9th century with ink consistent with material used at that time.

So what we're looking at is, at best, evidence of a 7th to 9th century sect that believed Jesus had a wife, and at worst, a modern-day forger interested in showing there was a 7th to 9th century sect that believed Jesus had a wife. That's guessing there was a forger, and the forger knew his papyrus.

Pretty much.

Jesus still didn't have a wife, IMHO. I can't imagine any reason why that would be excluded from the canonical gospels, and plenty of reason to think it would have made the canonical gospels if it were so. There's no embarrassment involved with a religious figure being married.

Agreed.

Now, the other half we haven't looked at is the suggestion that Jesus' wife could be a disciple, with the associated "Good enough for Jesus' wife, good enough for my gal, too" argument that women could have a greater role in the church. If I was milking conspiracy theories, I'd be looking at scholars supporting priesthood for women in the Catholic church.

Eh, that would be a tough angle. We already know Jesus had female disciples. I recall at least one group believing that Jesus had 30 apostles (with one of them being a woman, counting as a "half") based on the 29.5 day lunar cycle. Mary Magdalene is even called "the apostle to the apostles" in Orthodoxy because she was sent to the the apostles of Jesus' resurrection. Not much new to add from that angle AFAICS.

[OingoBoingo]

First, the Goodacre Blog you linked in your earlier post:

The Jesus' Wife Fragment: How the Forgery Was Done

What's this "How the forgery was done" business? Has that been concluded already? I haven't seen that conclusion anywhere else. It can't possibly be a consensus, or I'd be seeing it elsewhere.

My first reaction is that this guy does not follow the usual standards of academic objectivity. The eyebrow has been raised.

And in fact his evidence is at best circumstantial, and at worst, made up of little more than personal bias.

1. Gos. Jes. Wife borrows the framework for a simple dialogue between Jesus and his disciples from Gos. Thom. 12.

2. All decipherable words in Gos. Jes. Wife appear in Gos. Thom. with a single exception: TAHIME (“my wife.”)

3. The words of each line of text in Gos. Jes. Wife are found in close proximity to each other in Gos. Thom.

4. The forger has slightly redacted Gos. Thom. by making masculine pronouns feminine and (attempting to) transform affirmative/negative statements into their opposites.

5. More than half a dozen notable textual features in Gos. Jes. Wife can be attributed to a forger’s dependence on Grondin’s Interlinear.

Numbers 1 and 4 are circumstantial, but interesting in my view for another reason, apart from evidence of forgery, because they support GoThomas as a literary source for the author of GoJesuswife. Hey, GoJw's got to have been based on something, right?

Numbers 2 and 3, though, are just bad statistics. You can see the fragment in all of these articles. The available sample of words and contiguities isn't big enough for anything but garbage-out analyses. Number 2 is worse; it's bad logic.

Number 5 is beyond my ability to critique, but lays to rest any lingering doubts that Goodacre may be referring to a 4th-8th century forger, unless Grondin was an early church father. And that's where I stop taking Goodacre seriously, because the fragment's papyrus and inks are now dated with a terminus ante quem that removes Grondin from the picture entirely.

The papyrus fragment has now been analyzed by professors of electrical engineering, chemistry and biology at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembles other ancient papyri from the fourth to the eighth centuries. (Scientists at the University of Arizona, who dated the fragment to centuries before the birth of Jesus, concluded that their results were unreliable.)

And no, critiques of the dating techniques do not constitute evidence of a modern forgery. They do no more than give us reasons to be hesitant when beginning analyses with an understanding that this is a fourth to eighth century fragment.

I don't know if you noticed this or not, but that blog article was from 2012, before the recent results came in. Also, if you've been following the course of discussion between scholars on the fragment, much of what Goodacre shares on his blog is not original to him. He basically used his blog to collate the data as it was coming in. Now, of course, he agreed with the charge of forgery at that time, but that seemed to be the majority opinion among scholars who were discussing the issue then.

Your immediate link is to Professor Watson's response (PDF) which includes a quote from Leo Depuydt:

I am personally 100% certain that the Wife of Jesus Fragment is a forgery. I have otherwise never deemed ink or papyrus tests necessary or relevant in light of the evidence set forth below. I will make three brief observations, however. First, the ink tests show chemical composition, in this case carbon-based “lamp black,” not age. Carbon-based ink is exactly the type that I would have used if I had been the forger. Second, as for the papyrus, nothing is more common than for forged paintings to be painted on an old piece of wood. And third, in a letter of July 19, 2013, accompanying his report, the principal investigator of the radiocarbon dating test, Professor Greg Hodgins, states that certain stable isotope measurements “[cast] doubt upon the validity of the radiocarbon date.”

I don't see any reason to read that beyond the first sentence. But I did anyway. And I'm now officially blaming Goodacre for wasting my time.

The eyebrow is lowered, and replaced with an entirely justifiable sneer. Into the bucket with Holding you go, Goodacre.

You're being far too harsh on Goodacre. If you're at all familiar with his work or his blog, you'd know that he's a reputable scholar from Duke university who's big on being open and even-handed. Watson has been leading the way in the case on the claim to forgery, and Goodacre has been posting his responses to the issue all along, so it'd be weird for him to not follow up with Watson. Leo Depuydt's article on the fragment, by the way, was published by Harvard with their results, so its not like quoting him is coming out of the blue.

[OingoBoingo]

Now, the other half we haven't looked at is the suggestion that Jesus' wife could be a disciple, with the associated "Good enough for Jesus' wife, good enough for my gal, too" argument that women could have a greater role in the church.

Funny you mention that. Goodacre thinks its likely that Mary Magdalene was not only a disciple, but also the first woman Apostle. He also thinks it likely that Junia, in Romans 16:7, was an Apostle.

[Juvenal]

Yes. Though even for Egypt, that would be extremely old for papyrus, and would make the forgery obvious.

CE, not BCE, yes?

Did you look at the ink study I linked? Did I miss where it talked about date testing the ink? Is there some other ink study you can point me to which did discuss the dating? Because all I'm seeing is papyrus dated to the 7th to 9th century with ink consistent with material used at that time.

Pretty much.

Agreed.

Eh, that would be a tough angle. We already know Jesus had female disciples. I recall at least one group believing that Jesus had 30 apostles (with one of them being a woman, counting as a "half") based on the 29.5 day lunar cycle. Mary Magdalene is even called "the apostle to the apostles" in Orthodoxy because she was sent to the the apostles of Jesus' resurrection. Not much new to add from that angle AFAICS.

Yes, CE, and no, I didn't look at the ink study, just the conclusion quoted by Paprika. Time constraints! I'm taking a break from my "Getting started" video creation right now.

I wasn't aware of Mary Magdalene's place in Orthodoxy. Now that's interesting. Do you know how that differs from the Roman Catholics?

I don't know if you noticed this or not, but that blog article was from 2012, before the recent results came in. Also, if you've been following the course of discussion between scholars on the fragment, much of what Goodacre shares on his blog is not original to him. He basically used his blog to collate the data as it was coming in. Now, of course, he agreed with the charge of forgery at that time, but that seemed to be the majority opinion among scholars who were discussing the issue then.

You're being far too harsh on Goodacre. If you're at all familiar with his work or his blog, you'd know that he's a reputable scholar from Duke university who's big on being open and even-handed. Watson has been leading the way in the case on the claim to forgery, and Goodacre has been posting his responses to the issue all along, so it'd be weird for him to not follow up with Watson. Leo Depuydt's article on the fragment, by the way, was published by Harvard with their results, so its not like quoting him is coming out of the blue.

I didn't follow the discussion on the fragment after it was published. Just another blip on the radar, so to speak. Jesus had a wife? Nah. Next article!

I'm probably being too harsh with everyone right now. Patience is not a virtue when I'm trying to shove out too much work in too little time, but its lack is an active evil when posting on discussion boards. When I've got more time, I promise I'll look at Goodacre again.

Funny you mention that. Goodacre thinks its likely that Mary Magdalene was not only a disciple, but also the first woman Apostle. He also thinks it likely that Junia, in Romans 16:7, was an Apostle.

Women considered as apostles must be a lot more common than I thought, then. So, what have we got left here?

Not much I guess.

As ever, Jesse

[OingoBoingo]

Women considered as apostles must be a lot more common than I thought, then. So, what have we got left here?

Not much I guess.

Correct. At the end of the day, we have a 4th-8th/7th-10th century (depending on who you read) non-codex, non-liturgical (non-Gospel) fragment of papyrus with ink on it that mentions Jesus and a wife who is a disciple with no surrounding context. Assuming its not a forgery (there is still real debate among serious scholars on the matter) its late date may indicate Islamic influence on the community who wrote it. We also know that it was probably offered to Professor Karen King at Harvard to examine, because she specializes in historical Christian studies with a feminist and Gnostic bent, but we don't know who gave it to her, or why the fragment was cut the way it is. For the good dirt on all this, Prof. Hurtado, Christian Askeland, and McGrath's blogs are worth checking out. Prof. Tabor has posted on it, but nothing that can't be read elsewhere, likewise with Cargill, Goodacre, and DeConick. Almost all of the relevant scholars in the blogosphere are pointing to Prof. Hurtado's breakdown as the place to go, and also mention Watson's reply to the results (since, as I previously pointed out, he was leading the way in the forgery claim).