The thing about the wife issue is that it’s near sexual ethics. There’s no hotter topic in our culture right now than sexual ethics. If you can turn it around and say, “You [Christians] have been thinking for 2,000 years that Jesus was celibate, and you held that forth as an ideal. It turns out that he was married and very much interested in sex. Therefore, he didn’t really care about sexual ethics they way modern-day Christians do.”
Is there any reason Christians should be unsettled by documents like these?
The Wife of Jesus fragment should not at all be unsettling for the Christian faith. It reflects the belief of someone who was writing between the fifth and ninth century. That belief might go earlier, but when we know that there were all kinds of heretical beliefs cropping up around end of the first century, we also know this is nothing new.
I knew all along it was hokum. It wasn’t in the canonical books of the Bible, for one. For another, it was dated very late. So I moved along because there wasn’t anything to see.
What garbage! One author, hundreds of miles and several centuries away from the historical Jesus, pens an imaginative work, and millions of modern folk who want to be duped believe it. At the same time, those modern agnostics and nay-sayers reject the reports of writers who lived and were taught by Jesus Himself, or at least wrote based on interviews of Jesus’s apostles.
By contrast, what proof do we have that “Homer” lived? None. Yet our universities are filled with (so-called) scholars who do not doubt his existence, or the unsubstantiated report that he was blind.
Then again, the absurdity of the misbelieving masses should not surprise me – they cannot remember the ghastly events in Libya a few years back and who are the government leaders responsible for that disaster.
I have no problem with it, whatsoever.
It mentions Jesus saying He has a wife….very cool with that. The church is the Bride of Christ.
It mentions that He will dwell with her….Very cool with that. He is with the Church and forms the Church by the inâ€dwelling†of His Spirit.
Then He mentions that she will be his disciple. Very cool with that. The Church, His Bride, is Always learning from Him because He dwells with Her, His Bride, His Wife.
So many literalists in the realm of science that never draw the spiritual conclusion already realized by His Wife. Of course, if the Church wasn’t so completely full of “literalistsâ€, also, this thing would have been put to rest a long time ago. “God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.†John 4:24
And I don’t mean that Jesus, while He walked the earth, was married to any one woman, for the sake of clarity. I am talking about Pentecost and the Church’s birthday. By the way, my wonderful son, Jamie, is 31 today!
The article seems pretty balanced. By the 5th century AD there was plenty of heretical belief around. This is probably just one more example (although since its a fragment its pretty hard even to know that).
#5,
We know from the New Testament that gnosticism had already reared it’s ugly head, and is with us today. I read last night that this fragment is most likely an 8th century riff off of The Gospel of Thomas, and not particularly well done at that. Of course, the media is playing it as an “ancient” document, as though that means something.