Analyses of Jesus' Wife Fragment Finally Published

[robrecht]

Sorry, but no. You're not reading the argument correctly, and unwinding what you've got here is not part of my fun-filled weekend plans.

No, and nope! She was very specifically talking about making Mary part of the trinity.

I didn't handle it as well as I should have, and ended up apologizing. My immediate reaction was to what looked like an arithmetic fail. "What's this, some new kind of Jackson 5 thing? Gonna have the Trinity plus One? Just shove another Osmond into the group? Trinity means three! Not three plus one! We call that four. Four parts of a trinity doesn't make sense."

Now that was fun reading. If I've got this right ... you respect some folks. They think it's a forgery. So there are legitimate doubts. I think that's what you're saying.

There's this, too. If it's authentic, she gets the glory. Some folks naturally dislike that idea, thinking it should have been them instead. But if it's a forgery ... yeah, like that. I read one blog link from this thread that actually went there, questioning why she got the fragment, what made her the person at the receiving end.

I do hope you're not handing out respect to Dr. "100 percent certain." I note he's the one with the concurrent rebuttal. If that's the best they've got, what we're looking at is cranked up volume trying to make up for ratty speakers.

As ever, Jesse

I haven't followed the debate closely but I do I know personally a few people who are involved in the public debate, one in favor and two against, and I happen to have more confidence in the two who have come out against. I'm not sure who Mr 100% is, but I think I read his name the other day and it was not someone I know. The two I trust are worth trusting in my experience because of the general quality of their scholarship, 'though we don't always agree in areas where I do have some expertise. But I respect their opinions when we disagree. The guy I know who was immediately on board is a great guy with interesting and important positions but has been overly gullible on a few things and is swayed more by interesting ideas that conform to his own ideas than by what I consider the best supported positions from a scholarly perspective.

[OingoBoingo]

If anyone is still interested, Prof. Goodacre blogged about a response from Depuydt to King's rebuttal of his original analysis, yesterday. http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2014/04...o-depuydt.html

[One Bad Pig]

If anyone is still interested, Prof. Goodacre blogged about a response from Depuydt to King's rebuttal of his original analysis, yesterday. http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2014/04...o-depuydt.html

That's awesome.

[Darth Xena]

Lol, love it.

[robrecht]

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?

Unfortunately, no. The path not taken, and all that. I have, um, a couple hundred books in my "to read" stack[s], and only a handful of the theological works are from the Roman Catholic perspective. Perhaps a Roman Catholic will deign to shed some light?

http://blog.archny.org/faith/?p=542

[robrecht]

Will the real Hans-Ulrich Laukamp please stand up?

[OingoBoingo]

Will the real Hans-Ulrich Laukamp please stand up?

Yeah, I saw that today. Veddy intereshtingk.

[robrecht]

More Questions

Mark Goodacre said...

"Well done, Christian. I must admit that I too had not thought to explore fully the links on the Harvard website until our discussion in the other comment thread about the date of the the first radio-carbon test, which is given only in the report there and not in the HTR article.

I would like to suggest that we all could have wasted a lot less time if all the materials, including the back-story documentation and this John fragment had been been made available back in 2012."

[OingoBoingo]

More Questions

Mark Goodacre said...

"Well done, Christian. I must admit that I too had not thought to explore fully the links on the Harvard website until our discussion in the other comment thread about the date of the the first radio-carbon test, which is given only in the report there and not in the HTR article.

I would like to suggest that we all could have wasted a lot less time if all the materials, including the back-story documentation and this John fragment had been been made available back in 2012."

I wonder if anyone is interested in directing a documentary reply to the Smithsonian's Jesus' Wife documentary when it comes out. At this pace its going to look extremely dated.

[carbon dioxide]

I personally believe that Jesus was more likely married at some time in his life than not but I don't see how this fragment proves anything. Even if its authentic, it does not date to the 1st century and at best it would only show that there was a view that he was married centuries later held by some people.

[OingoBoingo]

I personally believe that Jesus was more likely married at some time in his life than not but I don't see how this fragment proves anything. Even if its authentic, it does not date to the 1st century and at best it would only show that there was a view that he was married centuries later held by some people.

Yes. There doesn't seem to be any debate at all concerning the fact that the fragment tells us nothing about the historical Jesus. Prof. Larry Hurtado made the following (IMO insightful) observations to a commentor on his blog who also thought it likely Jesus was married.

[Manw� S�limo]

And anyway, the joining of God to a human woman somehow seems repugnant to me - this isn't a union among equals! God speaks of marrying the church but symbolic language like that can't be really compared to the actual joining humans do with each other.

[Manw� S�limo]

The plot thickens. It appears that the other manuscripts found alongside the Gospel of Jesus' Wife are suspect, because the fragment of the Gospel of John was written in the same hand, ink, pen, and an exact reproduction of the Cambridge Qau Codex: http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.b...er-in-law.html

The shocker here is this. The fragment contains exactly the same hand, exactly the same ink and has been written with the same writing instrument. One would assume that it were part of the same writing event, be it modern or ancient. In some sense, this is not a surprise, as the Ink Results indicated that the ink was very similar. (The ink on both sides of GJohn was identical or similar to one another; the GJW had slightly different ink on both sides. All of the inks were highly similar.)

Actually, if you are a Coptic nerd, there apparently is a bigger shocker... The text is in Lycopolitan and apparently is a(n exact?) reproduction from the famous Cambridge Qau codex, edited by Herbert Thompson. What is so shocking about that? Essentially all specialists believe that Lycopolitan and the other minor dialects died out during or before the sixth century. Indeed, the forger tried to offer two manuscripts both in Lycopolitan, but made two crucial mistakes. First, the NHC gospel of Thomas is not a pure Lycopolitan text, but the Qau codex is. That is we have two clearly different subdialects of Lycopolitan, which agree exactly with published texts. Second, this GJohn fragment has been 14C dated to the seventh to ninth centuries, a period from which Lycopolitan is totally unknown.

These are my initial thoughts, and I will update this blog within the next hours. My first assessment is that this a major blow to those arguing for the authenticity of GJW.

UPDATE ...
Alin Suciu has created a reconstruction, demonstrating that the verso follows the line breaks of Herbert Thompson's edition precisely. Leo Depuydt came to the same conclusion on his own. All three of us would conclude that this almost certainly marks this GJW-John fragment as a modern fake..... Given the surrounding dialectal realities, here, this is nonsense, and further evidence of forgery.

[OingoBoingo]

The plot thickens. It appears that the other manuscripts found alongside the Gospel of Jesus' Wife are suspect, because the fragment of the Gospel of John was written in the same hand, ink, pen, and an exact reproduction of the Cambridge Qau Codex: http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.b...er-in-law.html

psst. that's what robrecht mentioned/linked to in post #83. :)

[Manw� S�limo]

Post #83 is a modern forgery of my post.