Spinning Jesus's wife

New from the "Tempest In A Teapot" department, we had an announcement on Thursday that the fragment of papyrus that mentions Jesus's wife was not a modern forgery.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Predictably, the hue and cry started almost immediately, especially after historian Karen King of Harvard Divinity School, who brought the papyrus to light last year, stated, "The main point of the [fragment] is simply to affirm that women who are wives and mothers can be Jesus’s disciples."

Some were in favor of the whole thing.  Hal Taussig, of Union Divinity School, said that the idea of Jesus not being celibate would be a "huge shift."  "This is where people will take the most offense," he said.  "But for many married people, this might make Jesus feel closer."

Then there were the ones who started claiming immediately that the woman referred to in the scrap of papyrus was Mary Magdalene, and that therefore "Dan Brown was right."  Evidently not recognizing the fact that The Da Vinci Code is still shelved in the "Fiction" section at Barnes & Noble.

Others, however, were not so sanguine, although only marginally more grounded in reality.  Reverend James Martin, a prominent Jesuit writer, said, "It’s incredible that the four Gospel writers wouldn’t have mentioned Jesus’s wife if he had one.  They mentioned everyone else in his family.  There are Gospels that talk about Jesus turning stones into birds...  [F]unnily enough, the people who are quick to accept the veracity of this appear to be liberal Christians who question the veracity of other biblical accounts, including that of the Resurrection."

Reverend Henry Wansbrough, English biblical scholar and Prior of the Cathedral of Norwich, echoed Martin's sentiments.  "It will not have a great deal of importance for the Christian church.  It will show that there was a group who had these beliefs in the second century - Christians or semi-Christians - who perhaps had not reflected enough on the implications of the canonical scriptures - to see that Jesus could not have been married.  It's a historical interest, rather than a faith interest."

Then we have Professor Alberto Camplani, of Sapienza University in Rome, who added that the text "should be read purely symbolically."

Whatever that means.

What I find funny about all of this is that the fragment doesn't date to the 1st century C. E.; it dates to somewhere between the 6th and 9th centuries, and "possibly even earlier," according to the Harvard Theological Review.  So, at best, the fragment was written four hundred years after Jesus's death.  So it's a little like we had a fragmentary account that said only, "King Henry VIII said to his girlfriend..." and forthwith started arguing over whether the phrase was referring to Anne Boleyn, with others commenting that no, it can't mean that, that it wasn't referring to Boleyn but to another woman, who, by the way, had nice legs and spoke with a French accent, and yet others who claimed that the phrase was entirely metaphorical in nature and that "Henry's girlfriend" referred to the country of England.

Given that, it's no wonder that Ben Witherington, Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary, said that the papyrus was not a "game changer" with respect to belief and biblical understanding.  Of course it isn't.  People have come to the conclusions they have -- whether Jesus likes gays or is pro-welfare or would have been in favor of the Iraq War or thinks that premarital sex is verboten -- by cherry-picking whatever biblical quotes seem to support the point of view they already had.  Because a big, complex, internally inconsistent document like the bible, that has been translated and copied and retranslated and recopied hundreds of times, and which in any case reflected the changing beliefs of a bunch of Middle Eastern mostly-illiterates over a period of perhaps two thousand years, is bound to contain support for damn near any worldview you happen to have, whether you are a bleeding-heart liberal tree-hugger or a steely-eyed close-the-borders conservative.

So if you come to understanding a different way than science, you can end up wherever you want, really.  The science says that the document isn't a forgery, and dates to somewhere around 1,400 years ago; the linguistic analysis gives us an idea of what the Coptic text said.  And that is all.  After that, if you want more, you have to leave the realm of rational, evidence-based understanding.  But it you do that, you can take the results and spin it whichever direction suits your fancy.

Which is mostly what people do anyhow.  So business as usual, I guess.

Confirmation bias, and the story of Jesus' wife

In well-done science, conclusions are based on one thing and one thing alone: the quality of the evidence.  When physicists announced a few months ago that they had data that seemed to support the conclusion that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light, every high-energy physicist  in the world began to sift through the evidence, looking for flaws, looking for inaccuracies, trying to see if the data supported such an earthshattering outcome.  And after rigorous analysis, the result did not stand -- Einstein's fundamental speed limit on the universe seems to have been vindicated once again.

Contrast that to how conclusions are drawn in other realms, where vanishingly small pieces of evidence are considered enough to support any conclusion you happen to favor.

This whole thing comes up because of the recent announcement that a small fragment of papyrus, covered with faded Coptic script, seems to indicate that Jesus might have been married.  [Source]  The finding, which has been analyzed extensively by historian and ancient language scholar Karen King, is the subject of a paper that was presented Tuesday in Rome at an international meeting of Coptic scholars.

Of course, the first question asked was, "Is the artifact a fake?"  And the conclusion was: probably not.  The script was examined by experts, and looks authentic.  The phrasing of the text seems consistent with other early writings in that language.  While the piece is too small to carbon-date, there is apparently some talk of a non-destructive spectroscopy on the ink that could give a rough estimate of its age.  One phrase begins, "And Jesus said, 'My wife...'" and then is cut off.  A later phrase on the piece says, "... she should be my disciple."

So: what we have here is a small fragment of paper, of unknown age, with two incomplete (but admittedly provocative) phrases.  And that was all it took.

Already we have people who are against the Catholic policy of celibacy for the clergy saying that this should change church law.  If Jesus was married, why shouldn't priests be able to?  Folks who want women to be priests jumped on the second phrase; the lack of a clear mention of female disciples in the bible is the only justification for church policy on the issue, they say, and this fragment clearly supports the ordination of women.

Then the woo-woos got involved.  Fans of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code and Martin Scorsese's controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, both of which claimed that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, are saying that the fragment supports that contention.  Many of these people seem not to realize that the book and the film both reside in the "fiction" aisle.

Even wilder stories have started up.  Take a look at this article, that claims that the piece of papyrus is a clear vindication of the wacky ideas from Laurence Gardner's The Bloodline of the Holy Grail, in which Jesus survived the crucifixion, lived another hundred years in which he traveled to Tibet, and his wife and children ended up in France where they founded the Merovingian dynasty and ultimately ended up on the throne of Scotland. 

And to all of the above, I can only say: will you people please just chill?

There's a name for taking a tiny, questionable piece of evidence, and pretending that it trumpets support for an idea that you already agreed with; it's called confirmation bias, and unfortunately for the proponents of married priests, female priests, and Jesus being the ancestor of the Kings of Scotland, it's a logical fallacy.  Meaning that thinkers who are being honest should not engage in it.  The evidence we have is flimsy at best; Karen King, who is clearly a scholar of some repute, isn't even willing to hazard a firm opinion about the piece's provenance, but has given a guess that it probably dates from the Fourth Century.  So even if it is authentic, the thing was written three hundred plus years after Jesus died.  At that point, anyone could have written anything, and it wouldn't necessarily have any bearing on the truth of the matter.  The piece of paper could state that Jesus had blond hair and was left-handed and liked to eat donuts for breakfast, and there's no reason to conclude that those statements have any relevance to what the real man was like, since it was written long after anyone who actually knew him had died.

But, of course, unlike in science, that's not how these things work.  The married-priest cadre will certainly be harping on this finding for a while, as will the female-priest cadre.  The Dan Brown Writes Non-Fiction Society is probably also going to continue making little excited squeaking noises about all this, and any woo-woos further out on the plausibility scale will have a field day drawing conclusions from what in any other field would hardly constitute any evidence at all.

As I've observed before: confirmation bias is these people's stock in trade.  So honestly, I shouldn't be surprised.  But I still am, somehow.