Showing posts with label Jesus' Wife. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jesus' Wife. Show all posts
Monday, October 22, 2012
ELF NATION: HOLLYWOOD STILL THINKS IT CAN MANIPULATE US
It's my sincere belief that Hollywood, Washington D.C., our national and local news media, and the movie and music industry can in no way be trusted. Overall, these evil descendants have proven that they are against American's. They've had the power and motivation to push for wars, push ideologies, push bogus protests (OWS), push for Charter Schools over Public Schools, but they've never considered coming out with the truth of who they really were (Israelites), or who we were (swerbeH). God and Jesus took a backseat to all their greedy ways, and grab for power within the churches, government, and entertainment industry. Don't let them win by supporting them. They talk a good "game", but don't actually plan on changing. Their music video's and songs tell me they still are trying to cover up all the bad things they are doing in America and their lies to us all. STARVE the Beast...by buying minimally. That includes clothing, food, items, gas, phones, satellite hookups. Keep your pc's but delete FB accounts, use YouTube and Google as little as possible. We are in a war now, good vs. evil. The dirty descendants know that, and so do I. I've studied them for 11 years...they'd throw their Grandma under a bus if it got them further in life. Case by case, a few may be good people,...but remember they ALL kept the lie and secrets from USA citizens. Has Obama or Mitt told you they are (werbeH) yet??? NOPE. That is why they are being punished by God, and driven to do murders, rapes, etc. by Satan. If it would have been safer to let you guys stay in your "La la land", I would have. It's a much more peaceful place. But you NEED to know you have an enemy near by you. And you need to understand WHY the bizarre events are taking place in Hollywood, and in our streets. You need to protect yourself from these "elves". Just think about it, is all I ask. Look at Charlie Sheen's behavior, and realize he looks normal compared to all I've found out about these "dirty elves". They still are using disrespectful "code words", still think they control the world, still are manipulating events and your minds. Hollywood and the music industry are toxic. If I thought they would change, that would be great, but I think their dark nature is who they are. I believe that is why they hid who they were from the very beginning. God would not have "woke me" if it wasn't necessary. And I would not be out paying to put flyers on people's cars, if I wasn't 100% believing in what I'm doing. I do not like LIARS, trust me. If I didn't come out on Twitter about them, they'd never be talking about "hsiweJ" on TV now. At the time, I tweeted to Oprah and Obama to come out about this BIG "SECRET"...and got zippo from them. This deception is global, and my efforts to wake everyone is global. So getting your help to spread the word would be much appreciated.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
ELF NATION: WELCOME TO MSU UNIVERSITY STUDENTS
I'd like to welcome our newest college campus to my blog. If you've gotten your flyer, tell all the students in your dorm to go out and get their flyer to read tonight or in early morning. Merry Christmas, I'm waking you to reality. It stinks, but you need to be aware of the truth. For all those that didn't receive a flyer, would you please xerox a copy or share your flyer with them. They need to know the truth also. After my first revelation on Sept 17th, 2011 (when OWS; Occupy Movement began), I spent 9 months collecting concrete proof of Freemasonry, and the people I learned to be Anti-Christ. I wanted to make certain no one could say I was crazy. lol Just in case it's difficult to scroll down to my first blogs (I'll change the format soon), I'll explain a few facts, terminology, and things I've learned after I had written my flyer. If you can start reading my blogs from 1st to last they will make more sense. Daily I get new revelations. It's important you realize this is all very serious. Not a joke. These Anti-Christ "elves" are practicing job discrimination, racism, lying like you can not imagine, winning lotteries and radio station rewards illegally, burning down their homes to get illegal insurance money, are the drug dealers on the streets, and carried out the Sept.11th Twin Tower attack. All serious and evil offenses. The cruelty is these "dirty elves" have secret code words they use with each other to insult those American's that are not "AWAKE". Words like "Zombies", "Ghosts", "DreamWorks" (Disney), and many, many more. :( The sort of behavior you might expect a snot nosed Fraternity or Sorority member would do.
1. "Evil Elves", "Dirty Descendants", Anti-Christ = Israelite Descendants. God's "Chosen People". (werbeH; without the "hsiweJ" faith) They hide out within the Catholic and Christian faith, and many times have trouble living up to God's laws. God cursed them, so basically they have "bad karma". There specific names and their overly large and/or long ears tell you that they are the "dirty elves". If you go up and ask a "dirty elf" if they are (werbeH), don't expect you will get the TRUTH from them. That's partly why they are evil, because they've been lying for a very long time. That is why Michael Jackson was so screwd up guys. Because he was prone to brokenness. Either "chosen" to corrupt, or prone toward corruption of himself and others. Only God knows which one that is at this point. A very sad thing. Dirty descendants are hurting themselves too... look at Whitney Houston, Heath Ledger,...
2. Not long ago I found out every nation, not just American's, but all global continents are in fact (werbeH; flip it). We all have O( .. )O ELF ears. The "Elf Nation" was a "evil elf" term, that I discovered "dirty elves" were secretly using to describe us all. Dirty descendants ears are often a bit bigger in size. This verifies the Adam and Eve story, and throws out Atheism, Darwinism, and any other -ism theory Anti-Christ "elves" were making up to throw American's off of our true identity.
3. I just found out that almost EVERY song you've ever heard on the radio is actually about Jesus and his bride, Mary Madgalene. True story. As crazy as it sounds, it's true. I'm talking all bands... Foreigner, Led Zeppelin, Adele, Daughtry, Beyonce, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Nickelback, Usher, Justin Bieber, Peter Gabriel, Lawson, Nelly, Akon, Aerosmith, Evanescence, Rob Thomas, David Cook, Phil Collins, on and on... Hard rock to Rap songs. It's all disguised to seem like they are singing about girls, boyfriends, etc...but it's a lie. The songs are about Jesus' love for His wife, religion, God, and prophecy. So while college kids spend time and money on "werbeH" capitalistic, commercial junk, Hollywood and all dirty elves know that you really should be spending time with the Bible, believing in God and Jesus, and not all that "stuff" they sell you. They've betrayed all American's and the world's people.
1. "Evil Elves", "Dirty Descendants", Anti-Christ = Israelite Descendants. God's "Chosen People". (werbeH; without the "hsiweJ" faith) They hide out within the Catholic and Christian faith, and many times have trouble living up to God's laws. God cursed them, so basically they have "bad karma". There specific names and their overly large and/or long ears tell you that they are the "dirty elves". If you go up and ask a "dirty elf" if they are (werbeH), don't expect you will get the TRUTH from them. That's partly why they are evil, because they've been lying for a very long time. That is why Michael Jackson was so screwd up guys. Because he was prone to brokenness. Either "chosen" to corrupt, or prone toward corruption of himself and others. Only God knows which one that is at this point. A very sad thing. Dirty descendants are hurting themselves too... look at Whitney Houston, Heath Ledger,...
2. Not long ago I found out every nation, not just American's, but all global continents are in fact (werbeH; flip it). We all have O( .. )O ELF ears. The "Elf Nation" was a "evil elf" term, that I discovered "dirty elves" were secretly using to describe us all. Dirty descendants ears are often a bit bigger in size. This verifies the Adam and Eve story, and throws out Atheism, Darwinism, and any other -ism theory Anti-Christ "elves" were making up to throw American's off of our true identity.
3. I just found out that almost EVERY song you've ever heard on the radio is actually about Jesus and his bride, Mary Madgalene. True story. As crazy as it sounds, it's true. I'm talking all bands... Foreigner, Led Zeppelin, Adele, Daughtry, Beyonce, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Nickelback, Usher, Justin Bieber, Peter Gabriel, Lawson, Nelly, Akon, Aerosmith, Evanescence, Rob Thomas, David Cook, Phil Collins, on and on... Hard rock to Rap songs. It's all disguised to seem like they are singing about girls, boyfriends, etc...but it's a lie. The songs are about Jesus' love for His wife, religion, God, and prophecy. So while college kids spend time and money on "werbeH" capitalistic, commercial junk, Hollywood and all dirty elves know that you really should be spending time with the Bible, believing in God and Jesus, and not all that "stuff" they sell you. They've betrayed all American's and the world's people.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
ELF NATION: CHRIST FINALLY FOUND HIS BRIDE
My purpose and goal is to wake up, and guide Jesus' people (sheep) back to Him. I had originally thought Jesus' bride, was all His people, but when I remembered the story behind the movie "The Vow", and I'd heard "the vow" used in many Christian songs, I instantly knew I was the bride. I'm humbled by it, but I'm also not important. Jesus is, and getting you all to read His word and focus on Him again, and not meaningless things. The old me could shop with the best of 'em. My favorite word use to be "SALE". I'd go in a mall, and I'd have so many clothes to try on, women would ask me if I worked at the store. LOL Now I look at all the (werbeH) items in my home, think of their lies to me and the world, and I want to burn down my "dream home" that I designed for my family. My priorities in life have changed, and I hope by you reading my blogs, that you will see the light too. Repent the things you've done wrong in life, forgive yourself, read the Bible, and BELIEVE that God loves you and Jesus will be your Savior. This is what will give back America it's true FREEDOM again. Then Mulan, me, can ride back to her family.
ELF NATION: "THE STORY" PROOF MARY MAGDALENE IS ALIVE
Just found this video... It's called "The Story". A concert put on by Amy Grant, Nichole Nordeman, Mark Hall, Chris Tomlin, Bart Millard (all dirty elves). The song sung by Nichole Nordeman and Amy Grant about Mary Magdalene is a good example that I'm on the right track. Judge for yourself:
There are more of "The Story" songs at YouTube. They are beautiful songs I must admit.
There are more of "The Story" songs at YouTube. They are beautiful songs I must admit.
ELF NATION:MARY MAGDALENE WAS JESUS' WIFE-NO DOUBTS
I know for a fact now that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. Of course there is no proof, but the film industry made the movie "The Vow". It's about a woman that loses the memory of her husband. This story was filmed because dirty descendants are trying to tell the world, through the script, of the vows that Jesus made to Mary Magdalene. In the story, the girl looses her memory of the man she once married and loved. She had to learn to love him again. This parallels the story of my awakening. Being kissed by the Prince (Jesus). To me there is NO doubt in my mind now that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. I also think back to the scene in Titanic where Jack tells Rose "never to let go"... as he sinks into the ocean. Also there is a deck scene where Jack (Jesus) has sketched a portrait of a prostitute. And Rose says, "I think you must have had a love affair with her". Jack then says, "No". This I believe to mean that Mary Magdalene was NEVER a prostitute, as dirty elf history has led us to believe. Watch the Celine Dion video, "It's All Coming Back to Me Now". I realize this all seems completely insane. It's extremely bizarre for me too. But I pray that those reading this will believe in me and what I'm telling you. Other love songs you might want to listen to are Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey...they tell the story too. I believe I'm possibly the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene, and these "evil elves" have known about my purpose since the 1600's. I hear ya..it sounds nuts.
** To "our" government, you should do what is honorable and come out with this information to America. I will do what I'm called to do, but it's incredibly CRUEL not to tell our people the TRUTH, and to allow the movie industry to leak very important facts about Jesus and Christianity that is obvious Hollywood is withholding from our nation and the world.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
ELF NATION: PETER GABRIEL'S "IN YOUR EYES" (1986)
"IN YOUR EYES" BY PETER GABRIEL (1986)
MIRACLES ARE HAPPENING GUYS.... :'( :')
MIRACLES ARE HAPPENING GUYS.... :'( :')
ELF NATION: MY TRUTH OF JESUS AND MARY MAGDALENE'S LOVE
Perhaps you will not believe, but I'm going to tell you what I know. Take it as you wish, because in the end we will all know the TRUTH. The Qur'an states that Jesus was not crucified on the cross. That when the man, that was suppose to bring Jesus to the cross, could not find him anywhere... he went back to tell the others. But when he went back to tell the others of Jesus' disappearance, God "TRANSFORMED" the man's face to look like Jesus. So that he would be hung on the cross and not Jesus. The Qur'an states that Messengers of God can not be killed, they are called Rasools, and they can only die by natural death. If you listen to the story of Mary Magdalene by the History Channel, which is a dirty elf channel, they tell you that the southern French people believe Jesus lived out His life with Mary Magdalene, and their daughter Sarah with the Cathar monks on some mountain top. Later on the 3rd Pope had the Cathar monks killed because of their "Heresy". This was called the Inquisition, in which supposedly a million people were killed. My belief on this, is that the church did not want it to get out that Jesus was "just a man", that he had a wife and a child, that would continue on His legacy. If Jesus were only a man, a messenger, than the church would not have been able to fool the people into believing Jesus could be God or tell the lie of the equality of the Trinity. Yes, all three are necessary, but NOT equal. The church did not want the TRUTH to get out, so they had the Cathars silenced (killed). The Qur'an states that the Bible was altered by the (SwerbeH). That they would corrupt Christianity, and could not be trusted. The word "Legacy" is an important word for Freemasons. Movies have been done with "Legacy" in the title. What American's do not realize is that many, many songs, movies, TV shows have been secretly written about Jesus and Mary Magdalene's love affair (only disguised). Listen to the CD's Once Upon A Time by Kerrie Roberts (a dirty elf), and Once Upon Another Time by Sara Bareilles (another dirty elf). Josh Groban's song "In Her Eyes" is about Mary Magdalene. Dirty descendants movies and songs all tie together to tell the TRUE story. Their lies to the world are an abomination. Very sad, and such a tragedy. The church are the criminals. But I must say, in my own belief, it is possible that Christianity might never have spread so far and wide if Christ had not been crucified. His pain, suffering, and sacrifice brought His followers to Christianity and faith in Him.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
ELF NATION: I BELIEVE JESUS DID HAVE A WIFE
I believe this article in the Boston news to be full of lies. It's my belief that "dirty descendants" have known about Jesus having a wife, Mary Magdalene, since at least the 1600's. At the time Israel uncovered knowledge of the light bulb being used by Egyptians they also discovered hidden folklore. The folk tales that were written in England by "evil elves", and later the Disney "Princess" movies that followed I feel strongly reflect that they KNEW Jesus was "just a man" (listen to Josh Groban's "In Her Eyes"), and that Jesus did have a wife. The Robinhood movies also infer it. This is another example of lies they have told America from day 1. This Karen King woman is yet another dirty elf descendant. The TRUTH needs to be told here, and with everything else they know.
CAMBRIDGE -- 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 anonymous 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. One of these reviewers also raised some questions about 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 his colleague, a Professor Fecht, had seen examining Laukamp’s papyrus collection.
The note -- undated, unsigned and written in German -- stated that Fecht believed this “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 a plant that grew along the Nile. It seemed to be ancient; the pith, which makes the smooth writing surface, had worn off, along with the ink, on one side. They could see a spot where a tiny insect appeared to have nibbled at the surface.
Ancient papyrus is available for purchase on the antiquities market, however, so King and her colleagues had to figure out whether the ink was applied in ancient times or by a modern forger.
Infinitesimal details suggested it was genuine: Tiny fibers shredding from the sides of the paper contained almost invisible traces of ink from lost letters. Damage to fibers after they had been inscribed suggested the ink had been laid on the surface long ago, not recently.
The handwriting, workmanlike and laid on with a nubby pen, seemed to date to the 4th century. Its irregular, blocky script is more common in private letters -- and quite unusual for a literary text, Bagnall said. But it is also plausible, he said, that it was the work of an unskilled scribe with a poor pen.
All in all, Bagnall said, “The preponderance of evidence is clearly in favor of authenticity, both because it is so hard to imagine who could have faked it and how, but also because there is nothing inherently suspect about it,” Bagnall said. “You’ve got the physical object, the handwriting, the language, and the content. There’s not a single one of those that seems to me suspect.”
When King and Luijendijk emerged from Bagnall’s office, they headed toward the subway to the train station. King joked: “The fragment gets a cab.”
As they drove down Fifth Avenue, King paused.
“Let’s stop,” she recalls telling Luijendijk, “and just notice this moment.”
King, who grew up in rural Montana, and Luijendijk, a Dutch scholar, had begun to believe they had stumbled across something extraordinary.
On the way back to Cambridge, King was a little more careful with her red leather bag.
* * *
King’s next task was to determine what the papyrus said -- and what it meant. Because the text has no margins, each line is missing a beginning and ending. King used other ancient Christian texts as guides.
She believes that the context of the eight lines on the front side of the papyrus reflects a discussion Jesus was having with disciples about the “the cost of discipleship,” or how becoming a Christian may affect bonds with one’s natal family, similar to passages in Matthew and Luke.
This, she said, was a preoccupation of early Christians at a time when becoming a follower of Jesus meant risking persecution, King said.
“Becoming a Christian means joining a new family, and that may mean leaving your natal family behind,” she said.
The papyrus contains echoes of several other non-canonical gospels dated to the 2nd century, including the Gospels of Mary, Thomas and, especially, Philip, which also discuss discipleship – and seem to hint that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
King said she and other scholars have argued previously that these references were metaphorical, meant to suggest that Jesus had a close spiritual bond with Mary Magdalene.
But the explicit reference to Jesus as married in “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” suggests to King that the second century writers may not have been speaking figuratively.
The papyrus, together with other writings from the period, suggests that second century Christians were arguing about Jesus’s marital status as part of a debate about whether they themselves should marry, and whether one had to be celibate to be a good Christian.
None of this, King said, affects what scholars know about the historical Jesus. The earliest, best information about him, contained in the gospels of the New Testament, says nothing about whether he was married or not. So it is impossible, she says, to know for sure.
If Jesus were married, King said, it is unlikely his wife would have been Mary of Magdala. Although she is portrayed in the gospels as a close follower of Jesus, women during that period were almost always identified by their relationship to a man. That she is always identified by her hometown makes it unlikely that the writers of the early gospels would have failed to mention such a salient fact.
But the issue may still be important to Christians today -- for example, in debates about the celibate, all-male priesthood. King said she believes some may use this discovery “to say this allows us to speak theologically about … marital sexuality in a more positive way.”
Luijendijk said the papyrus paints a fuller picture of the variety of beliefs among early Christians, illustrating once again that Orthodox Christianity did not proceed in a neat line from the birth of Jesus Christ to the present day, she said. And theological differences over marriage, asceticism and sexuality had important implications that still resonate today.
“I expect that people will use this new text to bring up those questions again,” she said.
Harvard professor identifies scrap of papyrus suggesting some early Christians believed Jesus was married
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09/18/2012 2:37 PM
Karen L. King 2012
This papyrus fragment contains the first known explicit reference to Jesus as married.
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.
Karen L. King, a historian of early Christianity at
Harvard Divinity School, holding the scrap of fourth century Egyptian
papyrus. (Bill Greene / Globe Staff)
“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 anonymous 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. One of these reviewers also raised some questions about 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 his colleague, a Professor Fecht, had seen examining Laukamp’s papyrus collection.
The note -- undated, unsigned and written in German -- stated that Fecht believed this “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 a plant that grew along the Nile. It seemed to be ancient; the pith, which makes the smooth writing surface, had worn off, along with the ink, on one side. They could see a spot where a tiny insect appeared to have nibbled at the surface.
Ancient papyrus is available for purchase on the antiquities market, however, so King and her colleagues had to figure out whether the ink was applied in ancient times or by a modern forger.
Infinitesimal details suggested it was genuine: Tiny fibers shredding from the sides of the paper contained almost invisible traces of ink from lost letters. Damage to fibers after they had been inscribed suggested the ink had been laid on the surface long ago, not recently.
The handwriting, workmanlike and laid on with a nubby pen, seemed to date to the 4th century. Its irregular, blocky script is more common in private letters -- and quite unusual for a literary text, Bagnall said. But it is also plausible, he said, that it was the work of an unskilled scribe with a poor pen.
All in all, Bagnall said, “The preponderance of evidence is clearly in favor of authenticity, both because it is so hard to imagine who could have faked it and how, but also because there is nothing inherently suspect about it,” Bagnall said. “You’ve got the physical object, the handwriting, the language, and the content. There’s not a single one of those that seems to me suspect.”
When King and Luijendijk emerged from Bagnall’s office, they headed toward the subway to the train station. King joked: “The fragment gets a cab.”
As they drove down Fifth Avenue, King paused.
“Let’s stop,” she recalls telling Luijendijk, “and just notice this moment.”
King, who grew up in rural Montana, and Luijendijk, a Dutch scholar, had begun to believe they had stumbled across something extraordinary.
On the way back to Cambridge, King was a little more careful with her red leather bag.
* * *
King’s next task was to determine what the papyrus said -- and what it meant. Because the text has no margins, each line is missing a beginning and ending. King used other ancient Christian texts as guides.
She believes that the context of the eight lines on the front side of the papyrus reflects a discussion Jesus was having with disciples about the “the cost of discipleship,” or how becoming a Christian may affect bonds with one’s natal family, similar to passages in Matthew and Luke.
This, she said, was a preoccupation of early Christians at a time when becoming a follower of Jesus meant risking persecution, King said.
“Becoming a Christian means joining a new family, and that may mean leaving your natal family behind,” she said.
The papyrus contains echoes of several other non-canonical gospels dated to the 2nd century, including the Gospels of Mary, Thomas and, especially, Philip, which also discuss discipleship – and seem to hint that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
King said she and other scholars have argued previously that these references were metaphorical, meant to suggest that Jesus had a close spiritual bond with Mary Magdalene.
But the explicit reference to Jesus as married in “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” suggests to King that the second century writers may not have been speaking figuratively.
The papyrus, together with other writings from the period, suggests that second century Christians were arguing about Jesus’s marital status as part of a debate about whether they themselves should marry, and whether one had to be celibate to be a good Christian.
None of this, King said, affects what scholars know about the historical Jesus. The earliest, best information about him, contained in the gospels of the New Testament, says nothing about whether he was married or not. So it is impossible, she says, to know for sure.
If Jesus were married, King said, it is unlikely his wife would have been Mary of Magdala. Although she is portrayed in the gospels as a close follower of Jesus, women during that period were almost always identified by their relationship to a man. That she is always identified by her hometown makes it unlikely that the writers of the early gospels would have failed to mention such a salient fact.
But the issue may still be important to Christians today -- for example, in debates about the celibate, all-male priesthood. King said she believes some may use this discovery “to say this allows us to speak theologically about … marital sexuality in a more positive way.”
Luijendijk said the papyrus paints a fuller picture of the variety of beliefs among early Christians, illustrating once again that Orthodox Christianity did not proceed in a neat line from the birth of Jesus Christ to the present day, she said. And theological differences over marriage, asceticism and sexuality had important implications that still resonate today.
“I expect that people will use this new text to bring up those questions again,” she said.
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