Welcome to our Wednesday “Ask Beau” post. The purpose of this weekly feature is to provide you, our readers, with biblical responses to questions you have about practical issues that you face.
As always, you may submit questions for future “Ask Beau” posts by contacting us at frontier@gracepolaris.org, or by leaving a comment on this post.
On Tuesday the 18th, The New York Times published a story on a Harvard scholar’s discovery of an ancient Coptic papyrus fragment. Though most people don’t really comb the newspapers looking for stories about ancient Coptic texts, this one has garnered much attention because the text in question has Jesus uttering the words, “My wife.” There has been a lot of talk about the story, not all of it constructive. How should we digest this information?
When one looks at the fragment, which is certainly intriguing from a scholarly standpoint, it is important to remember a general principle: knowing a statement’s source and context has much value in determining its accuracy and relevance.
We instinctively apply this principle, though we may have atrophied a bit in its use. If Joe Buckeye posts a chat room statement about the injury status of Carlos Hyde, we appropriately grant the statement less weight than if it had been uttered by Urban Meyer.
Likewise, if we read a Web site about 9/11 written by a fringe group (or Rashard Mendenhall), we recognize that the group, by virtue of being on the margins of opinion, would have to clear a relatively high bar to get us to even consider their arguments seriously.
The problem here is that most people do not have any sense of the source and context of this papyrus fragment. Darrel Bock, a prominent New Testament scholar, offers some very helpful thoughts on the subject in a recent blog post. Let me summarize here some of the most important considerations, in my opinion.
First of all, the New Testament is silent on the issue of Jesus’ marital status, but it is not a neutral silence. Given Jesus’ centrality to the New Testament, it is unlikely that we would have a number of descriptions of Jesus’ relationships, as we do, and yet have no mention of his wife—if He had one. Consider also Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 9:5, in which the omission of Jesus’ marital status would be quite curious if He had indeed been married:
Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? (ESV).
Early church tradition and literature stands decidedly against the notion of Jesus having had a wife, also. Bock writes, “[The fragment] is one speck of a fringe text in a sea of texts that say that Jesus was single. It, if authentic, is the exception to the rule of the texts we have about Jesus.”
In reference to the publication of the so-called Judas Gospel some years ago, John DelHousaye, my New Testament professor at Phoenix Seminary, suggested that it might be significant that the text had lain unaccounted for in a desert for centuries. I think that same common-sense test applies here as well. If there really were credible evidence that Jesus had a wife, why are we only now reading about it on a scrap of paper written three hundred years after the time of Christ? This feels a bit like an ancient version of a chat room comment about Carlos Hyde’s knee.
To be fair, the fragment, if shown to be authentic (and assuming that a metaphorical meaning of “wife” was not in use), shows what a fourth-century A.D. group believed about Jesus. It says little if anything, though, about the historical Jesus.
It’s helpful to remember that the Bible, particularly the book of Proverbs, associates wisdom with cool-headedness and thinking before we speak or act. If we are inclined to criticize people for making sensational claims based on a Coptic fragment, let us also turn the mirror on ourselves. Do we speak before thinking? Are we patient enough to evaluate information and not simply Tweet our knee-jerk reactions?
What are your thoughts on this?
—Beau Stanley
Reblogged this on Beyond Our Walls and commented:
Pastor Beau Stanley gives some quick thoughts on this recent “discovery”…
My thought on this is we need to see the rest of what is written. I think of the church as His wife. So, context will help and all you have written about the credibility of the manuscript, etc.
My response is “Who cares?”.
The Bible is not explicit and BARELY even implicit about large swaths of Jesus life. And the Gospels take no position on Jesus being single or married or having any romantic relationships at all – They are neither ruled out or ruled in.
And, quite frankly, your usage of one isolated verse as a way to discredit the possibility is MUCH the same thing as using this one fragment to suggest that we’ve “proven” something. So it’s your taken-out-of-context verse vs. their random fragment of text.
Furthermore, Paul is simply arguing in that verse that he has a RIGHT to have a “believing wife” during his ministry – Who’s to say Jesus didn’t marry young and then his wife passed away at some point before his ministry began? Your verse doesn’t actually prove anything except that it would appear Paul had no knowledge of Jesus having a wife during his ministry. That’s not proving what you want it to prove.
Yes, the witness of the church through the years has been that Jesus was single and never married. But I would point you to many other positions of the church through the years as evidence that we can’t simply accept prima facie ‘the position of the church through the years’.
My point is this:
1. I don’t think it’s a big deal either way.
2. I’m don’t think it’s productive for churches to construct large, impenetrable doctrines around irrelevant things OR things that we barely understand or know about or have firsthand testimony for – This is not the trinity or the resurrection or man’s nature or a question of our mission here on earth. If Jesus was married, so be it. It would make him more relatable and more able to deal with his sexual and emotional needs. If he was single, so be it. Let’s not let matters like this drive us down doctrinal cul de sacs that simply make it more difficult for us to relate to each other and to the world. Let’s leave gray things gray.
Brian,
Thanks for your comment. In the post I did not argue that the verses cited proved my point. I argued that they are not what one would expect if Jesus was indeed married. It is also true that the witness of the early church is not ultimately authoritative on the matter. But the weight of the available evidence, I would argue, is strongly on the side of Jesus’ not having had a wife.
The bigger issue here is one of context. My concern is that many who do not understand the context of the Coptic fragment in question may rush to judgment about its significance, which is not even on the same level as the biblical texts I cited. The text in question has not even been fully vetted by experts.
You are correct that if Jesus had been married, this would not be harmful to the claims of Christ. But I’m somewhat puzzled if you interpreted this to be an example of churches constructing “large, impenetrable doctrines around irrelevant things.” The answer to the “Who Cares” question is this, as I see it: This contemporary story reinforces the value of patience in our thinking, speaking, and writing, and it is a worthy aim to embody this value.