Un profesor de Harvard ha identificado lo que parece ser un trozo de papiro egipcio del siglo IV que contiene la primera referencia explícita conocida a Jesús como casado, un descubrimiento que podría alimentar el milenario debate sobre el celibato sacerdotal en la Iglesia Católica.
Un hasta ahora desconocido papiro sugiere la posibilidad de que Jesús tenía esposa.
Una investigadora de la Universidad de Harvard presentó el martes en una conferencia en Roma fragmentos de un papiro que podría reabrir el antiguo debate en el cristianismo sobre si Jesús estaba casado.
Contenido relacionado
Hallan las pinturas "más antiguas" de los apóstoles
Los nuevos mandamientos para jóvenes y adolescentes
Una "esposa sumisa" que quiere ser presidenta de EE.UU.
Según los expertos, el fragmento -que data del siglo IV- es auténtico e incluye las palabras: "Jesús les dijo, mi esposa…", una frase que no aparece en los Evangelios.
"La tradición cristiana ha mantenido desde hace siglos que Jesús no tenía esposa, a pesar de no haberse encontrado ninguna evidencia de ello", dijo en un comunicado Karen King, del Escuela de la Divinidad de Harvard y responsable de haber presentado el documento.
Según el diario estadounidense The New York Times, la investigadora ha consultado con varios expertos y todos creen que el fragmento no es apócrifo, aunque hacen falta más pruebas concretas para confirmar su autenticidad.
El trozo de papiro, no más grande que una tarjeta de visita, contiene ocho líneas en tinta negra en uno de los lados, escritas en el idioma que hablaban los cristianos coptos que habitaban el actual Egipto.
Según King, el descubrimiento no es una prueba concluyente de que Jesús estaba casado, pero sugiere que la discusión sobre si tenía pareja o no llegó a tomar relevancia en el cristianismo como consecuencia de los intensos debates en torno de la sexualidad y del matrimonio.
Un vieja controversia
A pesar de la insistencia de la Iglesia Católica de que Cristo no tuvo esposa, la controversia sobre un posible matrimonio de Jesús ha reaparecido regularmente a lo largo de la historia y recientemente a tomado nuevo vigor con la publicación del best seller de Dan Brown "El código Da Vinci".
"El Vaticano ha reiterado que el sacerdocio no está abierto ni a mujeres y hombres casados, según el modelo establecido por Jesús"
Esta novela está basada en la idea de que Jesús estaba casado con María Magdalena y tenía hijos.
En una entrevista que King le concedió a The New York Times, la autora repitió varias veces que, si bien el fragmento no es una prueba definitiva de un posible casamiento de Jesús, sí es un importante descubrimiento en torno de los conceptos de casamiento, matrimonio y sexualidad que durante siglos han predominado en la Iglesia Católica.
El Vaticano ha reiterado que el sacerdocio no está abierto ni a mujeres y hombres casados, según el modelo establecido por Jesús.
King afirmó que el texto podría haber sido escrito siglos después de la muerte de Jesús y que en la literatura cristiana no aparece ninguna mención similar.
¿Auténtico?
Roger Bagnall, director del Instituto para el Estudio del Mundo Antiguo en Nueva York, apoyó la autenticidad del fragmento basándose en un examen del papiro y la letra, y Ariel Shisha-Halevy, un experto copto en la Universidad Hebrea de Jerusalén, llegó a la misma conclusión tras examinar el idioma y la gramática.
La investigadora Karen King recibió el papiro de manod de un coleccionista en 2011.
A pesar de todo, King afirma que la conclusión sobre la autenticidad del papiro dependerá de más pruebas y exámenes, y sobre todo del análisis de los componentes químicos de la tinta con la que fue escrito.
El fragmento, que pertenece a un coleccionista anónimo que contactó a la investigadora para que le ayudase a traducirlo y analizarlo, podría ser originario de Egipto o tal vez de Siria.
King cree que forma parte de un Evangelio perdido, al cual ha nombrado "Evangelio de la esposa de Jesús", que fue probablemente escrito en griego en la segunda mitad del siglo II y posteriormente traducido al copto.
Este Evangelio podría atribuirse a uno de los discípulos más cercanos a Jesús, pero el verdadero autor sería desconocido aún incluso cuando se conservase el texto en su totalidad.
"El descubrimiento de este nuevo Evangelio ofrece una oportunidad de repensar el papel que el estado civil de Jesús jugó en las controversias cristianas sobre el matrimonio, el celibato o la familia", afirma King.
"La tradición cristiana solo preservó aquellas voces que aseguraban que nunca se había casado. El nuevo descubrimiento sugiere que algunos cristianos habrían podido tener una opinión diferente", concluye la investigadora.
Copio la noticia completa.
A Harvard professor has identified what appears to be a scrap of fourth century Egyptian papyrus that contains the first known explicit reference to Jesus as married, a discovery that could fuel the millennia-old debate about priestly celibacy in the Catholic church.
The fragment, which has been preliminarily authenticated but still must undergo further testing, portrays Jesus as referring to a woman as his legitimate disciple -- most likely his wife, whom the text’s author probably believed to be Mary Magdalene.
The text is not evidence Jesus was married, said the professor, Karen L. King, a historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, who is scheduled to discuss her discovery at an international gathering of Coptic scholars in Rome on Tuesday. But she said it may cast new light on the history of early Christianity, including the formation of Christian views of celibacy and whether women were members of Jesus’s inner circle, issues still intensely relevant to the Catholic church, which allows only celibate men to be priests.
“The issue has far from gone away,” King said.
The fragment is smaller than a business card, and appears to have been torn from the middle of a page of a codex, or primitive book, written in a southern Egyptian dialect. Its owner, who declines to be identified publicly, does not know where it was found.
It contains just eight broken lines, scrawled in a crude Coptic hand.
The fourth says: “… Jesus said to them, ‘My wife….”
The next line reads: “…she will be able to be my disciple.”
The text does not prove that Jesus had a wife, King emphasized. Even if it is actually a translation of a second century Greek text, as King theorizes, it would have been composed more than a century after the death of Jesus. The earliest and most reliable information about the historical Jesus is silent on the question of his marital status, King said.
“It’s not saying we’ve got the smoking gun that Jesus is married,” she said.
But the fragment -- which King provocatively calls “The Gospel of Jesus’s wife” -- does show that some early Christians believed Jesus was married, probably to Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus who the gospels say was the first person to see him after his resurrection.
It contains echoes of other early Christian writings, suggesting to King that it may have been part of a debate about the spiritual importance of celibacy verus marriage.
“The entire question about whether Jesus was married or not first arose only 150 years after Jesus died in the context of Christians discussing ... whether Christians should marry or remain celibate,” she said. “And that’s interesting.”
The fragment appears to underscore the diversity of Christian ideas about Jesus’s life when the faith was still in its infancy, before the books of the New Testament had been canonized and religious councils convened to resolve differences over beliefs.
“It helps to remind us that practically everything that later generations told about Jesus was put together and edited by somebody well after his death, and represents the view of Jesus that they were trying to get across,” said Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and professor of ancient history at New York University, who helped King authenticate the papyrus.
“It’s not going to change history in a dramatic way,” he said, “but it does give us a much sharper view of one little corner of Christianity we couldn’t see into before.”
The notion that Jesus may have been married, considered heretical by the Catholic church, has long captivated artists and conspiracy theorists. The success of Dan Brown’s 2003 international best-seller, “The Da Vinci Code,” which posits that the Catholic church covered up the marriage and progeny of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, testifies to its potency in the popular imagination.
Aware of the incendiary nature of her finding, and its potential for being dismissed as a forgery or distorted as evidence that Jesus was married, King has treated it a bit like academic dynamite.
Reporters for three publications -- the Globe, the New York Times, and Harvard Magazine -- were invited to a joint interview last week in King’s office, a book-lined nook with arched, leaded-glass windows on the top floor of Andover Hall. Each promised not to publish until 1 p.m. Tuesday, when King was scheduled to speak at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, across the street from the Vatican.
The reporters were allowed to contact Bagnall and two other scholars who had helped authenticate and interpret the fragment, AnneMarie Luijendijk, a papyrologist and professor of religion at Princeton University who contributed to King’s paper, and Ariel Shisha-Halevy, a Coptic linguist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Reporters were not allowed to discuss King’s finding with other scholars in advance of her presentation at the Coptic Conference, the International Association for Coptic Studies.
Yet King decided to publicize her discovery before completing testing on the composition of the ink on the fragment. Such testing, which she plans to finish before the scheduled publication of her article in the January issue of the Harvard Theological Review, would not definitively date the fragment but could ensure that the chemicals in the ink matched what scribes in southern Egypt would have used in the 4th century.
But because so many people involved in the authentication process have now seen it, King feared word could leak out about its existence in a way that sensationalized its meaning. A more controlled release, she surmised, might raise the level of discussion about it. Major discoveries such as this are often brought forth at the Coptic Conference, she added, which meets once every four years -- this year, by happenstance, in Rome.
And evidence of its authenticity was strong enough to make her think it was time to invite other scholars to weigh in, she said. In any case, she added, she stood to gain little if she was wrong.
“This is not a career maker,” said King, a tenured professor at Harvard. “If it’s a forgery, it’s a career breaker.”
* * *
Two of three scholars tapped by the Harvard Theological Review to review King’s 52-page paper cast doubt on the fragment’s authenticity, relying on low-resolution images to reach their conclusion. But both recommended that King bring the papyrus to an expert papyrologist. Neither knew King had already done so, having taken it to Bagnall. The third reviewer raised some questions on its grammar, but King said she and Shisha-Halevy were able to address those.
“I have no competence at all to decide whether this fragment is authentic or not,” Shisha-Halevysaid in a phone interview. But, he said, a couple of linguistic constructions pointed to by the reviewer “do not warrant considering this fragment a fake. Even if they are not usual … they are good Coptic.”
King said the owner of the papyrus wishes to remain anonymous because he does not want to be hounded by people who wish to buy the papyrus, which he has now offered to give to Harvard as part of a purchase of his collection of Greek, Coptic, and Arabic papyri. Harvard has not decided whether to pursue the offer.
* * *
It was a stranger’s e-mail that alerted King to the existence of the fragment. The man wanted to know whether the professor could help translate an ancient Coptic papyrus in his collection.
The man told King he had an inkling from a previous owner that it might say something about Jesus being married. When King looked at the photo he sent, the words leapt out at her immediately.
But was it authentic? Or a fraud?
“In this field, we keep having these things appear,” she said. “So I think it’s almost a reflex to be suspicious.”
King put it aside; she was busy with other projects. Last summer, the owner asked her a second time to take a look.
She stared at the photos again. This time, she spotted textual similarities to two other early Christian writings, the Gospels of Mary and Thomas.
King relented. She would look more closely, she told the owner, if he agreed to allow her to properly authenticate it. She needed to see the actual artifact. In December 2011, the man hand-delivered the papyrus to Harvard.
King needed as much information as possible about its origins, but the owner did not have much. He did not know, he said, where the fragment was found. All he had were a letter and a note, copies of which he e-mailed to King, addressed to the previous owner, an H.U. Laukamp, who had a Berlin address.
The letter to Laukamp, dated July 1982, from Peter Munro, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, states that a colleague named Professor Fecht had seen another papyrus fragment of in Laukamp’s collection.
The note -- undated, unsigned and written in German -- stated that Munro’s colleague, a Professor Fecht, believed “the small fragment … is the sole example of a text in which Jesus uses direct speech with reference to having a wife.”
King sent photos of the papyrus to Bagnall, who showed it to a small group of papyrologists he meets with regularly.
“We put it up on the screen and we all sort of said, ‘Eeew,’ ” said Bagnall, one of the world’s leading papyrologists. “We thought it was ugly. And it is ugly. The handwriting is not nice -- thick, badly controlled strokes made by somebody who didn’t have a very good pen.”
Was it genuine? Bagnall, too, needed to see it.
In March 2012, King tucked the papyrus into her red leather bag along with her iPad and boarded a train to New York, where she and Luijendijk, a former student of King’s, met Bagnall at his office. They sat for several hours around a table, looking at the fragment under magnification and different kinds of light, noticing different details and talking through possible scenarios.
The fibrous, dual-layered material was clearly papyrus, an ancient Egyptian precursor to paper made of the pith of
Alguien, cuatro-cientos años después de la muerte de ese supuesto Jesús, se puso a escribir sobre ello.
Muy fiable todo. No es de oídas ni nada. Una fuente digna de mención.
Visto lo visto dentro de cuatro-cientos años alguien empezará a escribir sobre si Harry Potter se cepilló a Hermione el primer año de curso o el segundo. Y tendremos polémica del Mago para unos veinte siglos más.
Es de admirar lo que dan de sí los Best-Sellers de hace varios siglos.
#16 Eso se lleva diciendo desde antes que naciera Dan Brown.
Por cierto, en el artículo no se afirma que estuviera casado: The text is not evidence Jesus was married The text does not prove that Jesus had a wife
Es otra teoría más.
#4 Para tu información apócrifo significa que la iglesia no lo reconoce y, la verdad, hay tantas cosas con las que hace los mismo, como en los papiros del mar muerto que si hubiera ue hacer caso nos pondríamos a su altura.
#27 Mi comentario era una ironía sobre la importancia que iba o puede tener dicho descubrimiento, ja que se ha hablado mucho sobre si el personaje de Jesús estaba casado o no, si tenía hijos o no, si estaba enrollado o no... Gracias por la definición de apócrifo, pero llegas unos años tarde.
Comentarios
El enlace correcto de #0 http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2012/09/18/harvard-professor-identifies-scrap-papyrus-suggesting-some-early-christians-believed-jesus-was-married/dZJ1sIJCay8b8cra30wfQK/story.html
Y a mí. Con free login tampoco me deja pasar
#13 Gracias
#13 Adjunto imagen por si acaso a alguien no le deja verlo. http://imgur.com/fGUXv
Favor reemplazar el enlace de #0 por el aportado en #13
#0 Pide registro para ver la noticia.
Mira el enlace que has mandado:
>> /registration/free/trial.aspx
#1 A mi no me lo ha pedido.
#3 Pues a mi si, no se a los demás...
¿No estarías ya registrado?
Mira lo que puse en el comentario 1, el final del enlace.
#5 Palabrita que no.
#7 Repito, revisa el enlace que has puesto:
>> /registration/free/trial.aspx
#3 #5 A mí también me pide registro.
#3 Enlaza la noticia, el link que pones es el del registro, como dice #1 services.bostonglobe.com/registration/free/trial.aspx
#1
Dios proveerá ...la password
En español: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/noticias/2012/09/120919_jesus_esposa_fragmento_ar.shtml
Un hasta ahora desconocido papiro sugiere la posibilidad de que Jesús tenía esposa.
Una investigadora de la Universidad de Harvard presentó el martes en una conferencia en Roma fragmentos de un papiro que podría reabrir el antiguo debate en el cristianismo sobre si Jesús estaba casado.
Contenido relacionado
Hallan las pinturas "más antiguas" de los apóstoles
Los nuevos mandamientos para jóvenes y adolescentes
Una "esposa sumisa" que quiere ser presidenta de EE.UU.
Según los expertos, el fragmento -que data del siglo IV- es auténtico e incluye las palabras: "Jesús les dijo, mi esposa…", una frase que no aparece en los Evangelios.
"La tradición cristiana ha mantenido desde hace siglos que Jesús no tenía esposa, a pesar de no haberse encontrado ninguna evidencia de ello", dijo en un comunicado Karen King, del Escuela de la Divinidad de Harvard y responsable de haber presentado el documento.
Según el diario estadounidense The New York Times, la investigadora ha consultado con varios expertos y todos creen que el fragmento no es apócrifo, aunque hacen falta más pruebas concretas para confirmar su autenticidad.
El trozo de papiro, no más grande que una tarjeta de visita, contiene ocho líneas en tinta negra en uno de los lados, escritas en el idioma que hablaban los cristianos coptos que habitaban el actual Egipto.
Según King, el descubrimiento no es una prueba concluyente de que Jesús estaba casado, pero sugiere que la discusión sobre si tenía pareja o no llegó a tomar relevancia en el cristianismo como consecuencia de los intensos debates en torno de la sexualidad y del matrimonio.
Un vieja controversia
A pesar de la insistencia de la Iglesia Católica de que Cristo no tuvo esposa, la controversia sobre un posible matrimonio de Jesús ha reaparecido regularmente a lo largo de la historia y recientemente a tomado nuevo vigor con la publicación del best seller de Dan Brown "El código Da Vinci".
"El Vaticano ha reiterado que el sacerdocio no está abierto ni a mujeres y hombres casados, según el modelo establecido por Jesús"
Esta novela está basada en la idea de que Jesús estaba casado con María Magdalena y tenía hijos.
En una entrevista que King le concedió a The New York Times, la autora repitió varias veces que, si bien el fragmento no es una prueba definitiva de un posible casamiento de Jesús, sí es un importante descubrimiento en torno de los conceptos de casamiento, matrimonio y sexualidad que durante siglos han predominado en la Iglesia Católica.
El Vaticano ha reiterado que el sacerdocio no está abierto ni a mujeres y hombres casados, según el modelo establecido por Jesús.
King afirmó que el texto podría haber sido escrito siglos después de la muerte de Jesús y que en la literatura cristiana no aparece ninguna mención similar.
¿Auténtico?
Roger Bagnall, director del Instituto para el Estudio del Mundo Antiguo en Nueva York, apoyó la autenticidad del fragmento basándose en un examen del papiro y la letra, y Ariel Shisha-Halevy, un experto copto en la Universidad Hebrea de Jerusalén, llegó a la misma conclusión tras examinar el idioma y la gramática.
La investigadora Karen King recibió el papiro de manod de un coleccionista en 2011.
A pesar de todo, King afirma que la conclusión sobre la autenticidad del papiro dependerá de más pruebas y exámenes, y sobre todo del análisis de los componentes químicos de la tinta con la que fue escrito.
El fragmento, que pertenece a un coleccionista anónimo que contactó a la investigadora para que le ayudase a traducirlo y analizarlo, podría ser originario de Egipto o tal vez de Siria.
King cree que forma parte de un Evangelio perdido, al cual ha nombrado "Evangelio de la esposa de Jesús", que fue probablemente escrito en griego en la segunda mitad del siglo II y posteriormente traducido al copto.
Este Evangelio podría atribuirse a uno de los discípulos más cercanos a Jesús, pero el verdadero autor sería desconocido aún incluso cuando se conservase el texto en su totalidad.
"El descubrimiento de este nuevo Evangelio ofrece una oportunidad de repensar el papel que el estado civil de Jesús jugó en las controversias cristianas sobre el matrimonio, el celibato o la familia", afirma King.
"La tradición cristiana solo preservó aquellas voces que aseguraban que nunca se había casado. El nuevo descubrimiento sugiere que algunos cristianos habrían podido tener una opinión diferente", concluye la investigadora.
Aún no se ha conocido la reacción del Vaticano.
Copio la noticia completa.
A Harvard professor has identified what appears to be a scrap of fourth century Egyptian papyrus that contains the first known explicit reference to Jesus as married, a discovery that could fuel the millennia-old debate about priestly celibacy in the Catholic church.
The fragment, which has been preliminarily authenticated but still must undergo further testing, portrays Jesus as referring to a woman as his legitimate disciple -- most likely his wife, whom the text’s author probably believed to be Mary Magdalene.
The text is not evidence Jesus was married, said the professor, Karen L. King, a historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, who is scheduled to discuss her discovery at an international gathering of Coptic scholars in Rome on Tuesday. But she said it may cast new light on the history of early Christianity, including the formation of Christian views of celibacy and whether women were members of Jesus’s inner circle, issues still intensely relevant to the Catholic church, which allows only celibate men to be priests.
“The issue has far from gone away,” King said.
The fragment is smaller than a business card, and appears to have been torn from the middle of a page of a codex, or primitive book, written in a southern Egyptian dialect. Its owner, who declines to be identified publicly, does not know where it was found.
It contains just eight broken lines, scrawled in a crude Coptic hand.
The fourth says: “… Jesus said to them, ‘My wife….”
The next line reads: “…she will be able to be my disciple.”
The text does not prove that Jesus had a wife, King emphasized. Even if it is actually a translation of a second century Greek text, as King theorizes, it would have been composed more than a century after the death of Jesus. The earliest and most reliable information about the historical Jesus is silent on the question of his marital status, King said.
“It’s not saying we’ve got the smoking gun that Jesus is married,” she said.
But the fragment -- which King provocatively calls “The Gospel of Jesus’s wife” -- does show that some early Christians believed Jesus was married, probably to Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus who the gospels say was the first person to see him after his resurrection.
It contains echoes of other early Christian writings, suggesting to King that it may have been part of a debate about the spiritual importance of celibacy verus marriage.
“The entire question about whether Jesus was married or not first arose only 150 years after Jesus died in the context of Christians discussing ... whether Christians should marry or remain celibate,” she said. “And that’s interesting.”
The fragment appears to underscore the diversity of Christian ideas about Jesus’s life when the faith was still in its infancy, before the books of the New Testament had been canonized and religious councils convened to resolve differences over beliefs.
“It helps to remind us that practically everything that later generations told about Jesus was put together and edited by somebody well after his death, and represents the view of Jesus that they were trying to get across,” said Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and professor of ancient history at New York University, who helped King authenticate the papyrus.
“It’s not going to change history in a dramatic way,” he said, “but it does give us a much sharper view of one little corner of Christianity we couldn’t see into before.”
The notion that Jesus may have been married, considered heretical by the Catholic church, has long captivated artists and conspiracy theorists. The success of Dan Brown’s 2003 international best-seller, “The Da Vinci Code,” which posits that the Catholic church covered up the marriage and progeny of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, testifies to its potency in the popular imagination.
Aware of the incendiary nature of her finding, and its potential for being dismissed as a forgery or distorted as evidence that Jesus was married, King has treated it a bit like academic dynamite.
Reporters for three publications -- the Globe, the New York Times, and Harvard Magazine -- were invited to a joint interview last week in King’s office, a book-lined nook with arched, leaded-glass windows on the top floor of Andover Hall. Each promised not to publish until 1 p.m. Tuesday, when King was scheduled to speak at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, across the street from the Vatican.
The reporters were allowed to contact Bagnall and two other scholars who had helped authenticate and interpret the fragment, AnneMarie Luijendijk, a papyrologist and professor of religion at Princeton University who contributed to King’s paper, and Ariel Shisha-Halevy, a Coptic linguist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Reporters were not allowed to discuss King’s finding with other scholars in advance of her presentation at the Coptic Conference, the International Association for Coptic Studies.
Yet King decided to publicize her discovery before completing testing on the composition of the ink on the fragment. Such testing, which she plans to finish before the scheduled publication of her article in the January issue of the Harvard Theological Review, would not definitively date the fragment but could ensure that the chemicals in the ink matched what scribes in southern Egypt would have used in the 4th century.
But because so many people involved in the authentication process have now seen it, King feared word could leak out about its existence in a way that sensationalized its meaning. A more controlled release, she surmised, might raise the level of discussion about it. Major discoveries such as this are often brought forth at the Coptic Conference, she added, which meets once every four years -- this year, by happenstance, in Rome.
And evidence of its authenticity was strong enough to make her think it was time to invite other scholars to weigh in, she said. In any case, she added, she stood to gain little if she was wrong.
“This is not a career maker,” said King, a tenured professor at Harvard. “If it’s a forgery, it’s a career breaker.”
* * *
Two of three scholars tapped by the Harvard Theological Review to review King’s 52-page paper cast doubt on the fragment’s authenticity, relying on low-resolution images to reach their conclusion. But both recommended that King bring the papyrus to an expert papyrologist. Neither knew King had already done so, having taken it to Bagnall. The third reviewer raised some questions on its grammar, but King said she and Shisha-Halevy were able to address those.
“I have no competence at all to decide whether this fragment is authentic or not,” Shisha-Halevysaid in a phone interview. But, he said, a couple of linguistic constructions pointed to by the reviewer “do not warrant considering this fragment a fake. Even if they are not usual … they are good Coptic.”
King said the owner of the papyrus wishes to remain anonymous because he does not want to be hounded by people who wish to buy the papyrus, which he has now offered to give to Harvard as part of a purchase of his collection of Greek, Coptic, and Arabic papyri. Harvard has not decided whether to pursue the offer.
* * *
It was a stranger’s e-mail that alerted King to the existence of the fragment. The man wanted to know whether the professor could help translate an ancient Coptic papyrus in his collection.
The man told King he had an inkling from a previous owner that it might say something about Jesus being married. When King looked at the photo he sent, the words leapt out at her immediately.
But was it authentic? Or a fraud?
“In this field, we keep having these things appear,” she said. “So I think it’s almost a reflex to be suspicious.”
King put it aside; she was busy with other projects. Last summer, the owner asked her a second time to take a look.
She stared at the photos again. This time, she spotted textual similarities to two other early Christian writings, the Gospels of Mary and Thomas.
King relented. She would look more closely, she told the owner, if he agreed to allow her to properly authenticate it. She needed to see the actual artifact. In December 2011, the man hand-delivered the papyrus to Harvard.
King needed as much information as possible about its origins, but the owner did not have much. He did not know, he said, where the fragment was found. All he had were a letter and a note, copies of which he e-mailed to King, addressed to the previous owner, an H.U. Laukamp, who had a Berlin address.
The letter to Laukamp, dated July 1982, from Peter Munro, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, states that a colleague named Professor Fecht had seen another papyrus fragment of in Laukamp’s collection.
The note -- undated, unsigned and written in German -- stated that Munro’s colleague, a Professor Fecht, believed “the small fragment … is the sole example of a text in which Jesus uses direct speech with reference to having a wife.”
King sent photos of the papyrus to Bagnall, who showed it to a small group of papyrologists he meets with regularly.
“We put it up on the screen and we all sort of said, ‘Eeew,’ ” said Bagnall, one of the world’s leading papyrologists. “We thought it was ugly. And it is ugly. The handwriting is not nice -- thick, badly controlled strokes made by somebody who didn’t have a very good pen.”
Was it genuine? Bagnall, too, needed to see it.
In March 2012, King tucked the papyrus into her red leather bag along with her iPad and boarded a train to New York, where she and Luijendijk, a former student of King’s, met Bagnall at his office. They sat for several hours around a table, looking at the fragment under magnification and different kinds of light, noticing different details and talking through possible scenarios.
The fibrous, dual-layered material was clearly papyrus, an ancient Egyptian precursor to paper made of the pith of
Alguien, cuatro-cientos años después de la muerte de ese supuesto Jesús, se puso a escribir sobre ello.
Muy fiable todo. No es de oídas ni nada. Una fuente digna de mención.
Visto lo visto dentro de cuatro-cientos años alguien empezará a escribir sobre si Harry Potter se cepilló a Hermione el primer año de curso o el segundo. Y tendremos polémica del Mago para unos veinte siglos más.
Es de admirar lo que dan de sí los Best-Sellers de hace varios siglos.
Es sorprendente cuánta gente vota «errónea» a los hechos que contradicen sus creencias.
#0 Cambiado el enlace.
¿Qué Jesus? Conozco muchos, pero si no me aportan apellidos, me pierdo.
Supongo que con el profeta Mahoma, y se montaban orgias
http://www.theonion.com/articles/no-one-murdered-because-of-this-image,29553/
Pq solo falta el.
¿No pone lo que le reclamaba por el divorcio?
y le ponía los cuernos con Maria Magdalena.
Jajaja, todos los papiros y manuscritos de la Biblia son falsos y están alterados.
Pero aparece esta cosa de no se sabe dónde y ¡sí que es auténtico!, jajaja...
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=283781341727193&set=a.229974057107922.42145.100002859898837&type=1&ref=nf
En castellano:
http://www.sinapsit.com/jesus-tuvo-una-esposa/
Si ya lo decía Dan Brown, Cristo estaba casado y se beneficiaba a la Magdalena
#16 Eso se lleva diciendo desde antes que naciera Dan Brown.
Por cierto, en el artículo no se afirma que estuviera casado:
The text is not evidence Jesus was married
The text does not prove that Jesus had a wife
Es otra teoría más.
#20 Según noticias recientes, desde el siglo IV.
Apócrifo, ese papel es apócrifo. No tiene validez. Papel mojado.
Por cierto, muchos dudan aún de la existencia de ese tal Jesús.
#4 Para tu información apócrifo significa que la iglesia no lo reconoce y, la verdad, hay tantas cosas con las que hace los mismo, como en los papiros del mar muerto que si hubiera ue hacer caso nos pondríamos a su altura.
#27 Mi comentario era una ironía sobre la importancia que iba o puede tener dicho descubrimiento, ja que se ha hablado mucho sobre si el personaje de Jesús estaba casado o no, si tenía hijos o no, si estaba enrollado o no... Gracias por la definición de apócrifo, pero llegas unos años tarde.
Pues pegalo aqui y ya esta.
cierto
Este hombre podría ser el Rushdie católito. Que vigile su espalda.
Yo apostaría que la pegaba cuando llegaba a casa borracho.
SE CASÓ CON MARÍA MAGDALENA Y A BASE DE FO**** POBLARON EUROPA