“Mrs. Jesus?”

The last week or so newspaper columnists and television reporters have made headlines writing and talking about 30 words written on a 1,600 year-old scrap of paper—well, papyrus—smaller than a business card.

Here’s the reason for the excitement: the text, a fragment of eight incomplete lines written in ancient Coptic, reads in part “…Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’ ” WAS JESUS MARRIED? That’s what the words written a long time ago say. “If validated,” ABC News said, “this could have major implications for the Christian faith.” In other words, THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!

All the excitement came as a result of a presentation made last Tuesday at the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies which met last week in Rome. Karen King, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, presented the recently-discovered document at the Congress. She titled the papyrus scrap “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” which certainly gained notoriety for her discovery.

Professor King told the scholars gathered for the Congress, “the fragment doesn’t provide evidence that Jesus was married, since it was probably originally composed in the second half of the second century.” On that point, the professor is right. The fragment proves only the self-evident fact that somebody wrote these words down on a piece of paper a long time ago.

The text does have meaning. But what? It’s probably best to begin by saying ABC News or the New York Times aren’t the best places to learn about fourth-century Coptic texts.

To understand the text, we need to know something about where it came from. Egypt was a cauldron of speculative religious thought in the ancient world, centuries before and centuries after the birth of Christianity. It was the center of All Things Mystical. The ancient equivalent of our fortune-telling gypsy was an Egyptian soothsayer. Egypt was the land of magical spells and mystic formulas, the land of the Old Gods. Christianity took root early on in Egypt. There was a large Jewish population in Alexandria, its capital. St Mark the Evangelist is revered by Orthodox Coptic Christians today as the one who first preached the Gospel in Egypt; they count him as their first bishop. But from its earliest days, Coptic Christianity faced a great foe in Gnosticism.

Gnosticism predates Christianity. It came from Persia a few centuries before the birth of Christ and made inroads into most of the religions of its day. There were Jewish and pagan forms of Gnosticism. Gnostics took things they liked from all religious traditions and blended them together.

The basic doctrine of Gnosticism is that material things are evil; spiritual things are good. Our Faith tells us that God made everything “visible and invisible” (as we say in the Creed) and it is all good. Gnostics reject this. In this evil world, they believe, human souls are trapped in evil bodies. Salvation, according to Gnostic teaching, is escaping the evil creation in which we are ensnared. They believe freedom comes by acquiring secret knowledge (gnosis is a Greek word for “knowledge”). They crave is secret words and mystic symbols and arcane formulas. Esoteric, mystical knowledge, they believed, is the key to set oneself free from the bonds of the fallen, physical world.

The Church’s teaching is quite the opposite. God reveals Himself to us, we believe, through His creation. The world is good because God, Who made it, is good. The Gnostics rejected the Sacraments, because we believe God uses physical things—bread, wine, water, oil, the laying on of hands and so forth—to give us spiritual gifts. The Gnostics believed there were two gods—the evil god who created the world and all that is in it, and the good god, who wants to set immaterial souls free from the prison of the world.

Gnostic texts of the third and fourth centuries (the same time the text at issue is supposed to be dated) did sometime depicted Jesus as married, sometimes to Mary Magdalene, sometimes to one of several goddesses who descended from heaven to engage Him in a celestial marriage. The Gnostic initiate could rise above the “sensual world” by memorizing the names of the gods and goddesses of Gnosticism or learning the secret passwords preserved in Gnostic texts. Some of these Gnostic Gospels (you may have heard, for example, of the so-called “Gospel of Thomas”) pass on “secret sayings” of Jesus, which purport to enlighten the Gnostic devotee. The fragment of the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” seems to be one of these.

The “celestial marriages” of Jesus to some goddess or other, such as the one referred to in the text above, were part of the Gnostic scheme of salvation. But let me bluntly say none of this makes sense to anyone who tries to make sense of it, because Gnosticism isn’t sensible; it never was, it’s not meant to be. It’s “magic.” Not rabbit-in-the-hat stage magic, but “my lucky number,” “don’t let a black cat cross your path” sort of magic. Gnosticism was (and is, because in a variety of forms it still exists) silly and stupid.

Every student and professor of Gnostic texts (most of which have come down to us in the Coptic language) knows the oddity and utter incomprehensibility of Gnosticism. Professor King certainly does.

This has not made headlines because Professor King has sparked a sudden interest in Gnostic texts of the fourth century.

The excitable reports on television that “JESUS WAS MARRIED AND THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!” will sell newspapers for a day or two. Books like the Da Vinci Code pass along fiction as fact. They confirm the ill-informed and unbelieving in their suspicion that Christianity has a murky past the Church has desperately tried to hide.

So what do we make of all this?

Scripture and the Church’s tradition from the earliest times tell us about our Lord’s life. Through them, we know much more about Him than we do any other person in the ancient world. They tell us more than just the facts of His life here on earth. The Gospels and our tradition tell us what our Lord’s life on earth meant. Everything He did and said, all the choices He made, all of it has meaning for us. He chose to live a celibate life, and He told His disciples then (and us now) why. St Matthew’s Gospel records His words:

“Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”

Our Lord chose the celibate life for a number of reasons (a topic for another time), but most especially for the reason embodied in His words just quoted. His celibacy is a sign of the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. The whole of His life was literally given over to the inauguration of the Kingdom. His chastity was part of His complete commitment of every aspect of His life to the Kingdom of God.

If that makes us squirm a little—even if we aren’t sure why—here’s something to make us downright uncomfortable.

Recall the story, related later in the St Matthew’s Gospel, of the Sadducees who asked the Lord about who will be married in Heaven. The Lord responded, “in the resurrection people will neither marry, nor be given in marriage.”

For the Gnostic, marriage is, like all other earthly things, evil. For the Christian, though, marriage is a Sacrament, a foretaste of the Kingdom. When the Kingdom of Heaven is come, there are no Sacraments (what this means for the men and women united in Christian marriage is the topic of another paper altogether!). God will then be “all in all,” as St Paul said.

So the Lord Christ is the living picture, the embodiment of Heaven here on earth. As God made perfect Man, He gives Himself for every person, “for the life of the world.” The Son of Mary says every woman who follows Him in faith (as she did perfectly) is His mother. His family is not a bloodline: it’s made up of those who are born, “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”

He is husband to none, to be Savior of all. THAT, beloved, does indeed change everything.—Fr Gregory Wilcox