Last month, the New York Times carried a detailed report about the discovery of a scrap of papyrus, which suggests that Jesus had a wife.

This fragment was smaller than a business card, and the language used was Coptic. It probably belonged to the fourth century after Christ. A scholar of considerable repute and historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, Karen L. King, gave details of the discovery at an international meeting of Coptic scholars in Rome.

She deciphered the writing as, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife… she will be able to be my disciple”. She gave the international Press access to the fragment, encased in glass, at her office at Divinity School, where she holds America’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity. She explained that the fragment was not conclusive proof that Jesus had a wife.

Yet, she granted considerable importance to the discovery, for it was the first known statement from antiquity that referred to Jesus speaking of a wife. So what was King’s conclusion? All that she was ready to suggest was that the scrap referred to a tradition in early Christianity which held that Jesus was not celibate, but married.

Any student of the history of Christianity would know that there were many streams of thought and conflicting attempts to anchor the new religion to Coptic, Hellenic and Jewish traditions. When Paul held the first conference at Jerusalem in 49 AD, long after Jesus’s crucifixion, and Christianity was formed, his attempt was to liberate it from the Jewish religion, which did not accord respectability to the Gentiles.

Even for a great leader like Paul, it was almost impossible to unite all strands of thought that existed in early Christianity, particularly when many even denied the Godliness of Jesus. Theologians proliferated as the new religion began attracting followers in large numbers leading finally to the conversion of Emperor Constantine (272-337) and to Christianity becoming the state religion.

The Bible as we understand the book today was the result of rigorous selection and codification. Yet, there are many differences; the Roman Catholic Bible is different from the Protestant Bible, which does not have Apocrypha. The Jewish Bible is different from other Bibles as it does not have the New Testament.

In the process, many books were discarded. Some of them are known as the gnostic gospels. About six years ago, the National Geographic magazine caused a sensation when it published the Gospel According to Judas Iscariot, who had become a synonym for betrayal, for he had sold Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, the price of a slave those days.

When the magazine appeared, I rushed to Browser in Chandigarh to buy a copy of it because it boastfully claimed that the “Gospel” would “shake Christianity to its foundations”. What it said was that Judas was Jesus’ favourite disciple. He betrayed Jesus to the authorities at the actual request of his master in order to fulfil a divine ordinance for the salvation of the world. Jesus tells Judas in the key passage in the text, “for you will sacrifice the man that clothed me”.

So there was no betrayal involved in Judas’ act. Did the publication undermine the Christian faith? South African bishop Desmond Tutu called it “believable” but six years after the publication of the “Gospel”, attributed to Judas Iscariot’s son; it has not made even a ripple in Christendom.

Gnosticism grew around the time Christianity grew. It is a “knowledge” religion – that is what the word means – which claims to have an inner explanation of life. Thus it was and, indeed, still is, a spiritual parasite which used other religions as a carrier. Christianity fitted into this role very well.

The Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Judas are some of the gnostic gospels. Karen King, who deciphered the papyrus scrap, is an authority on the subject as can be inferred from the books she has authored on the gospels of Judas and Mary of Magdala and Gnosticism and Women in Antiquity.

However, in the instant case, the scholar has not revealed the whole truth about how she got hold of the papyrus scrap. She says she received an e-mail from an anonymous private collector who wanted her to translate it. The owner took the fragment to the Divinity School in 2011. Thereafter she consulted two leading papyrologists about the authenticity of the documents.

Who is this collector? How did he get it? Why should he remain anonymous? These are some of the questions that she has chosen not to answer. After all, in the world of antiquity, it is not uncommon for forgers to strike gold, till they are exposed. King’s statement that the papyrus could have been written in the fourth century, at least two centuries after the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John were written, takes much of the shine away from it.

How could anyone have quoted Jesus three centuries after his ascension? The worldwide interest the discovery has evoked is unlikely to surprise anyone for we live in a society which breathes sex, more than oxygen. How could anyone believe that a “blue-eyed” epitome of masculinity could remain aloof from feminine charm?

Inevitably, those who want to romantically link Jesus to a woman find a readymade scapegoat in Mary of Magdala. It is a different matter that there are no references of any such link in the Bible or extant historical documents. She figures in all the four gospels. Yet, how did she get linked?

When Karen King holds up the papyrus and claims that it says Jesus had a wife, the image that immediately comes up in the mind of the reader is the lady from Magdala in Jerusalem. Perhaps, that is the price a woman in public life often has to pay in the world.

“She was an early follower of Jesus, who certainly deserves to be called a disciple,” according to the editors of the Life Application Study Bible. “An energetic, impulsive, caring woman, she not only travelled with Jesus, but also contributed to the needs of the group. She was present at the Crucifixion and was on her way to anoint Jesus’ body on Sunday morning when she discovered the empty tomb. Mary was the first to see Jesus after the resurrection”.

Mary of Magdala comes across as a fiercely loyal and brave disciple. She is eternally grateful to Jesus for freeing her from a bodily problem. That allowed her to stand under Christ’s cross when all the disciples except John were hiding in fear. Like the rest of Jesus’ followers, she never expected his bodily resurrection but she was overjoyed to discover it.

She became the subject of needless debate when the novel The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis was published in 1953. I was told that it was “un-Christian” to read the book. I found it allegorical and a difficult read. Decades later when a film based on the controversial novel was made, it became an instant success.

In one of the most controversial scenes depicted in the film, Jesus is shown waiting for his turn in a long queue of men at the door of Mary of Magdala, described as a prostitute. The film had its full run. There were no demonstrations, killings and assassinations of the kind Innocence of Muslims evoked in several parts of the world, including India.

Mary of Magdala continues to be at the receiving end of fiction writers like Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame. This novel, later made into a very successful film, begins with a page of facts that makes the fictional novel appear to be true in all its assertions. Brown's clever weaving of fact with fiction has convinced many readers that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were really married and had a child.

The impact of the book could be gauged from the fact that a Catholic priest in Patiala called me to ask whether the church would be able to withstand the fusillade from Brown. He had just finished reading the book when he called. All I could tell him was that while The Da Vinci Code was certainly riveting, I would not be able to read it a second time, though I would be able to read the Bible again and again.

It was on the gnostic gospels of Mary and Philip that Brown depended for his assertions about Mary Magdalene. In her own gospel, there is only one mention that Jesus loved her more than other disciples. In Philip’s gospel, there is a mention of Jesus kissing her. Karen King explains in her book The Gospel of Mary Magdala that the kiss in Philip most likely was a chaste kiss of fellowship.

The latest on the subject is the papyrus scrap. Should it worry Christian scholars and believers? What will happen, if it leads to the discovery that Jesus was not celibate? Down the millennia, even Christians have been unable to grasp the full import of the Biblical claim that Jesus was both man and God. If he was man, he could have had emotions like any human being.

That raises the question of Christianity and history. Unlike some others, Christianity and Islam claim to be historical religions, basing their claims on the historical facts they assert. If they are shorn of these historical bases, they would lose their moorings. Can a Christian, then, examine the truth of these facts with the same objectivity that he would display in respect of other phenomena?
As historian Paul Johnson argues in the Prologue to his A History of Christianity, “In the past, very few Christian scholars have had the courage or the confidence to place the unhampered pursuit of truth before any other consideration. Almost all have drawn the line somewhere”. We know how John Henry Newman locked up in his safe Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason because he wanted to save his students from the pernicious influence of the book.

We also know how the 16th century scientist Galileo suffered at the hands of the church for his scientific views. But for a Christian historian, theologian or believer, nothing is greater than the pursuit of the truth. In fact, the Bible proclaims that the truth alone shall set man free.

One of the synonyms for 'Christians' was “seekers of truth”. Given this fact, they can only welcome research and inquiry that will throw new light on old facts. A caveat would, however, be necessary in this context, for claims and assertions of the kind Karen King made are not uncommon.

Early this year British archaeologists claimed to have literally struck gold with the discovery that might solve the mystery of where the Queen of Sheba unearthed her fabled treasures from. According to the Bible, the ruler of Sheba, which spanned modern-day Ethiopia and Yemen, travelled to King Solomon in Jerusalem bringing 120 talents (four and a half tonnes) of gold.

Now an ancient goldmine, together with the ruins of a temple, has been found in northern Ethiopia, part of the Queen’s former territory. The news would have made interesting reading for all those who have seen the film Solomon and Sheba in which Gina Lollobrigida, the Italian actress after whom a mountain range has been named, acted as the Queen. Though I was not able to see the movie, I did attend a Press conference she addressed in New Delhi when she was the chief guest at the International Film Festival India organised in the early seventies.

To rush to Ethiopia with pickaxes to dig for gold is to expect the discovery of the papyrus scrap to lead to salacious details of Jesus’ romance with Mary Magdalene. The Bible says that it is the truth -- the complete truth -- that will set us free. It does not say, a fragment of the truth!

AJ Philip can be reached at ajphilip@gmail.com.