If nothing else, 'Jesus's wife' papyrus shows how Christianity created an authorised history | Tom Holland

Although

tells us little about their current marital status of Jesus, this new fragment shows how to create their own religions history allowed

Our sources of antiquity are often smaller bits and pieces, and curiously is difficult to trace the evolution of religions. Invariably, the process by which a particular orthodoxy was definitively established as long and complex. Then, once established that the canonical stories, back to what is written, that no persistent feeling that religion may have once been a whirlwind emerging doctrines and beliefs was purged effective competition. The consequence is that the stories told by believers in the first centuries of their own faith, they tend to serve as monuments to the destruction and preservation of the past.

Hence the excitement this week the discovery of a small fragment of papyrus, where for the first time in an ancient manuscript Christian, Jesus is recorded as speaking of "my wife". Although the origin of this surprising finding is mysterious, his last place of origin - assuming it is not, as some researchers suspect a fake - just maybe Egypt

This is not only because the language is a Coptic fragment. In Egypt, kept in dry sands and the evolution of municipal councils abandoned pieces of text, which otherwise would have remained unknown were exhumed regularly. Most are the equivalent of an empty file invoices, receipts and other. Sometimes the most valuable discoveries were made:. Lost masterpieces of classical literature and - most telling of all, perhaps - Gospels heretics

• these gospels had become defined as a heretic is mainly due to the victory in the fourth century a particular brand of Christianity sponsored by the State. In 367, four decades after the formulation of the Nicene Creed, under the Emperor Constantine, a famous bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote to the churches authoritarian appointed under its jurisdiction. In these letters, he prescribed the 27 books that would now be considered the equivalent of a "New Testament." At the same time, Athanasius says that not all included in the canon gospels were gone, for whatever reason, to be read. Among them, no doubt, is that just the smallest fragment surface:. He baptized by Karen King, Harvard professor responsible for publishing the Gospel of Jesus woman

It is certainly that the fragment has been dated to the fourth century, in the time when all but the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament today begin to be deleted in Egypt. Even more attractive, but the original dialogue between Jesus and his disciples that the files were dated by Professor King in the second half of the second century. This brings us back to a time when the specter of Christian opinion -

hairesis

in Greek - was, by the standards of post-post-Nicene Christianity, surprisingly large. There were Christians, for example, claimed that the human body and sexuality with him, was hopelessly corrupt, while there are others who have seen in the language of marriage and sexual relations in a metaphor of salvation . It was, in a famous verse of a long-lost Gospel rediscovered recently in Egypt, the Gospel of Philip, Jesus was described as kissing Mary Magdalene on the mouth. The Gospel of Jesus woman, apparently, was written as a contribution to the debate itself: a debate that, in time, Christians came to never forget roar

What the fragment does not do is shed light on the state of the historical Jesus - a fortiori if he really had sex with Mary Magdalene. Written nearly two centuries after the birth of Jesus, and with a huge ideological eliminate the circumstances of his life, the idea may be grist for fans of The Da Vinci Code - but not for teachers of life real Harvard. What we give, however, is the vision of a time otherwise occluded in the evolution of Christianity, and a reminder of how religions have actually been able to do for themselves, despite of reality confused, a Last agile and authorized.

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